Moroccan Immigrants in Spain: Negotiating language, culture and identity

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.