“Too much effort for what it’s worth”: Catalan in the school choices of global middle classes

Abstract

This article explores the role of language in the school choices of what has been characterised by the literature as global middle class families established in Catalonia. More specifically, it focuses on the role of Catalan in the making of these choices. The analysis is based on empirical data from a broader multi-sited sociolinguistic ethnographic study on multilingualism in the internationalising processes of two elite schools in the Barcelona area. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with four mobile students of an international school in a town near Barcelona that implements the British curriculum, and it analyses their desire to avoid Catalan in their individual strategies of linguistic capital accumulation. It is argued that an instrumentalist vision of languages, informed by ideologies of authenticity and anonymity, contributes to the hierarchisation of learned and spoken languages. Decisions regarding the languages they learn and speak and their school choices reflect broader desires of social positionality. The minor role of Catalan in the translocalised lives of these students allows us to explore how locality and globalisation are intertwined in this social group in today’s Catalonia.

Keywords: language in education, school choices, Catalan in international education, institutional ethnography.