Countering government’s low-intensity language policies on the ground: family language policies in Castilian-Spanish dominated Galicia and Navarre

ABSTRACT

Current research on language policy underscores how top-down policymakers tend to endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalize minority languages, and attempt to perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequity. In the Castilian-Spanish-dominated sociolinguistic terrains of Galicia and Navarre, this article examines the rise of grassroots level actors or agents in the form of parents who have decided to contest the government’s low-intensity language policy models through various bottom-up efforts. The principal focus of this article is to examine how ideologies, language planning strategies, and practices of pro-Galician or Basque parents act as instruments of language ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 2000) leading to grassroots discourses of resistance. Through their individual as well as collective linguistic practices, as this article underscores, these parents have the potential to generate visible and invisible language policies on the ground, influencing their children’s language ecology. Drawing from ethnographic research tools, including observations from field sites, individual interviews, and focus groups with parents from both geopolitical domains, we investigate how these parents exercise their agency and become policymakers in their homes and the community. The endeavor is also to reveal the key challenges they come across while implementing these policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Low-intensity language policy
• Family language management
• Governmentality
• Galician
• Basque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Johnson (2013) for an extensive account on the CLP research paradigm.

2. Although the first references of Ikastolak can be traced in the early 20th century, their language activism received prominence in the 1960s (see Arrien, 1983 for a detailed historical account).

3. Since 2015, ETB3 has been available in Navarre. The data was collected before this policy change.

Additional information

Funding

Anik Nandi’s work is supported through a Juan de la Cierva Incorporation Grant (Ref. IJC2020-043318-I) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR, the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (JDCI20/21), and the Basque Government (IT1627-22).