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16 - Identity Construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2021

Danae Perez
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Marianne Hundt
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Johannes Kabatek
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Daniel Schreier
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
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Summary

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.

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