Linguistic diversity from within and without: Analysing educational policy in Galicia

Academic scholarship has largely treated migrant and autochthonous minority languages as separate issues. Many territories strive to protect a heritage language while at the same time accommodating languages which have arrived more recently with immigrant families. This presentation explores this situation in the context of Galicia, an autonomous community of Spain, whose school language policies designed to address these two kinds of linguistic diversity have emerged separately, through different historical processes.  It looks at how the ways in which languages are categorised and treated differently at the policy level is at odds with the lived experience in present-day multilingual classrooms. By critically analysing the status quo, inspiration is sought for designing policy from asset rather than deficit perspectives.