Language Attitudes and Multilingual Education in Catalonia
Summary
Catalonia presents a distinctive multilingual landscape in which Catalan and Spanish coexist alongside immigrant and international languages. The regional education system has long favoured immersive and content-based approaches to promote Catalan proficiency while ensuring strong competence in Spanish and English. Attitudes towards these languages are shaped by historical, political and socio-economic factors, influencing identity, social cohesion and academic outcomes. Families, educators and policymakers negotiate the balance between language revitalisation and global competitiveness, seeking models that integrate language learning with subject instruction. Practical applications of this research span curriculum design, teacher training and community engagement, offering valuable insights for other multilingual contexts worldwide.
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Language Attitudes and Multilingual Education in Catalonia publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in language attitudes and multilingual education in catalonia across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Language attitudes: Individuals’ beliefs, feelings or predispositions towards a language or its speakers that influence behaviour and policy.
Implicit language attitudes: Automatic, often unconscious evaluations of a language revealed through indirect measures such as response times or non-verbal cues.
Explicit language attitudes: Consciously held evaluations of a language reported directly by individuals in surveys or interviews.
Code-switching: The alternation between two or more languages or dialects within a conversation or discourse.
Immersion programme: An educational approach in which a second or target language is used as the medium of instruction for various subjects to promote rapid language acquisition.
References
- Family Attitudes towards Multilingualism in Bilingual Education Programs and Their Relationship with Academic Performance. Behavioral Sciences (2023).
- Asymmetry and Directionality in Catalan–Spanish Contact: Intervocalic Fricatives in Barcelona and Valencia. Languages (2020).
- First language as a determinant of implicit and explicit language attitudes: Catalan/Spanish bilinguals’ general language attitudes and response to language choice in a COVID-19 vaccination advertisement. Folia Linguistica (2023).
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