Spanish as a heritage language in Europe: a demolinguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper offers an estimation of the number of Spanish speakers in Europe in order to analyze the demographic dynamics according to their migratory backgrounds. This demolinguistic approach allows us to quantify this group of Spanish heritage speakers and outline their demographic and linguistic profiles. Through analyzing specific family, social, educational, and geographic settings, this paper identifies a heterogeneous group of 1.7 million Spanish heritage speakers. Moreover, we discuss the social dynamics involved in the intergenerational transmission of the Spanish language in different contexts: spaces in which Spanish is an official language and in which different geographic varieties coexist, and spaces beyond the national borders of predominantly Spanish-speaking countries. In the latter, the demolinguistic analysis suggests that barely a third have been linguistically socialized in environments favorable to the intergenerational transmission of the Spanish language.

Current Approaches to Heritage Spanish and the Identity Construction of Spanish Heritage Speakers: Lessons Learnt from Five European Countries

“…Ideally, we would take into account demographic and immigration information to better contextualise the HS communities in each country. As stated by Ainciburu and Buyse (2023), recent studies such as that by Loureda Lamas et al (2021) and Loureda Lamas et al (2023), as part of the excellent work of the group "Spanish in Europe," directed by Francisco Moreno at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (Heidelberg University) and the University of Zurich, with whom we have worked on other research, resulted in two demolinguistic studies, in Germany and Switzerland. In the German papers, the authors speculate on the mixed marriages of about 60% of Spanish-speaking immigrant marriages.…”

“…From a sociolinguistic point of view, some authors argue that the degree of preservation of Spanish by direct descendants of immigrants can be indirectly deduced by observing the geographical and social spaces where they live and socialise (Loureda Lamas et al 2023). Using this criterion, and on the basis of a common origin of immigrant populations, added to the size and density of the Spanish-speaking population, the existence of linguistic and social environments more or less favourable to the preservation of the language can be revealed.…”

The “emotional brain” of adolescent Spanish–German heritage speakers: is emotional intelligence a proxy for productive emotional vocabulary?

“…First, heritage speakers represent a unique type of bilingualism; they have acquired their heritage language(s) naturally and in affective contexts, which may influence how they regulate and express their emotions (Montrul, 2015(Montrul, , 2019Montrul & Polinsky, 2021) two core facets of EI. Moreover, the number of heritage speakers across Europeparticularly of HL Spanish speakers in Germanyis increasing rapidly (Loureda Lamas et al, 2020); therefore, more research on these still underrepresented HL contexts is needed to achieve an in-depth understanding of the complexities and particularities of the emotional expression of these minority language groups. Second, although anger is a prototypical negative emotion, surprise has variable affective valence and can generate mixed or ambivalent emotions, which is probably the norm rather than the exception in real-life situations (see Mavrou & Dewaele, 2020).…”

Closing the computational biology ‘knowledge gap’: Spanish Wikipedia as a case study

“…Thus, it is plausible that the amount of time and efforts non-native English speakers spend on reading, writing papers, or proofreading their papers is higher than the time spent by native English speakers. Recent estimates of the number of Spanish speakers worldwide range between 559 and 591 million, with 460 million native speakers ( Eberhard et al 2023 , Loureda Lamas et al 2023 ). It is also estimated that 7.9% of internet users speak Spanish ( https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm ), making it the 3rd most common language on the internet, after English and Mandarin Chinese.…”