Language, Identity and Urban Space: The Language Use of Latin American Migrants

Migration as a process has achieved increasing attention in the context of nation-states and globalisation. In linguistics the field of language contact is particularly associated with this phenomenon. This book investigates the connection between language usage, migration, space, in particular urban space, and the constitution of cultural identity. Two corpora of Andean migrants’ Spanish conversations in Lima and in Madrid are analysed. The resulting comparative analysis provides the material for considerations on language contact, code copying, discourse strategies etc. Throughout the book a new theoretical approach based on linguistic ecology is used. It includes the concept of a general expanded feature pool, which is the basis for language use and identity constitution for migrants.

Tabea Salzmann studied Spanish and Indology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima (Peru) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (India). She has been a researcher at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in cooperation with the Université de Montréal (Canada) and the Hermann-Paul-School of Linguistics in Freiburg (Germany).