Abstract
This study examines the role of new speaker parents who have made a conscious decision to bring up their children in Galician, a language which they themselves did not acquire in the home. Although intergenerational transmission has for long been considered a crucial part of linguistic vitality, new speakers bring complexity to this paradigm and in particular prompt questions about their role as parents and as potential agents of sociolinguistic change in the process of language revitalization. Through their individual as well as collective linguistic practices, new speaker parents have the potential to generate visible and/or invisible language planning on the ground, influencing their children’s language learning and creating future generations of speakers. As such, these parents, through their own linguistic behaviour, can play a potentially significant role in the revitalization and maintenance of Galician outside the school through their family language policies in the home. Drawing on two focus group discussions involving seven families in two of Galicia’s urban centres, Santiago de Compostela and Vigo, we investigate how these new speaker parents exercise their agency and become policy makers in their homes.
Highlights
While language policy has been conventionally studied as a macro-level phenomenon, researchers have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of micro-level policy (Baldauf 2006), investigating the complex relationship between policy at macro- and micro-levels
In this paper we examine how official language policies in contemporary Galicia are interpreted and negotiated by “new speaker” parents who have made a conscious decision to bring up their children in Galician, a language which they themselves did not acquire in the home
Our discussion in this paper has been set within this framework, with a focus on how social actors position themselves vis-à-vis the different discourses in circulation and as such opening up ideological spaces for the use or non-use of certain languages or linguistic varieties
Summary
While language policy has been conventionally studied as a macro-level phenomenon, researchers have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of micro-level policy (Baldauf 2006), investigating the complex relationship between policy at macro- and micro-levels (see McCarty 2011; Ricento 2015). The mothers in Armstrong’s study differ to the Galician parents at the centre of the current study, who as will be discussed in more detail below, had already made a conscious decision to adopt Galician as their main language and had in most cases displaced their first language, Spanish, altogether Their commitment to actively using the minoritized language and to creating new spaces for its use distinguishes them from the broader pool of “potential” new speakers of Galician who acquire the language through the education system but may not yet have taken a leap of faith and make Galician part of their new linguistic repertoire. These active new speakers, known locally as neofalantes (literally ‘neo speakers’), were brought up speaking Spanish in the home but at some stage in their lives (usually adolescence or early adulthood), made a conscious decision to adopt Galician language practices and in some cases, adopt an almost exclusively Galician language repertoire (O’Rourke and Ramallo 2013) These neofalantes are in many ways the product of Galicia’s bilingual educational policies described above. We examine the extent to which official language policy as described above, is contested, negotiated or reproduced by these parents through their own family language policies
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