Language policies on the ground : parental language management in urban Galician homes

Abstract

Recent language policy and planning research reveals how policy-makers endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalise minority languages and perpetuate systems of sociolinguistic inequality. In the Castilian-dominated Galician linguistic landscape, this study examines the rise of grassroots level actors or agents (i.e. parents, family members, and other speakers of minority Galician) who play a significant role in interpreting and implementing language policy on the ground. The primary focus of this study is to investigate the impact of top-down language policies inside home domain, it looks at how the individual linguistic practices and ideologies of Galician parents act as visible and/or invisible language planning measures influencing their children’s language learning. However, these individual linguistic ideologies and language management decisions are difficult to detect because they are implicit, subtle, informal, and often hidden from the public eye, and therefore, frequently overlooked by language policy researchers and policy makers. Drawing from multiple ethnographic research methods including observations, in-depth fieldwork interviews, focus group discussions and family language audits with thirty-two Galician parents, this study attempts to ascertain whether these parents can restore intergenerational transmission of Galician and if their grassroots level interrogation of the dominant discourse could lead to bottom-up language policies.