after describing the close relationship between language and identity, González-Cruz justifies the linguistic analysis of literature and then studies the role Spanish plays in the construction of Otherness in six romances set in the Canaries. She illustrates the sociolinguistic strategies employed in the texts to represent characters’ identities, namely the use of metalanguage and the insertion of Spanish words (borrowing), and phrases and sentences (codeswitching). These mechanisms, which prove the authors’ awareness of the other culture and language, work as identity markers that emphasize socio-cultural closeness and create affective bonds with the Other. Besides, the study also reveals that a considerable number of Hispanicisms have been consolidated into the English lexical repertoire. (4)
From the introduction: