Effective Family Language Policies and Intergenerational Transmission of Minority Languages: Parental Language Governance in Indigenous and Diasporic Contexts

Abstract

This chapter examines the rise of grassroots level actors (i.e., parents) who play a significant role in interpreting and implementing top-down language policies on the ground in three Spanish-dominated bi(multi)lingual settings: Galicia and Navarre (Spain) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). This will be studied in relation to newspeaker parents who have made a conscious decision to bring up their children in either Galician or Basque, languages which they did not acquire through family transmission. Although intergenerational transmission has for long been considered a crucial part of language revitalisation discourses, newspeakers brought complexity to this paradigm prompting questions about their role as in-situ language ‘managers’. Through their individual as well as collective linguistic practices, these parents have the potential to generate visible and invisible language policies on the ground, influencing their descendants’ acquisition of minority languages. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork interviews, we investigate how these parents exercise their agency and become policymakers in their homes and in the community.