Hannah Davidson

Mauritius is a highly multilingual society where Mauritian Creole, French, English, and ancestral languages coexist and intersect with social identity, education, and power dynamics. In such a diverse postcolonial context, it is impossible to neglect social factors which mediate linguistic choices as these variables provide explanations which linguistic factors alone cannot account for. While sociolinguistic studies have explored the distribution and status of languages in Mauritius, limited research has examined the effect of the newly standardised Creole on the language itself and its changing role in society, nor how multilingualism operates at the psychological and cognitive levels. I plan to collaborate with Freiburg colleagues to develop both these strands of my research. To understand the effect of using Creole in formal contexts, I will conduct semi-structured interviews and analyse recordings of speakers who use the language both professionally and informally. Secondly, I'll design two tasks: one to investigate the effect of bilingual proficiency on processing the mother tongue, and the second to explore the role of typological distance on code-switching ease. This interdisciplinary project integrates social and psycholinguistic approaches to better understand how bilinguals use, process, and relate to their languages.