Abstract
This chapter draws on conversational data between four First Nations adolescents collected over 30 years ago and reflects on what this data can tell us about the interconnected processes of lexical innovation, lexical attrition, language switching and translanguaging. The chapter considers how these adolescents use English resources when they position themselves as speaking in a Cree monolingual mode and when they position themselves as speaking in a Cree-English multilingual mode. The findings illustrate the multiple roles that English plays in this Cree discourse, the interwoven nature of the linguistic resources, and the explanatory power of translanguaging for the understanding of social acts. The unpacking of the layers shows how translanguaging both overlaps with and differs from other linguistic practices and how translanguaging serves as a vehicle to transition between worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
Older, often reportedly monolingual, speakers of Cree use lexical innovations.
- 2.
The text does not contain any inter-linear glosses, as my focus is on the construction of the discourse rather than the grammatical structure of Cree texts. Lines 11–55 of this text were published previously in an article on syntactic structures in Cree discourse. In this publication, inter-linear glosses are provided (Starks, 1994), and interested readers can find the inter-linear detail in this publication.
- 3.
When verbs are borrowed, usually it is only the root of the word that is in English, e.g. kâ-kî-cleanupîyân ‘when I was cleaning up’. The only other part of speech in Cree is the particle. It is not usual to borrow particles from English.
- 4.
The exception is asikanak ‘socks’ (see line 60).
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Starks, D. (2018). Translanguaging: A Vital Resource for First Nations Peoples. In: Mazzaferro, G. (eds) Translanguaging as Everyday Practice. Multilingual Education, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94851-5_7
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