British Latino: language and identity across mediated contexts

Pye, Jonathan Alan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130010 Copy

Description

Title

British Latino: language and identity across mediated contexts

Author(s)

Pye, Jonathan Alan

Issue Date

2025-06-24

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Callesano, Salvatore

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Callesano, Salvatore

Committee Member(s)

• Escobar, Anna María
• Koven, Michele
• Delgado, Rodrigo
• Patiño-Santos, Adriana

Department of Study

Spanish and Portuguese

Discipline

Spanish

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• British Latino
• Latin Americans
• United Kingdom
• Sociolinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Latin Americans are now the second-fastest growing non-EU migrant group in the UK (McIlwaine, 2024). Despite this, members of the Latin American community in the UK experience precarity in work and access to services and are often understood to be an “invisible” community within UK sociocultural discourse (McIlwaine, 2015; Román-Velázquez & Retis, 2021). Against this backdrop, recent work in sociolinguistics has explored how Latin Americans in the UK construct identity and use language to navigate the sociolinguistic landscape of the UK (Morales-Hernández, 2023; Patiño-Santos, 2021; Patiño-Santos & Márquez Reiter, 2019). However, to date, no work has considered how members of the Latin American community use language to articulate identity within digital media spaces, such as social media. Therefore, as a point of departure, this dissertation has three collective aims: firstly, to explore how online, diasporic British Latino identities are articulated in digital spaces, such as community podcasting and on the social media platform, TikTok. Secondly, to identify the linguistic resources used to articulate these online identities and, thirdly, to offer initial insights into the evaluation and understandings – the uptake (Agha, 2003) – of these online identities. These aims are achieved across three interrelated studies. In the first study of the dissertation, the sociolinguistic concept of stance (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) is operationalized in order to investigate the identification practices of participants in the podcast of the British Latino Network. The second study of the dissertation builds upon this first study by exploring in greater detail the linguistic resources, or indexes (Silverstein, 2003) used to index these online, mediatized identities. In particular, this study investigates the role of Spanish-English code-switching within the identification practices of Latin Americans within the #BritishLatinos hashtag community (Zappavigna, 2015) on the social media platform, TikTok. The third study of the dissertation then investigates the evaluation and understanding of these #BritishLatino identities – as such, it is an analysis of the uptake (Agha, 2003) of these online identities. In particular, this study uses a combination of computational and qualitative methods to explore viewer sentiment within the #BritishLatinos comment section and the wider themes contextualizing viewer sentiment and uptake. Across the three studies, the dissertation finds that Latin Americans in the UK articulate a range of online, British Latino identities which recalibrate existing understandings of Latin American experience in the UK and of Latinidad (Aparicio, 2019; Caminero-Santangelo, 2017). These online, diasporic identities are elaborated through a range of linguistic resources – stancetaking (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009), English-Spanish code-switching (Muysken, 1997; Poplack, 1980), and lexical items from Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al., 2011; Palacios Martínez, 2021) – with uptake (Agha, 2003) of these online identities being generally neutral-positive, possibly indicating that these online #BritishLatino identities are not yet widely circulated or enregistered (Agha, 2003; Spitulnik, 1996; Squires, 2010). In this way, the dissertation provides important insights into the digitally-mediated identification practices of Latin Americans in the UK, highlights many of the linguistic and thematic resources which coalesce in contemporary understandings of Latinx identity in the UK and also expands understandings of (British) Latinidades (McIlwaine, 2024; Román-Velázquez & Retis, 2021).

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130010

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Jonathan Pye

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