Karin Vilar Sánchez
In the course of a study oflanguage attrition in second-generation Spanish emigrants in Germany, we detected the coexistence of the following two codes in a 17-year-old boy: on the one hand, an extremely dialectal variety of Spanish, and on the other, the interlanguage typical ofa German learner of Spanish. The coexistence of these two codes can be attributed to the special Situation ofthe Informant: after 16 years of total Isolation from the Spanish linguistic norm, he had begun attending Spanish classes in the German high school He considered the interlanguage spoken in class superior to his "domestic code". As a consequence, he had adopted this interlanguage äs a whole, and he used U to communicate with Spanish outgroup members.