Intersectionality in language trajectories: African women in Spain

Abstract

During the last decades, changing intra-state and inter-state immigrant profiles in Spain has generated an interesting landscape for sociolinguistics research. There has been a shift from temporary migration to permanent settlement, which means that there is an increasing number of individuals who need to speak the locally legitimate forms of language for different reasons. Apart from this, recent statistics indicate that female immigrants' profiles are also changing, and they are becoming more and more forerunners and active participants in the formal Spanish labour market (Aja et al. 2011). Therefore, this dynamic, ever changing profile of female immigrants suggests that they move across existing boundaries, acquiring and developing their linguistic knowledge to access other forms of symbolic capitals in Spain. Building on my ethnography of two sites in Madrid and Barcelona between 2011 and 2014, I shall explain how African immigrant women become new speakers and how their language learning process intersects with socially constructed boundaries such as political, economic, and linguistic hierarchies and ascribed gender roles.