Spelling bilingualism: Script choice in Russian American classified ads and signage

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russianspeaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use. (Writing systems, Russian, English, codeswitching, borrowing, hybridity.)*

Surface Politics: Scaling Multiscriptality in anIndian Village Market

“…Another example of this can be seen in the Balkan republics, in which Latin and Cyrillic scripts, both used to write Serbo‐Croatian, served as a resource for the creation of the independent “languages” of Croatian and Serbian, respectively (Magner ). All these cases underscore the importance of considering script in studies of linguistic differentiation, corroborating Sebba's assertion that “script and orthographic variation is used to iconize difference at a wide range of linguistic levels and levels of social organization” (Sebba ; see also Angermeyer ; Jaffe ; Sebba ; Unseth ).…”

Introduction

“…Like work demonstrating the pragmatic richness of codeswitching phenomena, contemporary studies of digraphia disrupt the idea that users are rarely able to utilize or combine multiple linguistic systems effectively and in ways that reflect community-based communicative competencies. Angermeyer's (2005) work on script hybridity in Russian diaspora writing, Miller's (2004) discussion of mixed script writing and Japanese kogal identity, LaDousa's (2002) work on script choices in advertising for language schools in North India, King's (2001) exploration of the complex cultural meanings and consequences of distinct script usage for Hindi and Urdu, and White's (2006) work on the biscriptual social contexts of reading in Serbia are a few examples of research that explores the wide range of competencies, uses, and meanings attached to the use of more than one writing system.…”

Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts

“…Any use of a different script (e.g. the script-switching described by Angermeyer, 2005Angermeyer, , 2012 has a similar effect. Similarly Mbodj-Pouye and Van den Avenne (2007, p. 104) note that in a handwritten text, script styleslowercase block letters for Bambara and cursive for French -keep the languages apart.…”