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From Gringo to Guarango: Language Shift in a Former Anglophone Community in Paraguay

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From Gringo to Guarango: Language Shift in a Former Anglophone Community in Paraguay Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2016 From gringo to guarango: language shift in a former anglophone community in Paraguay Perez, Danae Maria Abstract: Around the turn of the 20th century, over 600 English-speaking colonizers settled in rural Paraguay with the aim of establishing a socialist society called New Australia. The project failed, and the settlers either left the colony or gained a foothold locally. Today, their descendants mostly speak Guarani. New Australia is thus the only known case of a sizeable group of colonizers shifting from a European language to an indigenous one. This thesis provides a sociolinguistic study of New Australia and contextualizes it within the colonial and post-colonial spread of English in Latin America. On the basis of the literature, historical documents, and data collected in the field, I analyze the ethnolinguistic vitality of English over the past century. This shows that English was marginalized due to growing social inequalities and the value of English as a commodity on the international job market, which triggered out-migration. Moreover, the assignation of identity shifted from being based on primordial markers, including language, to socially constructed ones, such as financialand political power. This suggests that eventhough English was initially of overt high prestige, Guarani was, and continues to be, of covert prestige as a marker of solidarity. These findings contribute to our understanding of the vitality of Guarani in competition with English and Spanish in rural Paraguay today. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-169802 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Perez, Danae Maria. From gringo to guarango: language shift in a former anglophone community in Paraguay. 2016, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts. From Gringo to Guarango: Language Shift in a Former Anglophone Community in Paraguay Thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Zurich for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Danae Maria Perez Accepted in the fall semester 2015 on the recommendation of the doctoral committee: Prof. Dr. Daniel Schreier, English Seminar (main supervisor) Prof. Dr. Peter Finke, Institute for Social Anthropology Prof. Dr. Marianne Hundt, English Seminar Zurich, 2016 I Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables .............................................................................................................................. v List of Maps .............................................................................................................................. vi List of Pictures ......................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... viii 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 2 Framing New Australia: Language contact and English in Latin America .......................... 10 2.1 Language contact and societal bilingualism ................................................................... 10 2.2 Languages in competition: maintenance and loss of minority languages ...................... 18 2.2.1 Language competition and shift .............................................................................. 19 2.2.2 Linguistic enclaves .................................................................................................. 30 2.2.3 Models of language maintenance and shift ............................................................. 32 2.3 English in Latin America ............................................................................................... 38 2.3.1 English-speaking enclaves in Latin America .......................................................... 41 2.4 New Australia as a case in point .................................................................................... 45 3 The methodological approach and data collection ................................................................ 48 3.1 New Australia in the literature ....................................................................................... 48 3.2 The data .......................................................................................................................... 54 3.2.1 The field site ............................................................................................................ 54 3.2.2 Fieldwork ................................................................................................................ 62 3.2.3 The researcher(s) ..................................................................................................... 64 3.2.4 The interviews ......................................................................................................... 67 3.2.5 Written documents .................................................................................................. 68 3.2.6 The questionnaires ................................................................................................... 72 3.3 Summing up: exploring New Australia .......................................................................... 74 4 New Australia’s social history .............................................................................................. 76 4.1 The inception of New Australia ..................................................................................... 76 4.1.1 The recruitment of the settlers ................................................................................. 79 4.1.2 New Australia – where to? ...................................................................................... 82 4.1.3 Leaving Old Australia ............................................................................................. 83 ii 4.2 Paraguay – the Promised Land? ..................................................................................... 85 4.2.1 The English-speaking community in nineteenth-century Paraguay ........................ 88 4.2.2 Paraguay in the 1890s ............................................................................................. 91 4.2.3 The sociolinguistic situation at the time of arrival .................................................. 93 4.3 New Australia ................................................................................................................. 94 4.3.1 Setting up New Australia ........................................................................................ 95 4.3.2 Life at New Australia .............................................................................................. 97 4.3.3 The division of New Australia .............................................................................. 103 4.3.4 Nueva Australia ..................................................................................................... 104 4.3.5 Cosme .................................................................................................................... 109 4.4 A word on the failure of New Australia ....................................................................... 114 4.5 New Australia in retrospect .......................................................................................... 120 5 Language shift in Nueva Australia ...................................................................................... 122 5.1 Language shift in Nueva Australia: the vitality of native English in Paraguay ........... 125 5.1.1 Language institutionalization in Nueva Australia ................................................. 126 5.1.2 The demographic development of Nueva Australia and Cosme ........................... 133 5.1.3 The shifting status of English and its speakers in Nueva Australia ...................... 138 5.1.4 Shifting orders of indexicality in New Australia................................................... 160 5.2. On the role of English in Nueva Australia today…………………………………….162 5.2.1 Motivation to learn English among Nueva Australia’s youths ............................. 164 5.3 Language Shift in Nueva Australia: an exceptional case? ........................................... 172 6 Concluding remarks and outlook ........................................................................................ 175 7 References ........................................................................................................................... 179 8 Appendix ............................................................................................................................. 198 The Henry Connelly manuscript, Nueva Londres, 1924 .................................................... 198 The questionnaires .............................................................................................................. 219 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Language choice between German (G) and Hungarian (H) by 32 speakers depending on the interlocutor (Gal 1979: 135) ........................................................................ 21 Figure 2: The Three Concentric Circles of World Englishes (Kachru
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