Factors of Andalusian ethnolinguistic identity

Abstract

This paper analyses the details of the process by which the Andalusian ethnolinguistic identity is one of the most stigmatised in the Hispanic cultural context, which is even taken as an example of this type of processes at a global level. Among the reasons for the stigmatisation of speakers and scribes of the Andalusian language are the framework of power relations characteristic of colonisation and the dynamics of acculturation and underestimation of the cultural —and therefore linguistic— traits of the subalternised Andalusian people (whose territory is located in the western Mediterranean, in the Spanish state). Among the effects of these dynamics is also a kind of linguistic resilience that has been developing, especially in recent decades, a socio-cultural movement known as Andalophile, an agent of a whole diversity of ethno-literary production, oral, musical and visual literature which, sometimes unintentionally, poses a challenge to the ethnocentric perspective of linguistic Spanishism, building a linguistic identity without complexes among broad sectors of Andalusian society.