Contact between languages by the Galician communities in New York
Presenter(s)
Affiliation
Topic
Socio-cultural knowledge and practices
Type
Papers
Abstract
In the 1930s, a well-known Galician artist (Castelao) documented, after his stay in the United States, the existence of a koine between Galician and English, on the part of his emigrated compatriots.
However, even though this event took place almost a century ago, the contact between both languages has not yet been studied in depth. The author of this article, a Galician teacher and researcher, has had the opportunity to live, in 2011 and 2017, with Galician families in New York; an experience that has allowed her to observe the linguistic phenomena derived from the contact of Galician and English.
After these two short stays, the author has recorded, analyzed, and classified the observed phenomena according to the linguistic level to which they belong: phonetic, morphosyntactic, or lexical.
Furthermore, she has compared the linguistic uses heard at the beginning of the 20th century by her with those collected by Castelao eight decades ago. Likewise, she has reflected on the presence of Spanish in this contact (the only language studied in Spain by Galicians before emigrating—since the Franco dictatorship did not allow the Galician language in schools). Finally, the author has established a series of conclusions about a phenomenon that has seen fit to call it “galespanglish.”.
