Abstract
A historically multilingual country, Spain is today legally divided into 17 autonomous communities and 2 autonomous cities. The 1978 Spanish Constitution stipulates that Castilian – i.e., Spanish – is the official language of the Spanish state and that all Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it. The Constitution also acknowledges Spain’s multilingual character and, accordingly, confers legislative powers to the autonomous communities – by means of their statutes of autonomy – among others, in the areas of language policy and education. Every autonomous community has implemented its statute in a different way: Catalonia is officially trilingual, whereas Galicia, Navarre, the Balearic Islands, the Basque Country, and the Valencian Community are officially bilingual. Hence have Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Occitan become also official in (most of) their respective territories. The rest of the autonomous communities are officially Spanish-monolingual, even though several among them host historical minority languages such as Asturian, Aragonese, Arabic, Tamazight, or Portuguese.
Language-in-education policies in Spain have been a contended area for centuries, especially in the six territories with more than one official language. This chapter describes briefly the sociolinguistic historical backgrounds of these autonomous communities, grouped in three language areas and focuses on contemporary dimensions of bilingual education. The paper chapter ends with a short reflection on bilingual education in Spain as a whole.
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Vila, F.X., Lasagabaster, D., Ramallo, F. (2016). Bilingual Education in the Autonomous Regions of Spain. In: Garcia, O., Lin, A., May, S. (eds) Bilingual and Multilingual Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02324-3_28-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02324-3_28-1
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