Abstract:

This ethnographic study analyses ideologies on multilingualism and attitudes toward cultural diversity in a rural Catalan school located in a semirural locality which is undergoing a series of changes linked to the dynamics of globalisation. Firstly, it describes the demolinguistic processes that are affecting a small school compromised with the teaching of and in Catalan at the turn of the century. Secondly, the study links these processes to the current linguistic and social order of the school by looking at both the local and global social values indexed by the languages that now circulate within the institution. Thirdly, it examines the ideologies on multilingualism of the educational agents involved in the schooling process (teachers, students, parents), and attempts to understand where the historically-informed institutional stance of the school comes from. Finally, it examines how the defence of the teaching in a minority language-only and the investment in depicting the school as a Catalan monolingual monocultural space is legitimised in a largely unexplored arena: rural Catalan schooling in the global era.

Author: Maria Sabate Dalmau