Transnacionalidad e identidades lingüísticas en la frontera dominico-haitiana

AbstractZones of Dominican-Haitian contact can be analyzed from anthropological, sociolinguistic and language-acquisition perspectives. Despite recent advances in the linguistic study of this area (Ortiz López 2010), many contact phenomena remain unexamined. Building on previous work, I analyze Dominican-Haitian contact from a transnational (Duany 2011) and ethno-sociolinguistic perspective. Here, I document the roles that Dominican Spanish, Haitian Kreyòl and Haitianized Spanish play for speakers in the speech community of the Dominican-Haitian border, while considering the ethno-social dimension in which language acquires meanings associated with race, power, status, prestige, etc. I tackle the following questions: how do the aforementioned linguistic varieties become instruments for negotiating a fluid yet conflictive and ambiguous ethnolinguistic identity (Coupland 2001; Fishman 1987; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Zentella 2000; Duany 2010, 2011)?; where lie the specific connections between these linguistic varieties and ethnic components within the +/− black, +/− Haitian-Dominican, +/− Dominican, +/− monolingual continuum?; what values do these (often hybrid) linguistic varieties represent for the distant (Dominican and Haitian) neighbors from Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince as well as for the members of the hybrid, transnational and bifocal community of “others”?; and which linguistic varieties emerge from such a complex continuum?