Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods : The Politics of Belonging

This revealing analysis of everyday language use among Moroccan immigrant children in Spain explores their cultural and linguistic life-worlds as they develop a hybrid, yet coherent, sense of identity in their multilingual communities. The author shows how they adapt to the local ambivalence toward Muslim culture and increased surveillance by Spanish authorities. Offers ground-breaking research from linguistic anthropology charting the politics of childhood in Muslim immigrant communities in Spain Illuminates the contemporary debates concerning assimilation and alienation in Europe’s immigrant Muslim and North African populations Provides an integrated blend of theory and empirical ethnographic data Enriches recent research on immigrant children with analyses of their sense of belonging, communicative practices, and emerging processes of identification