Research: Linguistic policies and migration in the public communication space. The Spanish of Latin Americans in the urban linguistic landscape of Rome and the Lazio region.
The present research project falls within the theoretical-methodological line of the Linguistic Landscape and is based on the analysis of the linguistic-communicative modes of Latin American migrants in Rome. At the same time, the project focuses on the analysis of linguistic policies related to the management of public space in the two regional and local dimensions, starting from the models provided in the supranational and national spheres. Multilingualism and multiculturalism, in fact, are the founding principles of the European Union, which since its foundation has immediately manifested a multilingual vocation: each Member State, therefore, has been called upon to adapt to the European directives with the aim of creating a shared space that could be open to the cultural and linguistic varieties that make up the heterogeneous panorama of the EU. As a result, a more in-depth debate began to take place on the need for shared language policies, management tools needed to regulate the new contexts that were created from the 1990s onwards, i.e. at a time when increased mobility considerably altered the organisation of social and international relations and when public spaces, due to the progressive increase of migration flows, underwent significant sociolinguistic transformations that manifested the need for further in-depth study.
Contexts of superdiversity, quoting Vertovec, which can be studied through the analysis of the linguistic landscape, which focuses on the study of the communicative signs that characterise a given geographic area, and through which it is possible to detect the evolution of social and linguistic phenomena by highlighting the processes of re-territorialisation and identity negotiation implemented by diasporic communities: data, therefore, that provide indications on the presence and visibility of migrant communities, the activities carried out, the management of public space and social position.
The objective of this research is to collect and analyse a congruent body of data on the presence, visibility and activities of the Latin American community in the physical and virtual space of Roma Capitale and the Lazio Region, which will be analysed by applying the methodology of the Paesaggi e Lingua Roma platform (Mariottini, Oricchio 2019, which proposes a hybrid qualitative-quantitative approach and fulfils multiple basic functions: archiving, labelling and geolocalising Spanish-language communicative signs; retrieving information by making it searchable in the database; organising and administering communicative signs; and conducting research in a cross-cutting manner, cross-referencing data according to selected interests.
The project falls within the scope of interest of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development published by the EU, within which a great deal of attention has been paid to the promotion of interculturality and social integration, where interculturality refers to diasporas, i.e. the movements of migrants from one country to another that necessarily produce contacts between different languages and cultures.