Located in the province of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), this study aims to identify and analyze the predictors of linguistic acculturation preferences of autochthonous high-school students toward their peers of Latin American descent. Autochthonous high-school students (N = 349) filled a questionnaire measuring linguistic acculturation and a series…

While the idea of a named language as a separate and discrete identity is a political and social construct, in the cases of Sardinian and Asturian doubts over their respective 'languageness' have real material consequences, particularly in relation to language policy decisions at the state level. The Asturian example highlights how its lack of…

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a small, semi-autonomous archipelago in the English Channel. Although it is a British Crown dependency and part of the British Isles, it has its own parliament and does not belong to the United Kingdom or the European Union. This unusual geopolitical situation means that the nation-state has little relevance. It is…

In recent years there has been a focus in language policy research on understanding how national policies are interpreted and negotiated by social actors on the ground. This paper looks at the interplay between government and grassroots initiatives to create Galician-speaking spaces in predominantly Spanish-speaking urban settings. While official…

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an "ethnic" call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented…

Since the end of the last century, more than 10% of students in Catalonia's schools are immigrants, mostly concentrated in areas of Catalonia where the population speaks Castilian in everyday life. Although these newcomers are educated in Catalan, the majority use diverse varieties of Spanish as their language of everyday communication. In the…

Monolingual speakers of a national language continue to be the ideal figures on which national identities and senses of community are built. Yet this longstanding equation between nation and language is being contested by other ideologies. Alternatives are emerging from such disparate social locations as the European Union, now advocating for…