Language Practices And Processes Among Latin Americans In Europe

Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe is an innovative and thematically organised collection of studies dedicated to contemporary sociolinguistic research on Latin Americans across European contexts. This book captures some of the language practices and experiences of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans (SsLAs) across various regions in Europe, addressing language uses, language ideologies, and experiences with languages in particular geographical contexts and settings across the ten chapters. The book provides a new lens to study the sociolinguistics of the migratory trajectories of Spanish-speaking Latin American migrants and the situated practices and processes in which they participate in their host societies. The comprehensive volume will be of interest to researchers in the area of Spanish sociolinguistics, sociology of language, and language ideology.

This book explores the life stories of Latin American immigrants living in London. Through a critical analysis of their discourses in various contexts, this book provides insights into representations of migration and processes of exclusion among co-ethnics. Ideologies of language, neoliberalism and social class intersect with such constructs as gender, race and ethnicity as the participants categorise other Latin Americans and themselves in the social spaces that they have cohabitated. It is a timely work for those interested in the history of Latin America, its people in diaspora, social inequality and the interrelationship between language and identity in a context of mobility.

This book traces Latin American migration to Europe since the 1970s. Focusing on Amsterdam, London, and Madrid, it examines the policies of integration in a comparative perspective that takes into account transnational, national, regional and local levels. It examines the entire mechanism that Latin American migrants confront in the European cities they settle, and provides readers with a theoretical framework on integration that addresses the concepts of multiculturalism, interculturality, transculturality and transnationalism. This work is based on rich qualitative data from in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation complemented by a substantial documentary and legislative analysis. It reveals that current policies are limited and migrants are excluded in most of the formal venues for integration. In addition, the book shows the many ways that migrants negotiate the constraints and imperatives of integration. In Western Europe today, immigrants are largely assuming the entire responsibility of their integration. This book provides readers with much needed insight into why European integration policies are not responding to the needs of immigrants nor to society as a whole.

This Element expands the horizon of sociopragmatic research by offering a first inquiry into the sociocultural norms that underlie the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relations in a diasporic context. Based on accounts of the practices that Spanish-speaking Latin Americans engage in pursuit of employment, primarily gathered in life-story interviews, it captures the social reality of members of this social group as they build interpersonal relations and establish new contractual obligations with each other away from home. It examines occupational recommendations as a diasporic relational practice whereby the relationship between the recommender and the recommendee becomes part of the value being exchanged and the moral order on which the practice is established and maintained through an interlocked system of favours. The Element offers new social pragmatics insights beyond the dyad in a contemporary globalised context characterised by social inequality.

This volume brings together scholars in sociolinguistics and the sociology of new media and mobile technologies who are working on different social and communicative aspects of the Latino diaspora. There is new interest in the ways in which migrants negotiate and renegotiate identities through their continued interactions with their own culture back home, in the host country, in similar diaspora elsewhere, and with the various "new" cultures of the receiving country. This collection focuses on two broad political and social contexts: the established Latino communities in urban settings in North America and newer Latin American communities in Europe and the Middle East. It explores the role of migration/diaspora in transforming linguistic practices, ideologies, and identities.

Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas focuses on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guaraní, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. This edited volume explores the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, and also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure. Across ten chapters, this book offers a broad survey of bidirectional influence in Spanish contact situations both geographically (in the US Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Andean regions of Ecuador and Peru, and the Southern Cone) and structurally (in the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics). By examining the potential structural effects that two languages have on one another, it provides a novel and more holistic perspective on mutual linguistic influence than that of previous work on language contact. The volume serves as a reference on mutual influence in bilingual language varieties and will be of interest to researchers, scholars and graduate students in Hispanic linguistics, and more broadly in language contact.

Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning addresses the ways in which discourses about language value and identities of linguistic expertise are constructed and negotiated in the Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom, and how the classroom discourse shapes, and is shaped by, the world outside of the classroom. The volume examines the sociopolitical contexts, personal histories, and communicative practices of Spanish teachers and students in two diverse geographic regions: the US states of Texas and Kansas. Adopting an integrated sociocultural approach, it considers the ways in which individuals draw from multiple linguistic resources and social practices in daily interaction and how they articulate their beliefs about language through storytelling. Rich interactional data, examples from social media, and stories of community engagement are utilized to demonstrate how Spanish heritage speakers use language creatively and proactively to legitimize and claim power in their home and community linguistic practices. This is an invaluable resource for applied linguists who seek to better understand the relationship between language, ideology, and identity and for graduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, Spanish, and HL education.

Data Representativity and Granularity in Spanish Syntax focuses on the dialogue between Generative Grammar, Variationism, and experimental linguistics with a unique emphasis on Spanish linguistics. Combining formal syntax and empirical data collection, this volume analyzes and compares various data collection methods in syntactic theory, and examines a wide variety of approaches to gain novel insight in this emerging area. Through the case study of subject properties in Spanish, with an emphasis on how differences in data collection and data analysis standards may shape our perception of the object of study, this book addresses the following questions: (a) How do the data gathered through the standard methodology in each discipline diverge (if at all) and why? and (b) What kind of research questions can be answered with the standard methodology in each field? The volume argues for methodological crosspollination to avoid forcing data to conform to field-specific expectations and to appreciate language variation for what it has to tell us about linguistic theory, marrying the goals of Generative Grammar with data-driven research. This is an essential resource for researchers in the area of formal and generative syntax, linguists with an interest in data collection standard in syntax, and graduate or advanced undergraduate students in the field of Spanish linguistics.