Linguistic attitudes in Aragon

Abstract

The study of the linguistic attitudes has been considered a key element when we pretend to guarantee the success of any proposal of treatment of the languages in the school. In spite of it, in the case of Aragon (Spain), where three languages are s p o ken along the terr i t o ry, the practical non-existence research in this way is only coherent with the lack of determination that the topic has been traditionally treaty. In this context, taking as a reference school children in Compulsory Secondary Education, our goal is twofold: 1) to describe the attitudes towards the languages in contact (Aragonese, Castilian-Spanish and Catalan), as well as the two foreign languages who are more present in the school curriculum (French and English), and 2) to analyze the incidence of some of the main factors that determine those attitudes. The heterogeneity among the linguistic areas in Aragon derived from our data, should take to a deep reflection about the future actions to undert a ke in the schools located in those that have been considered the classical linguistic Aragonese territories: the Aragonese speaking area, the Castilian-Spanish speaking area ant the Catalan speaking area.

English in Spain: Education, attitudes and native‐speakerism

“…However, around 5% of its population live in a narrow area bordering Catalonia in which Catalan has traditionally been the home language of its inhabitants and it is still widely spoken by the majority of them, albeit with very little appreciation of it in the public sphere. The results of that study showed that socio‐professional status did not affect attitudes towards Catalan, Spanish or even French but it did have a significant effect on attitudes towards English (Huguet & Lapresta, 2006), in the sense that higher status carried along more favourable attitudes to this language, thus highlighting the role of English as a social marker, supported and embraced by dominant socio‐economic elites, with the potential side effect of further increasing the divide between privileged and unprivileged elements in society.…”