Granada, Spain, presents a fascinating microcosm for sociolinguistic analysis and study. The Spanish spoken in Granada belongs to the Andalusian variety of Spanish, within which processes of convergence with the central and northern Peninsular Spanish are evident. As a result, the historical stigmatisation of many Andalusian linguistic features remains prevalent today. Furthermore, Granada has not yet fully reached European economic standards, and it exemplifies urban processes of elitisation (gentrification), which have led to significant demographic changes in recent years, including the displacement of young residents from the city center and the expansion of a large metropolitan area. In this issue, we explore different sociolinguistic aspects of the Spanish of Granada. Given that this variety has been examined from a sociolinguistic perspective for over 40 years, this issue introduces the novel focus of studying linguistic change in real time. It is a well-known fact that studies of linguistic change in real time are very scarce in the Hispanic world. In order to conduct such studies, the authors of this issue consider two time periods that are represented by two easily comparable corpora. In addition to outlining the sociolinguistic context of Granada and describing the research project, this introductory article also provides a summary of the articles included in this special issue, which is organized into three thematic categories: sociophonetics, sociogrammar, and sociopragmatics, with three articles in each category.
Cruz et al. (2026) studied this question.