Dos comunidades inmigratorias conservadoras en el sudoeste bonaerense: dinamarqueses y alemanes del Volga* YOLANDA H. HIPPERDINGER y ELIZABETH M. RIGATUSO Aunque el estudio de la conservacion y despla- zamiento del idioma no necesita limitarse enteramente a la comparacion de casos sepa- rados, es indudable que el metodo compara- tivo (...) es indispensable en nuestra busqueda de regularidades interculturales y diacronicas. Joshua A. Fishman (1974: 412) Abstract In the late nineteenth and early twentieth Century, a mass inmigrant flow reshaped Argentine demography. A particularly high percentage offoreign- ers settled in the southwest of the province of Buenos Aires, where a complex multilingualism was generated. Nevertheless, an accelerated Substitution of original languages took place in a few decades, and nowadays Spanish is the only language spoken by the majority of the population. Against that background, Danish and Volga-German communities stand out because of their prolonged conservation oftheir Immigrant languages, which continues to the present. In this paper, we offer a review of both groups' linguistic behavior, with the purpose of analyzing the common factors that in both cases have contributed to producing the nontypical result referred to. Introduccion En las ultimas decadas del siglo XIX y las primeras del XX, la demograf ia de varios paises americanos se renovo ante el impacto de una masiva corriente inmigratoria, de procedencia fundamentalmente europea. Los principales receptores fueron Estados Unidos, Argentina, Canadä y Brasil, en ese orden, de acuerdo con el ingreso neto de poblacion extran- jera. El caso argentino reviste particular interes, por cuanto la proporcion 0165-2516/96/00117-0039 Int'l. J. Soc. Lang. 117 (1996), pp. 39-61 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Se Authenticated Download Date | 5/29/15 6:38 PM