Nombres y relaciones sociales: El grupo de iguales como comunidad interpretativa

This article examines how members of a child peer group use names (through nicknames, references to third parties and narratives around names) in their spontaneous interactions. Naming practices take place in different interactional situations, such as conflicts, narratives or negotiations and they signal different forms of affiliation, inclusion or exclusion in the peer group. Efficient use of names involves shared knowledge between members of the peer group and this knowledge is related to different domains, which are more or less accessible to external third parties, of their peer culture (e.g. media figures, neighborhood characters or participants in intimate relationships). Consequently, name use provides information on the place that each interlocutor plays in the group understood as an interpretive community. Also, the analysis of name use can uncover aspects of the peer group’s social structure. The data of this study comes from a linguistic ethnography focused on peer interactions of a mostly Gitano group of children from a small city in Spain. This article is published in Spanish.