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