Ideologies and Linguistic Practices in a Time of Crisis

A Sociolinguistic Reflection on the Hispanic Context from a Posthuman Perspective

Abstract

This contribution analyses the role of linguistic ideologies both in contexts of migration and in countries where Spanish is an official language through the narration of a young transnational Spanish speaker of Peruvian origin living in Italy. More specifically, I will address a reflection on the discursive frames relating to the coexistence between Spanish and autochthonous languages —or other modern languages— in an era characterized by the crisis of humanism and Western structuralism. Starting from the theoretical debate on posthumanism that has affected various fields of thought (Braidotti 2013; Latour 2012), I will focus on the role that this new conceptual turn is playing in the contemporary crisis (Rivera Cusicanqui 2018), even from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view (Pennycook 2018; Lamb & Higgins 2020; Schneider 2022). As I will highlight through the metalinguistic considerations carried out by the protagonist of the study, the socio-cultural aspects, materiality, and everything that goes beyond the human are key elements capable of documenting our ideological vision of linguistic knowledge.