Spanish and English in U.S. Service Encounters

Laura Callahan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780230619104
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Service encounters involve communication between strangers. Communication - or, at times, miscommunication - between strangers who come from different groups can foster the formation of stereotypes. This is therefore an area of particular relevance for investigation. Using service encounters as a vehicle, Callahan examines Spanish as social capital in the United States, focusing on who may use this language and under what circumstances. This book contributes to an examination of Spanish in the United States as a language of selected uses and selected users, along with the factors that can influence United States Latinos acceptance of its use by other Latinos and by non-Latinos.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Language Use
• 2 Workers Report on Their Language Use
• 3 Observing Workers' Language Use
• 4 Codeswitching in Service Encounters
• 5 A Comparison of Service Encounters in Person and Over the Telephone
• 6 Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix A: Demographic Characteristics of the Interviewees (Chapter 2)
• Appendix B: Photographs Shown to the Interviewees (Chapter 2)
• Appendix C: Fieldworkers in the Face-to-Face and Telephone Encounters; Service Workers in Selected Face-to-Face Encounters
• Appendix D: Selected Face-to-Face and Telephone Encounters
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects