New speaker parents as grassroots policy makers in contemporary Galicia: ideologies, management and practices

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.

Language Policy in Ukraine in the Context of European Integration

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Study of Everyday Language Practices of the Population of South Russian Multinational Region

“…Thus, a review of publications devoted to linguistic practices in a social environment where not only the native language of the native speaker is used, but also the main (state) one shows, on the one hand, the high relevance of this topic, and on the other, the lack of relevant information [7,9].…”

Agencia humana y ciudadanía sociolingüística en la Galicia contemporánea: ideologías, gestión y prácticas de revitalización lingüística

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