Beyond questionnaires: Community-based measures of bilingualism

Abstract

Bilingual speakers are often categorized according to degree of language contact on the basis of proficiency tests, which may have prescriptive biases, or questionnaire responses, which may be limited in scope and open to misinterpretation. Here an alternative approach is put forward and applied to the New Mexico bilingual community. Three forms of data are triangulated to construct a sociolinguistic profile: variables derived from self-reports in questionnaire items; content analysis of sociolinguistic interviews through systematic extraction of speakers' spontaneous comments on their linguistic experiences; and operationalization of language predominance as a measure of relative level of use and activation.