University of Zagreb. University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Department of English language and literature.
Abstract
This master’s thesis is a case study focused on a specific language contact situation between Croatian and English. The data for the case study was collected by conducting a sociolinguistic interview with one respondent. The respondent is a forty-one-year-old male who moved to London with his family at the age of eight, right after finishing his second grade in primary school. He lived in London for six years and finished his primary school education there. At the moment of moving to London, the respondent had gone to a foreign language school and learned English for two years, but was unable to either use it or understand it. The thesis primarily deals with several processes and phenomena connected to bilingualism and the sociolinguistic conditions of second language acquisition. More specifically, the thesis deals with the ways and methods employed by the respondent in the process of acquiring English, as well as the process of integration in the new society and the interrelationship of the two developments. It explores the impact of the community on both languages, but also the impact of the different educational systems in Croatia and England. Additionally, the results show the respondent’s present-day situation, e.g. the levels of proficiency in Croatian and English, his everyday use of both languages, situations in which code-switching occurs, etc. Lastly, the thesis deals with some of the most important language ideologies and the respondent’s beliefs about language, on both the individual and the general level
