30 March 2017 – 1 April 2017
Avenue Campus, Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton, SO17 1BF
Beliefs about language and language uses play a central role in social life. As a well-established field of inquiry, the study of language ideologies has allowed researchers from different approaches and disciplines (discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social psychology, linguistic anthropology and ethnography, amongst many others) to shed light on the complex relationships between social structures and individual (linguistic) agencies. Thus, giving account of the social and institutional conditions under which speakers’ evaluations are made, factors such as language prestige, language change and maintenance, language choices, language policy or the role of language in power relations, have become central to understanding how language behaviour is shaped by such situational, institutional and indeed broader social and historical constraints. The numerous domains of Spanish language use offer us important contexts within which to reflect upon how language ideologies function, and the circumstances in which they circulate and are legitimised in the spaces where different varieties of Spanish coexist, or in multilingual and diasporic situations where Spanish, in its multiple varieties, is one of the choices available within the linguistic repertoires of speakers.
Posted By : Erin Forward