Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article examines the language mixing practices of Puerto Rican adolescents in various social media platforms through a framework of code-mixing and socioindexicality. Over a twelve-week period, I collected samples of online text messages from six island bilinguals of an elite community of practice (CofP) and studied the way their unique socializations in private schools and bilingual universities contributed to the ways they made sense of languages, their social meaning potentials, and uses across online interactions. Against the meaningful backdrop of colonial-dynamics of Spanish and English in Puerto Rico, the paper examines how ideologies of "nationalism" and "race" get reproduced or challenged through bilingual practice, and English takes up an equally important role for the construction of social identities in the interactions of youth. Additionally, the study discusses bilingual styles that have been enregistered as social styles specific to technological mediums of communication and youth registers, Puerto Rican netspeak, as well as emerging social styles that indicate queer gender identity, or non-binary practices. In this sense, I offer a description of the island bilingual that is dynamic, strategic, and metapragmatically conscious of the purist ideologies of Spanish in Puerto Rico, as well as the indexical potentials of appropriating variable gender forms in Spanish, bilingual language practices, and netspeak registers towards the negotiation of identities in technological interaction. The way bilinguals relate to the languages at their disposal can provide a window to impending questions on the perceived coloniality of English, potential changes in language ideologies and uses, and whether and how language policies may shift to meet current demographic attitudes and language uses of contemporary Puerto Ricans.

Abstract
This introduction to our special issue surveys some of the current work undertaken by scholars on the island of Puerto Rico and abroad that document the language forms, uses, and ideologies of language in the U.S. territory. We provide the "total linguistic fact" (Silverstein 1985) of what it means to speak English and Spanish in Puerto Rico, Census projections of language use, self-reported data and actual documented work on the form and social uses of languages. We provide the sociohistorical context of the history of both Spanish and English on the Island, language policies across time, and how these have played out and been contested in real time. Setting the scene for our special issue, we ask our readers to think critically on the status of contact languages in globalized times, ideological shifts of language practices, and the intimate ties between language and identity.