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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1390

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

What’s in a word? Lexical choices by Welsh/English bilinguals in the workplace

Authors: Robert, Elen
Submitted by: Robert, Elen (Cardiff University, United Kingdom)

The long-standing presence of two languages in Wales, namely English and Welsh, has resulted in a number of language contact phenomena amongst Welsh/English bilinguals. On the lexical level, this is manifested, for example, through loanwords, code-switching and loan translations. Often, there are both Welsh and English lexical items in use that carry equivalent semantic meaning. A. R. Thomas (1987) calls these pairs ‘doublets’, and gives as an example the Welsh word cerddoriaeth (‘music’) and its meaning equivalent miwsig. However, although I refer to such pairs as being equivalent in meaning, their meaning is not necessarily equivalent in a sociolinguistic sense. Thomas claims that the items in such pairs are differentiated on a standard-colloquial or formal-casual scale, with more purely Welsh lexical items (e.g. cerddoriaeth)indexing formality/standardness, and lexical items showing more influence from English (such as miwsig)indexing colloquialism/informality.

However, following more recent accounts of styling which call for more nuanced analyses (Coupland 2007), this paper will consider whether the above interpretation of the social meaning of Welsh and English lexical items is sufficient. I will present an interactional analysis using recordings of spontaneous speech collected for a wider study on lexical usage at a bilingual workplace. Focusing on a small number of Welsh/English lexical pairs, I will consider how speakers use lexical items to achieve their interactional aims, and whether the language origin of words plays a part in their achieving their aims. I suggest that while Welsh and English lexical items do seem to index a greater and lesser degree of standardness to some extent, it is too simplistic to assume that all cases can be interpreted wholly on this scale.

Coupland, N. (2007). Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, A. R. (1987). A Spoken Standard for Welsh: Description and Pedagogy. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 66, 99-113.