Contesting the Conventionalising of Castilian: The Role of Galician Parents as Counter-Elites

Abstract

Recent LPP research reveals how policy-makers endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalise minority languages and perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequality. This paper examines the Castilian-dominated Galician linguistic landscape, perceiving the rise of grassroots level actors or agents. These include teachers, parents, family members, language activists and other speakers of minority Galician who play a significant role in interpreting and implementing language policy on the ground. This study locates these individuals as ‘counter-elites’ (Higley 2010; Beard and Phakphian 2012), generally comprised of the educated Galician demographic, who if disillusioned with policy decisions of ruling state elites may develop alternative discourses of resistance to hegemonic ideologies. This analysis centres on Galician parents as counter-elite intermediaries, who implement individual language policy in diverse arenas and collective mobilisations including co-operative funded Galician medium schools. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork interviews, this paper demonstrates that in Galicia’s shrinking Galician speaker pool, counter-elite parents can play an important role in the language revitalisation process. The endeavour is to ascertain whether Galician counter-elite parents can restore intergenerational transmission and if their microcosmic interrogation of the dominant Castilian discourse could lead to bottom-up language policies.

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