Phd in POLITICAL STUDIES

Thesis title: Politiche linguistiche e migrazione nello spazio di comunicazione pubblica. Lo spagnolo migrante nel Paesaggio Linguistico urbano di Roma ed extrametropolitano della regione Lazio.

This study analyses the relationship between language policies, migration and communication in the public sphere through an examination of the linguistic landscape (Landry, Bourhis, 1997) of spanish-american migration in Rome (Mariottini, 2019a; 2019b) and in the extra-metropolitan areas of the Lazio region: adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates linguistic, sociolinguistic and ethnographic perspectives, the aim is to observe how the presence of resident Spanish-American communities manifests itself in urban and extra-metropolitan spaces through the display of communicative signs, and how such linguistic practices result from the interaction of multiple factors, including processes of identity reconstruction, practices of reterritorialisation and broader phenomena such as globalisation and touristification. From a methodological perspective, the research draws on primary sources—the communicative signs collected and catalogued within the Poliglopolis digital platform, designed and developed for the cataloguing, coding and querying of data—and interviews with key informants responsible for producing the signs under study; as well as secondary sources, namely statistical data on the demographics of resident Hispanic American communities, extracted from the databases of ISTAT and the Municipality of Rome. Following a theoretical and methodological review of studies on the linguistic landscape, with particular attention to the context of migration and the Italian context, the social and demographic profile of Spanish-American migration in Rome and the Lazio region was defined through the analysis of statistical data covering the period 1990–2024 and the local and regional language policies governing communication in the public sphere of the areas under consideration. Subsequently, empirical analyses were conducted examining the Spanish-American commercial linguistic landscape of Rome between 2019 and 2025, focusing in particular on activities relating to the Peruvian and Mexican communities and the associated processes of symbolic and communicative transformation of the space. In parallel, the study examined the areas surrounding Rome (and those outside the metropolitan area) in the Lazio region, areas that remain largely unexplored in linguistic landscape studies. The research findings demonstrate how the linguistic landscape serves as a key tool for observing the dynamics of visibility, representation and identity negotiation among migrant communities in the urban space, whilst simultaneously highlighting the role of language policies and the impact of processes such as globalisation and touristification, which tend to redefine the forms, content and target audiences of public communication.