Having comparatively discussed the educational policies designed by the regional government in Galicia and the grassroots language planning initiative Plan As Rocas, and highlighted the underlying ideological motivations of each, I will now turn to ethnographic data collected during my time in the field that will illustrate the advantages and shortcomings of the Plan As Rocas, within a context of regional governance and high numbers of immigrants in the school system. I will draw on interview data as well as reflections from ethnographic fieldwork. Through a closer examination of the Plan As Rocas, and the reflections of students and teachers who have taken part in initiatives organised by the plan, this chapter will question whether cultural awareness and intercultural contact has been achieved and whether there has been a move away from notions of ‘parallel monolingualism’ (Heller, 1999) in favour of conceptualisations of language as a more fluid process. I will illustrate this by exploring whether the language practices of the immigrant community refute long standing notions that position language ‘mixing’ as a marker of deficiency (Wei, 2014; Woolard, 2004) and instead establish themselves as skilled actors within a multilingual and multicultural context.
5.4.1 Linguistic proximity: possible advantages
The following discussion will examine the linguistic proximity between Galician (one of the languages of As Rocas) and Kriolu and Portuguese (the languages of origin of the immigrant community). As discussed in chapter 3, Galician and Portuguese have historical connections; notably, the language spoken in the kingdoms of Galicia and Portugal in the 13th and 14th centuries is referred with as Galician-Portuguese. For further discussion of these linguistic links, see Chapter 3.6. The sociolinguistic parallels
between Cape Verde and Galicia are essential to understanding this case study.
Linguistic hierarchies have been long engrained in both Galician and Cape Verdean society. Furthermore, Kriolu, Portuguese and Galician derive from the same language family, sharing a degree of mutual intelligibility. These salient overlaps are focal points for the discussion of the Cape Verdean community in As Rocas.
An analysis of the interview data demonstrated that, according to many members of teaching staff, it is ‘easier’ for Cape Verdean students to learn Galician than it is for them to learn Spanish. These sentiments were also expressed by many Cape Verdean students, mainly because of the abundance of lexical items that are the same in Kriolu, Portuguese and Galician. Also, due to the similarities between Galician and Kriolu and Portuguese, some students made reference to preferring to speak Galician because of the emotional and affective connections they had with the languages of their country of origin. In example 5.1, Clara, a seventeen year old girl from Cape Verde, who had come to live in Galicia ten years previously, makes explicit reference to the linguistic similarities between Portuguese and Galician, demonstrating her awareness of the connection between the two languages. She explains that she ‘feels good’ (síntome ben) when she speaks Galician, because it reminds her of speaking Portuguese, a language which she feels an emotive connection to.
Example 5.1 - Feeling comfortable speaking Galician
E: que pensas do galego entón como: como idioma que che parece?
C: a mí paréceme unha boa lingua porque falo: gústame falalo E: [si
C: non] sei síntome ben falando galego
E: si sínteste ben e sínteste máis cómoda falando en galego que en castelán?
C: si porque á parte de que síntome falando como portugués sabes?
I: what do you think of the Galician language?
C: I think it’s a great language because I like speaking it I: yes?
C: I don’t know, I feel good when I speak Galician
I: you feel good? So you feel more comfortable speaking in Galician than in Spanish?
C: yes because I feel as if I’m speaking Portuguese, you know?
This could also be understood, in Bourdieu's terms, as an example of how habitus and field intersect (Bourdieu, 1993). As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.5, the choices that people make are shaped by the options that are available to them at that moment in time (field), but also by the socialisation that they have experienced over the course of their own personal trajectory (habitus). In this case, Clara's statement that she feels 'comfortable' speaking Galician is conditioned by her past experiences (habitus) in a Portuguese speaking country, but also influenced by her current context (field), where she acknowledges the communicative and integrative value of speaking Galician. It is in this way that habitus and field are connected:
On one side it is a relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus […]
On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction. Habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.127)
In example 5.2 we see Clara expanding on the previous comment where she discusses how speaking Galician makes her ‘feel good’. Not only does Clara prefer to speak in Galician because of emotional factors that remind her of speaking Portuguese, she also perceives Galician to have communicative advantages within the context of As Rocas where Galician is the primary language of most of the population.
Example 5.2 - Galician and Portuguese are similar
C: para poder comunicarse coa xente de aquí pero tamén en castelán pódese pero co galego xa é mellor no?
E: si e por que é mellor?
C: a ver pa os pa os caboverdianos xa / polo simple feito de falar portugués escoitar a xente falar portugués xa o galego e moi parecido
C: To be able to communicate with people who are from here, you can communicate in Spanish but Galician is better
E: Yes? And why is it better?
C: Well for Cape Verdeans because of the simple fact that they speak Portuguese and have heard people speaking Portuguese and Galician is very similar
Clara explains that Galician is the more advantageous of the two co-official languages in order to communicate with “people from here” (xente de aquí). Thus, Clara presents Galician as having more integrative value than Spanish. Clara demonstrates meta linguistic awareness in her acknowledgement that the similarities between Portuguese and Galician make it easier for her, as a speaker of Portuguese, to communicate with the local population in As Rocas. Nevertheless, Clara also demonstrates awareness of the value of Spanish within the bilingual Galician town of As Rocas, but stresses that, for her, Galician “is better” (é mellor). It could be argued that for Cape Verdeans, who are usually speakers of Portuguese, Galician is more accessible than Spanish, due to the similarities they perceive between Galician and Portuguese. Clara addresses this issue clearly, describing Galician as being “very similar” (moi parecido) to Portuguese and thus a logical starting point when learning the new languages of her new community.
Nevertheless, Clara expressing positive attitudes about Galician to me could be influenced by many factors. Firstly, she is a student in the school where the Plan As Rocas was developed, which has the promotion of Galician as one of its core elements.
It could be that Clara is trying to show me, the interviewer, and someone she might perceive as an authority figure, how her values align with those of the school, thus making her a ‘good’ student. Furthermore, throughout the interview, Claudia frequently mixed words from Galician and Spanish, so perhaps although she was referring to languages as separate countable entities (Galicia, Portuguese, Spanish, Kriolu), her daily practices were more hybrid.
As well as interviewing teachers in the two secondary schools in As Rocas, I had the opportunity to speak to a teacher who worked in a state funded community centre.
Jacinta was a middle aged Galician woman and a first language speaker of Galician who lived in the neighbouring town. It was an interesting opportunity for me to be able to interview somebody who worked with the Cape Verdean community but outside the official school context. Cape Verdean students attended Jacinta’s classes on an optional basis. While the teachers in the school worked in larger mixed groups, Jacinta worked in smaller groups and many of her classes only had Cape Verdean students in them. In this sense Jacinta had closer contact with the Cape Verdean students than some of the teachers in the school. Furthermore, IES Primavera was following the Plan As Rocas language planning model, and many of the teachers with whom I spoke were involved
in organising it. Interviewing Jacinta was a chance to speak to somebody who, although involved in educating the immigrant community, operated independently from the school and therefore was able to provide an opinion outside of the internal politics of the state run secondary schools.
The community centre where Jacinta taught provided general information services for immigrants as well as language classes and broad curriculum adult education. My first impressions of the centre were that it was a fairly limited initiative. Jacinta had one room in the community centre, and she only taught part time during the school year.
During the rest of the year the centre was used for various other community activities such as IT courses and the local radio station recording studios. The classroom in which Jacinta taught held about ten students, meaning the class sizes and the number of students availing of the courses was low. There were no learning materials permanently in the room, instead, Jacinta brought books and photocopied material that she distributed to the students each week.
Jacinta spoke to me about her experiences teaching both children and adult members of the Cape Verdean community (example 5.3). Jacinta emphasised that, in her experience, Cape Verdeans achieved better results in academic activities that were through the medium of Galician, than those done through Spanish. Jacinta credited this to the fact that Cape Verdeans were able to draw on their knowledge of Portuguese, which shares many lexical items with Galician. These commonalities, she believed, allowed Cape Verdean students to deduce the meaning of much vocabulary, and hence they achieved better results in Galician exercises than in Spanish ones.
Example 5.3 - Galician vocabulary
J: si: teñen moito vocabulario que o sacan es que tú: póñelles unha: un texto en