The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education by Josep Soler & Lídia Gallego-Balsà

Author:Josep Soler & Lídia Gallego-Balsà
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030166779
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusions

Catalan universities represent a particular case of the use of a ‘medium-sized’ language (Vila and Bretxa 2013) in higher education, having what would seem to be sufficient historical, sociological, and political weight to ensure a comfortable presence of the language in the sphere of higher education. As Vila (2015, p. 5) explains, though, “medium-sized languages are extremely sensitive to the legal and political factors of their nation states”, and this certainly seems to be the case here, for what we have seen is how university language policy documents in Catalonia respond to the pressures from different types of agents, both macro and micro. As in other multilingual settings, in both northern and southern European countries, university language policy documents present a stance in favour of creating opportunities in which different languages each have their niche in their specific university contexts (Lindström and Sylvin 2014), a stance that indicates an official commitment to multilingualism (Cots et al. 2012). To the extent that it can shape both the circulating discourses in place and the interactional orders (Hult 2015), such an institutional stance is important, as it reflects each university’s official orientation, a stance that seems to emerge also in the presentation of universities’ linguistic realities online (Elliott et al. 2018). However, at the end of the day, we know that the actual practices of end-users of existing language policies may depend on a large number of factors (Spolsky 2004). Taken together, the accumulation of linguistic practices can tilt the balance towards the use of one language more than another, and languages of wider communication tend to function centripetally in multilingual encounters: the more multilingual a situation, the higher the chances that a language of wider communication will be used, something that nowadays favours English more and more (de Swaan 2001). Nevertheless, for the time being at least, it seems Catalan will continue to enjoy a relatively safe position at universities in Catalonia, but the politicisation of language issues through their linking to economic measures of public funding for universities would seem to mark a new development in connection to sociolinguistic matters in Catalan higher education, both in the short and the long term.

In Chapter 5, we will return to the analysis presented above and look further into the emerging key issues in the formal language policies of Catalan universities. Before that, though, let us turn in the next chapter to the lived experience of language policy, and look ethnographically at the implications of the internationalisation initiatives at a small university in Catalonia.

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