Intercultural communication in Spanish

What is it about?

In this chapter we offer a précis of research conducted on intercultural communication in Spanish and present an analysis of the construction of interculturality between speakers of Spanish in contemporary contexts resulting from globalisation. We start by reviewing the studies conducted on the topic from a contrastive pragmatics angle as cross-cultural findings have often been used to predict the prospective intercultural contact between members of different Spanish lingua-cultures. We then turn our attention to constructivist studies of encounters between speakers of different Spanish-speaking backgrounds in transnational settings. Their differences may reside in their ethnolinguistic identities, the varieties of Spanish they speak and their access to resources, among others. What these speakers have in common is the fact that they have had limited contact with one another in the past despite speaking the same basic language: Spanish. The discussion of such encounters is illustrated by previously unexamined instances of interculturality in communicative settings such as transnational service encounters, interactions in contexts of voluntary migration, multilingual settings and tourism.

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