@misc{10481/81471,
year = {2023},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/81471},
abstract = {At the center of political discussion regarding the crisis of immigration in Spain,
Moroccan immigrants' cultural, religious, and linguistic practices are highly contested and
surveilled. Analyzing multilingual situations from a sociolinguistic perspective has traditionally
involved characterizing where, when, and how languages are used, utilizing constructs that
characterize language use as stable and domain-specific which references static social categories
or bounded ethnolinguistic identities. These long-standing constructs in sociolinguistics are
unable to account for language use within the complex social realities of Moroccan immigrants
in Spain. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach to language which maintains that language
and the social world are mutually shaping, I examine the relationship between the sociopolitical
realities of the Moroccan immigrant community in Granada, Spain and the role of language use
and identity negotiation in Moroccan immigrants' participation in Spanish society in order to
refine key concepts in sociolinguistics. The data include sociolinguistic interviews,
questionnaires, observations and recordings conducted with 30 first and 28 second generation
members of the Moroccan immigrant community as well as eight interviews over the course of
ten months with six focal participants. In chapter 1 I contextualize the study and discuss the
motivation for investigation. In chapter 2, I provide an overview of previous studies in the
characterization of multilingual situations, social identities, attitudes and ideologies. Chapter 3
includes an overview of the methods used in this work. In chapter 4, I present a sociolinguistic
description of language use of Moroccan immigrants in Granada as well as describe how
Moroccan immigrants conceptualize and characterize their own language use within society.
Chapter 5 addresses how identities are enacted in language practices through the use of
linguistics structures that reflect their multilingual repertoires. I examine how speakers position
themselves in interviews in addition to how this position is negotiated and constructed over time.
The sixth chapter discusses the linguistic attitudes and ideologies that are present in the
questionnaires and interviews.
I found that first and second generation Moroccan immigrants’ language practices are
fluid while they are perceived to be domain specific and functionally separated. These fluid
language practices were frequently leveraged in interviews and social interaction to negotiate
their position as members of past, present, and future or imagined communities. However,
speakers' linguistic attitudes and ideologies frame their fluid language practices as separate and
distinct.
This project challenges previous constructs in sociolinguistics, namely, the concept of
functional and stable language separation while recognizing the socially real consequences of
such static conceptualizations of language use. Additionally, this research provides a greater
understanding of how Moroccan immigrants' perceptions of political, social, and economic
issues interact with identity construction within a highly politicized context which constrains or
enables particular kinds of language practices.},
organization = {Tesis Univ. Granada.},
publisher = {Universidad de Granada},
title = {Moroccan Immigrants in Spain: Negotiating language, culture and identity},
author = {Ready, Carol Ann},
}