Reverse intergenerational language transmission: children teaching a language to their parents

Abstract

Abstract
The Catalan sociolinguistic context has changed, especially since the arrival of people from around the world in the 1990s. Nowadays, some urban spaces of Barcelona are considered superdiverse. The native languages of the populations living in these contexts are usually transmitted within the family. However, the transmission of the Catalan language to children and teenagers is ensured in the school context, while Spanish is acquired by children, young people and adults especially in the social contexts in which this language is used as a lingua franca. The analysis of data from an ethnographic study carried out in a secondary school in Barcelona brings up new research topics: the activity of intergenerational language brokering and the activities which support the learning of Spanish as possible avenues for “reverse” intergenerational language transmission (from daughters and sons to parents). This could expand the concept of intergenerational language transmission to include the bidirectionality of transmission.
Keywords: reverse intergenerational transmission, language brokering, migration, superdiversity, Spanish.