Affect and emotions in the Hispanic linguistic landscape in Milan

This study aims at investigating the presence of Latin American communities in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Milan, and the role of affect, understood as the social dimension of emotions, in the construction of their collective identities. It is based on a corpus consisting of photographic material from 36 Latin American restaurants and other shops in Milan, interviews with their owners, and a number of Facebook posts by the shopkeepers themselves, collected in the period 2019– 2020. The analysis will highlight the main emotive devices which can be seen in LL items, such as the use of the Spanish language, food images, or certain colours and graphical elements with strong cultural values. We will discuss some cases that are particularly interesting from the point of view of the narration of place.