Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Falam Immigrants In America: Motivations For Language Use, Maintenance, And Shift, Hannah Reeves

Theses and Dissertations

Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach, I explore immigrants' individual motivations for language use, language shift and language maintenance. I met with 25 immigrants to the US who are native speakers of Falam, a language from Myanmar, to learn their reasons for Falam and English usage as well as their desires for Falam usage in the US. I used the Perceived Benefit Model of Language Shift's taxonomy of motivations to classify each motivation expressed. Among Falam immigrants to America, I found that solidarity-related and communicative motivations are behind language maintenance while economic and communicative motivations are behind language shift. …

Berne, Indiana Swiss German: Lessons Learned From A Small-Scale Documentation Project, Gretta Yoder Owen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a case study of a small-scale language documentation project carried out in Berne, Indiana. The goal of this project was to capture, through audio recording, samples of the Swiss German language that could be presented to the Berne community and preserved for future use. As much as possible, this project was carried out according to best practices for language documentation, so that the data will be accessible to the academic community for further research after there are no more living speakers of the Berne, Indiana Swiss dialect.

The history of the Swiss Mennonites who settled the Berne, …