The emergence of new linguistic repertoires among Barcelona's youth of Latin American origin

Abstract

Since the end of the last century, more than 10% of students in Catalonia's schools are immigrants, mostly concentrated in areas of Catalonia where the population speaks Castilian in everyday life. Although these newcomers are educated in Catalan, the majority use diverse varieties of Spanish as their language of everyday communication. In the case of students from Latin America, it is possible to observe the emergence of a new repertoire that shares traits of different varieties of Spanish spoken in South America. This article focuses on the hybrid features of this repertoire, its transmission among peers, and also on the way teachers categorize and value it. The research results reveal that students develop multilingual abilities to fulfill practical goals. The data also show that varieties of vernacular Catalan and Spanish are articulated with a new Latino language repertoire in a complex set of resources in which linguistic forms of various origins are mixed. The uses of this hybrid repertoire can be related to key issues such as the speaker's stance regarding school, but also to symbolic aspects of broader processes, such as the re-territorialization of languages and people and the emergence of new processes of identity construction in a multilingual and cosmopolitan city.

Keywords:

• Catalan
• Castilian
• immigration
• multilingualism
• globalization
• secondary school
• language socialization

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the editors of this volume, especially Susan Frekko and an anonymous reviewer, for their contribution in order to improve the text.

Notes

1. Although Castilian and Spanish can be considered synonyms, we will use Castilian to refer to the different varieties of the official language of the Spanish state spoken in Catalonia. The term Spanish will be used to refer to the different varieties of this language, which are official in many Latin American countries. This approach mirrors the use of the cognates ‘castellano’ (which is the more common word for the language in Spain) and ‘español’ (which is the more common word for the language in many places in Latin America).

2. This research was funded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Project SEJ2007-62147-EDUC, 2007-2010) and Ministerio de Ciencia y Innovación (Project EDU2010-17859; 2011-2013).

3. See: http://greip.uab.cat/ca/projectes/finalitzats/I+D/decomasai/

4. Different features are mentioned as follows: Ecuadorian in bold; Caribbean in italics; Peruvian are underlining; peninsular Castilian are in bold italics , and words in Catalan are in Courier New style.