Codewisseling in een Nederlandse Gemeenschap in Brazilie

The present investigation was carried out in Holambra, a community of Dutch origin in Brazil. The goal was to analyze the codeswitching between Dutch and Portuguese practised by the immigrants in their everyday speech, taking into account both grammatical and functional aspects. Moreover, the codeswitching of the first and second generations were compared, focusing on the different motives, the size of switched constituents, and the type of codeswitching. Previous theories suggested a relationship between grammatical characteristics on the one hand, and functions of individual switches, attitudes towards the languages and communities involved, and language ability on the other hand.In this article, results of the three analyses are presented and the language use and codeswitching of the different generations in this community are described. The results show an intermediate generation consisting of the most balanced bilinguals, who codeswitch often and without difficulties, using the full range of both languages. The first and second generations, however, show less diversity in their codeswitching, mainly switching nouns. Finally, suggestions for future investigation are presented.