Romanian migrant families in Castelló de la Plana (Spain)

Abstract

This article adopts the critical and ethnographic language policy approach (McCarty, 2011; Johnson and Ricento, 2013) to unveil the family language policy adopted by first-and second-generation Romanian parents in a diasporic context, Castelló de la Plana, the capital city of the Castelló province (Spain). The study focuses particularly on parents’ language ideologies and practices regarding the acquisition and use of Spanish, Catalan, and Romanian. The analysis of parental policies is pursued through 15 semi-directed interviews about life experiences produced in ethnographic research. By drawing on biographical narratives, I examine in detail how parents ground their position regarding language choices, transmission, or interruption of the home language and how multilingualism is perceived and valued by different generations. I conclude that first- and second-generation migrant parents mobilise different language ideologies in relation to the use of the heritage language and the translingual practices they deploy. I also report on the tensions migrant families experiment regarding languages in this neoliberal economic governmentality (Martín Rojo, 2019) and how language policy at the family level sometimes supports and reproduces the institutional discourses and hegemonic nation states’ policies and at other times challenges them.