Identity construction

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

Abstract / Description of output

In the context of English and Spanish in contact, issues of identity arise at various levels, including: how people’s national and ethnic identities are bound up with their language choices; how the national and ethnic identities were formed historically, and are continually re-formed, in conjunction with languages; how languages themselves are defined – how the English and Spanish (or Castilian) languages came to be recognised as such, and likewise for Scots or Galician or Catalan as languages apart, where many other varieties are regarded as dialects; how contact between English and Spanish, which principally means their knowledge and use by bilinguals, affects these conceptions of languages and national and ethnic identities. This chapter examines these issues in terms not just of Spanish and English, but of Spanishes and Englishes in their global diversity, together with the other languages with which they share multilingual spaces. A wide range of recent studies on bilingual identities are taken into consideration, as is current work on the effects of globalisation, superdiversity and translanguaging.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEnglish and Spanish
Subtitle of host publicationWorld Languages in Interaction
EditorsDanae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek, Daniel Schreier
Place of PublicationCambridge
PublisherCambridge University Press
Chapter16
Pages335-357
Number of pages23
ISBN (Electronic)9781108623469, 9781108660112
ISBN (Print)9781108486040, 9781108736978
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • language and identity
  • bilingualism
  • translanguaging
  • agency
  • globalisation
  • superdiversity
  • Scots
  • Catalan
  • standard language
  • ethnicity

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