FOR AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF BILINGUAL CONVERSATION: SAMOAN/ENGLISH IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

ALESSANDRO DURANTI & JENNIFER F. REYNOLDS
University of California at Los Ángeles (USA)

Bilingualism is a concept that critically relies on and interacts with a variety of other theoretical constructs, including the notions of "language," "speakers," and "community." Subjecting these key notions to new empirical and theoretical challenges (e.g. Bakhtin 1981; Romaine 1982; Silverstein 1996), we struggle to invent a new language able to describe what we are learning to see without the faulty presuppositions of earlier labels. This is particularly difficult in the study of what is probably the most emblematic phenomenon of bilingualism, namely, code switching (CS). The very notion of CS presupposes a clear-cut distinction between two codes (or "languages") and yet recent studies have pointed out that bilingual speakers typically have access to more than two linguistic varieties and participate in more than two sharply defined linguistic communities (Schieffelin 1994; Zentella 1997). In the linguistic and social reality of contemporary multi-ethnic and multi-racial networks, the assumption of stability necessary for establishing formal accounts of intrasentential CS (Myers-Scotton 1993; Di Sciullo, Muysken, Singh 1986) must give way to the acceptance of instability, that is, variability across situations, families, and generations. Such variability might make it difficult to establish which code is the "Matrix Language" (Myers-Scotton 1993) and distinguish between CS and borrowing (Poplack, Sankoff, and Miller 1988), especially because among immigrant populations there is more syntactic and morphological convergence that previously suspected (Clyne 1987). Finally, as we recognize most bilingual situations are fluid and unstable -- and often characterized by language loss (Dorian 1981) -- it becomes more problematic to assign "intent" to CS on the basis of shared conventions (Gumperz 1982). Functional accounts of CS have typically relied on an underspecified notion of culture (or ethnicity) and have not considered the possibility of multiple, sometimes contradicting social motivations (Lo 1997; Stroud 1992).Starting from these considerations, we examine audio-visual recordings of spontaneous interaction collected during a three year project in a Samoan community in Southern California (Duranti 1997; Duranti & Ochs 1997; Duranti, Ochs, Ta`ase 1995; Reynolds 1996) with the goal of applying an anthropological approach to CS. We start from the following observations: (i) CS is common in conversational interactions among family members -- both intersententially (see [1]) and intrasententially (see [2]); (ii) there is considerable variation across families, generations, and individuals in terms of (a) frequency and type of CS, (b) ways in which CS is achieved.

(1) G; are you gonna- do you wanna eat? (pause)
G; fia`ai?
"(are you) hungry?"
(2) M; I don't think `o le sefulu afe e lava
"the ten thousand is enough [as a fine]"
e kakau oga suspend kama gâ for a whole season.
"(they) should" "that boy"

Among the rich data we collected, which include evidence for syntactic and morphological convergence, we concentrate on three phenomena: (i) the routine adoption of kinship terms like Dad and Mom in Samoan discourse; (ii) the "island-like" status of certain proper names which are not adapted to the Samoan phonological register called "bad speech" spoken at home (where /t/ and /n/ are pronounced [k] and [ ] respectively (Duranti 1990; Duranti & Ochs 1986); (iii) the CS to Samoan words that do have an English equivalent and are associated with church activities. On the basis of structural analysis, ethnohistorical data, and ethnographic information, we argue that all three phenomena are indexes of social change, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. The variation found in our corpus suggests that linguistic phenomena like CS should be considered as indexical of degrees of cultural assimilation and different types of positioning vis-à-vis "tradition".