Modeling the outcome of language contact in the speech of German-Spanish and Catalan-Spanish bilingual children

This article focuses on phonological aspects of bilingualism and includes two approaches: internal linguistic and sociolinguistic. The former approach is based on internal variables (markedness, frequency, complexity, uniformity), and the latter on external variables (age, school, family language, language of the peer-group). The article comprises two parts. First, we analyze spontaneous data produced by German-Spanish bilingual children and try to model the contact-language situation of that group characterized by family bilingualism and societal monolingualism. The external variables are relatively homogeneous for those children, as they receive Spanish from the mother and German from the father, and from the broad German-speaking community in Hamburg. These cases of individual bilingualism mainly receive the impact of internal variables, which can be weighed against one another. This leads to the following hierarchy of variables from those having more to less impact: frequency > markedness > uniformity > language of the environment. Second, we analyze and compare the elicited speech of Catalan-Spanish bilingual children in two districts of Barcelona, which differ in the degree of Spanish dominance. Here, the emphasis is on external factors. School and the peer-group seem to play the most important role, as they have more predictive power than the language spoken at home.