Managing Bilingual Identities: Community, Conversation, and Politeness

This project examines the use of politeness and impoliteness as resources for emergent bilingual identities in interaction. The bilingual situation provides a rich context for the study of politeness and impoliteness because of the meeting, overlapping or conflicting of sociocultural norms from two or more ethnolinguistic groups. This project takes advantage of the rich linguistic environment of the Phoenix metropolitan area to investigate whether bilingual, Mexican-American participants follow American English norms, follow Mexican Spanish norms, or create innovative, syncretic norms.