Introduction. Language and Territory - Part I

MAGADÁN, CECILIA; RIZZO, MARÍA FLORENCIA; KLEIFGEN, JO ANNE

WORD (WORCESTER)

Taylor & Francis Group

Lugar: Abingdon; Año: 2020 vol. 66 p. 239 - 254

0043-7956

This is the first of a two-part special issue on Language and Territory. Both parts represent a selection of papers from the 64th Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2019 with the same theme. Participants explored such wide-ranging topics as the current debates around local, national and global languages and literacies; the ways in which linguistic borders have been defined, enforced, inherited, but also challenged through time; and how these practices are being examined and debated today. The relationship between languages and territories has been constructed and interrogated across social groups and communities throughout different moments in history. In the twenty-first century, equating languages with national identities and borders, while still defended in some quarters, is met with recurrent resistance: In a world of mobile communication devices, social and mass media networks, and increasing migration, transidiomatic practices demonstrate how social identities and practices clash with language policies and language ideologies that remain tied to single nation-states. The five articles in this issue trace this theme along a thread of tensions between Spanish, as a hegemonic language in Spain and the Americas, and the ?other? languages spoken in the same territories. These tensions are intertwined through different paths: linguistic fields (sociolinguistics, bilingual education, language policies, lexicography), linguistic scenarios (Catalan-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, Spanish and its varieties, Guarani-Spanish, Quechua-Spanish) and the analysis of different types of data (news media, travel guides, social media, dictionaries).