Abstract
Our work examines the residual effects of three quarters of a century of anti-Haitian propaganda on the language attitudes and ideologies of contemporary children in the northern Dominican Republic. Focused on interviews with 90 Dominican fronterizo children and adolescents, many of whom are descendants of Haitians themselves, our findings reveal that their attitudes towards Haitian Creole mirror broader negative assessments of its speakers. In their reluctance to learn Creole (or French, which they associate almost exclusively with Haiti), these rural Dominicans choose linguistic isolation. Thus, although the number of Haitian immigrants in the northern border region has dramatically increased since the earthquake, the burden of intercultural communication will likely remain on them.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap