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