Language use and identity in a bilingual community: Re-examining the English of Mexican Americans

In this dissertation, I describe the range of linguistic behaviors that are found within three generations of a primarily English-dominant, middle-class Mexican American family from El Paso, Texas and in the speech of two Mexican American disc jockeys on an English-language, top-40 radio station also in El Paso, focusing on four linguistic behaviors indexing Mexican American identity. These linguistic behaviors include Spanish/English code switching and the pronunciation of words such as personal names and place names with Spanish phonology, linguistic behaviors associated with Spanish, as well as the stress pattern of compound words and the use of the "rising glide" intonation pattern, prosodic patterns associated with Mexican American English.;I demonstrate that even within these small, close-knit groups of speakers, there exist a variety of linguistic norms, ranging from those associated primarily with Spanish and Mexican American English to those associated primarily with "standard" English, and that individual speakers vary in terms of the extent to which they approximate these norms. Moreover, even those individuals who engage in few linguistic behaviors associated with Spanish or Mexican American English differentiate themselves linguistically from non-Mexican Americans in clear and interesting ways.;Following Le Page (1980, 1997) and Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), and Johnstone (1996), I view the conscious and unconscious linguistic choices made by the subjects of my study as "acts of identity" and the linguistic behaviors I describe as resources upon which they can draw to construct or express aspects of their social identities. Moreover, following Pratt (1987), I emphasize the importance of exploring the heterogeneous nature of the "speech community," as it is embodied in the linguistic practices of individual speakers, as a means of better understanding some of the ways in which language is used in the construction of identity.;This study contributes to our understanding of Mexican American language use and our understanding of the relationship between language and ethnicity, or language and identity more generally, and language ideology, as they relate to Mexican American English and Mexican Americans. Moreover, it contributes to research on code switching and research on prosodic patterns associated with Mexican American English.