Change in the Discursive Practices of Bilingual Speakers after Moving to a Monolingual Environment

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Abstract The article analyses the speech behaviour of two speakers who were born into bilingual families, grew up in a bilingual environment in Italy, and decided as adults to move to a monolingual Slovene environment. We are interested in how the change in environment affects their discursive practises. To acquire the data, the guided conversation method and transcription of audio-recorded discourse were used, while the interactional sociolinguistic analysis method was used to analyse the discourse. The study showed that in the monolingual Slovene environment, both speakers found it difficult to adapt their speech to Slovene technical language. They also lacked the specific Slovene expressions used in everyday life. On the other hand, although their Slovene was interspersed with Italian interference, they knew variations in Slovene and were sensitive to the use of slang in standard Slovene.