The Increasing Presence of Spanish-Speaking Latinos in London: An Emergent Community?

In recent years, the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos in Britain and London has grown considerably. Estimates from different sources put the population in London as high as 300,000. Unfortunately, this growing ethnolinguistic group is an underresearched minority, and information of any kind is hard to come by. In this article, my aim is to remedy this situation. First, I establish that there are by now a substantial number of Spanish-speaking Latinos in London. I then move to explore the extent to which one can say that there is a Spanish-speaking Latino community in the city. I present interview data collected from a small sample of Spanish-speaking Latinos living in London and examine their experiences, including their uses of English and Spanish in their day-to-day lives.