Projects & Collaborations

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Dialect contacts in contexts of migration. The case of the Equatoguinean immigrants in Madrid, Spain

The studies about language and migration constitute a recent approach in the field of linguistics and aim to analyse language contacts resulting from human migrations. Such contacts activate sociolinguistic accommodation processes, which shape the language use of the immigrants and their linguistic attitudes towards the involved languages and dialects. The sociolinguistic integration of the immigrants is considered a fundamental part of their integration in the receiving society. In Spain, Madrid is one of the areas with the highest immigration rate in the last decades. Spanish-speaking immigrants as well as immigrants with different linguistic backgrounds enter in contact with the Madrilenian society, and their languages and dialects play an important role in the overall integration process. Most of the Spanish-speaking immigrants, who have to adapt to a society in which dominates another variety of Spanish, come from Latin American countries (e.g. Ecuador, Colombia, Dominican Republic, etc.). Another Spanish-speaking group, which so far has not yet been considered in studies about the immigrant population in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, are the immigrants from Equatorial Guinea. Despite the fact that Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking country in Central Africa - and constitutes, therefore, a singular case in the Spanish-speaking world -, it has very little visibility in studies about the Spanish language. In a similar way, the Equatoguinean immigrants have never been subject of any research on language and migration. This research project aims to study the sociolinguistic situation of the Equatoguineans in Madrid, with a special focus on language attitudes, language ideologies and some selected dialectal features of Equatoguinean Spanish. The primary research methodology are semi-directed interviews composed of life stories that include the following topics: the arrival of the immigrants to Spain, the past in their country of origin, the adaptation to the life in Madrid and differences to their country of origin, their labour situation, their family and their expectations for the future.

Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, Knowledge

Research Project | 5 Project Members

The interdisciplinary project Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, Knowledge investigates inheritance as a process of passing down objects to reproduce collectives and institutions into the future. It does so against the backdrop of an historical paradox: between growing investments in inheritance predicated on liberal conceptions of political subjecthood, genealogical continuity, and durable attachments to land, territory, and identity on the one hand, and an increasing sense of futures displaced and threatened by climate change, technological transformation, the fragility of the global political order, and large-scale migration on the other hand. The project draws on rich anthropological and historical studies of inheritance as a social practice, and the norms, institutions and values that shape the transmission of property, resources, rights, and obligations across generations. Likewise, it builds on how anthropologists and historians have attended to the ways in which individuals and societies orient themselves towards, desire and imagine futures, and explained under which conditions the making of futures is put into question, suspended, or undermined. Consolidating these perspectives, the project ties inheriting and futuring together, and turns towards the problem of time and temporality by way of understanding struggles over inherited things as struggles over epochal ruptures, moments of crisis, (re)orientation in space and time, and being and becoming. Our concern with these dynamics informs the project’s main research interest, methods, and outcomes. The research foregrounds objects, understood as knots of social practice and social knowledge, in order to shed light on the complexities of ‘inherited futures’ across social terrains, temporalities, cultural imaginaries, epistemologies, scales of inquiry and affective economies. The studies proposed illuminate multiple ways of paying attention to things - highlighting the social life of objects and their embeddedness in social relations and practice, and acknowledging the ways in which individuals and societies care for, reconstitute, and reimagine what they inherit. Grounded in ethnographic and archival research in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, and negotiating approaches from anthropology, history and African Studies, the project pursues a strategy of thinking across disciplinary, epistemological, historical, and cultural spaces to decenter established modes of knowledge production and interrogate inherited paradigms of regional boundedness in order to attend to the shifting material grounds of subjectivity, belonging and historical imagination.

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 219800), hosted by the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel.