Language Awareness in Four Romances Set on the Island of Madeira

Publication year
2020
Pages
69-82
Comment

From the introduction:

Bazenga offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of [...] strategies for the representation of language contact in four romances set in the Portuguese-speaking island of Madeira. She shows the authors’ language awareness through the strategies they employ to recreate the bilingual environment of the novels’ settings and to characterize and portray the different characters according to their language competence. However, her findings also confirm the writers’ poor knowledge of Portuguese address terms, which constitute a highly coded and complex system. In fact, their general knowledge of the Other tends to be superficial and often inaccurate, as proved by the lack of diversity of Portuguese words used, including some confusion between Portuguese and Spanish. (5)