The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education: Language Policy and Internationalisation in Catalonia

The Sociolinguistics
of Higher Education
Language Policy
and Internationalisation
in Catalonia
Josep Soler
Lídia Gallego-Balsà
The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education
“This timely book offers a compelling account of the tensions between interna-
tionalisation and national priorities in higher education – as seen through Catalan
language policies. Written by renowned experts in the field, it is a must read for
researchers, policy makers and anyone even remotely interested in the profound
sociolinguistic changes higher education systems across the world are grappling
with.”
—Anna Kristina Hultgren, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Applied
Linguistics, The Open University, UK
“Essential and stimulating reading for anyone studying the language impacts
of internationalisation in higher education institutions in non-anglophone and
minority language contexts. Through their critical, constructive and insight-
ful analyses of original data from a university in Catalonia, the authors show us
the tensions arising from the competition between Catalan, Spanish and English
amidst national and global goals, and weigh up the position of the Catalan lan-
guage and its prospects.”
—Peter Garrett, Emeritus Professor, School of English, Communication and
Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK
Josep Soler · Lídia Gallego-Balsà
The Sociolinguistics
of Higher Education
Language Policy and Internationalisation
in Catalonia
Josep Soler Lídia Gallego-Balsà
Department of English Department of English and Linguistics
Stockholm University University of Lleida
Stockholm, Sweden Lleida, Spain
ISBN 978-3-030-16676-2 ISBN 978-3-030-16677-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16677-9
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support received from the following

research projects:
a. “Internationalisation and Multilingualism” in Universities in Bilingual

Contexts: Catalonia, Basque Country, and Wales (Reference:
FFI2008-00585/FILO). Funding body: Spanish Ministry of Science
and Innovation.
b. “Towards a Plurilingual Perspective in Teaching English as a Lingua
Franca” at University (Reference: FFI2015-67769-P). Funding
body: Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
c. Cercle de Lingüística Aplicada. (Reference: 2017 SGR 1522).
Funding body: Catalan Agency for Management of University and
Research Grants.
We are also grateful for the support received from the Faculty of the
Humanities, Stockholm University (Ledande forskningsområde—
Andraspråk och tvåspråkighet).
For much collegial support and feedback at different stages of our
research, we would like to thank our colleagues at both the Department
of English at Stockholm University and the Department of English and
Applied Linguistics at the University of Lleida. In particular, we would
like to thank Prof. Josep M. Cots for his insightful feedback on the anal-
ysis of the ethnographic data, presented in Chapter 4 of this book.
v
vi Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Tim Curnow for his very detailed and sys-
tematic reading of our book and for both stylistic and content-related
help during the final stages of the writing of the monograph. We also
would like to thank the anonymous peer-reviewer for much useful feed-
back and comments; persistent shortcomings, of course, are only our
own.
Last but not least, we would like to thank our respective families for
their encouragement and support at a more personal level. Having to
juggle parenthood with academic writing is not always an easy task, and
it may frequently take a toll on partners and children equally. It is, how-
ever, highly rewarding once you make it to the finish line, but without
our families’ support, this would be all the more difficult. A big thank
you to them.
Contents
1 Introduction: Language Policy and the

Internationalisation of Higher Education in Catalonia 1
The Internationalisation of Higher Education from
a Language Policy Perspective: Methodological and Theoretical
Issues 4
Outline and Summary of the Volume 10
References 13
2 Language Policy, Internationalisation, and Multilingual

Higher Education: An Overview 17
The Internationalisation of Higher Education
and the ‘International’ University 18
Unpacking ‘Internationalisation’ 19
Sociolinguistic Studies of the Internationalisation of Higher
Education 24
Language Policy and Planning in Higher Education
and the Position of English 26
Multilingual Higher Education in Minority Language Settings 30
Conclusions 34
References 35
vii
viii Contents
3 Language Policy Regulations at Catalan Universities:

A Content Analysis of Their Narrative 43
The Catalan University System: Legal Framework, Language
Knowledge, and Language Use 44
A Content Analysis of Language Policy Documents at
Universities in Catalonia 50
Conclusions 64
References 65
4 Clashing Stances Towards Catalan: An Ethnographic

Study in a Small University in Catalonia 67
A Small Trilingual University: International Mobility
and Language Use 68
The Study: An Ethnography of Language Policy and
Internationalisation 69
Fieldwork and Data 70
Stance and Interactional Sociolinguistics 74
Analysis 75
First Things First: The Context for Stance-Taking 76
Catalan as a Legitimate Language 79
The Lecturers’ Stance: Between Teaching the Language
and Teaching the Content 80
The Responses of International Students: A Monolingual
Institution in a Bilingual Context 83
Good Students and Bad Students: The Stance
of the Catalan Language Instructors 89
Conclusions 91
Appendix: Transcription Conventions 92
References 93
5 The Internationalisation of Catalan Universities:

Multilevel Language Policies, Circulating Discourses,
and Stakeholders’ Stance-Taking 95
Introduction 96
The Institutional and the Individual Sides of the
Internationalisation of Higher Education: Taking Stock
of Some Initial Key Points 98
Formal Language Policies at Catalan Universities:
The Narrative of the Policy Documents 100
Contents ix
Stance-Taking: Juggling Different Languages and Ideological

Positions at Higher Education 107
Conclusions 112
References 113
6 Conclusions 119
The Stance of Stakeholders ‘On the Ground’ 121
The Stance Formulated by the Universities in Their Official
Language Policy Documents 123
Towards a Trilingual Classroom Decision-Making Policy
in Catalan Universities: The Fate of Catalan? 126
References 130
Index 131
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the undergraduate

level 2013–2016 (Source Based on data from Universitats i
Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya [2016]) 48
Fig. 3.2 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the graduate level
2013–2016 (Source Based on data from Universitats i Recerca,
Generalitat de Catalunya [2016]) 48
Fig. 3.3 Hits of keywords per university 54
Fig. 4.1 La vida de los Erasmus en C! by Christina and Nadine
(fieldwork materials, November 2010) 88
xi
List of Tables
Table 3.1 University language policy documents 50

Table 3.2 Ranks and frequencies of the keywords 52
Table 4.1 Data collection timeline 72
Table 4.2 Participants 73
Table 6.1 A hypothetical classroom language survey
for a course at the UC 128
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Language Policy

and the Internationalisation
of Higher Education in Catalonia
Abstract  In recent years, universities have increasingly attracted the

attention of applied linguists, allowing them to investigate important
sociolinguistic phenomena. From the point of view of language policy in
particular, universities are attractive research sites because of their dou-
ble-sided nature: on the one hand, they continue to be seen as flagship
national institutions, expected to be (and sometimes legally required to
be) locally relevant and nationally important research organisations; on
the other hand, they are increasingly asked to engage globally in the field
of education, making them players in an international market. These two
different aims produce a set of tensions, ambiguities, and anxieties that
universities and their primary stakeholders experience in terms that are
intensely sociolinguistic in nature, particularly where the universities are
located in non-anglophone contexts. Our book explores these tensions
and ambiguities, using empirical material from the Catalan higher educa-
tion system. This first introductory chapter succinctly presents the main
goals of the book and its general outline, together with an overview of
the central arguments to be developed in it.
Keywords  Language policy · Internationalisation · Higher education ·

Catalonia
© The Author(s) 2019 1

J. Soler and L. Gallego-Balsà, The Sociolinguistics of Higher
Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16677-9_1
2 J. SOLER AND L. GALLEGO-BALSÀ
Professor Molt bé, bon dia a tothom. Avui Well, good morning everyone.
parlarem del futur del sistema Today we will talk about the future
capitalista global of the global capitalist system
Int. St. A (she raises her hand) Por favor, señor (she raises her hand) Excuse me, sir
Professor ¿Sí? Yes?
Int St A (she stands up) ¿Perdone pero podría (she stands up) Excuse me, but could
dar la clase en castellano? you give the class in Spanish?
Int. St. B Sí … Yeah …
Professor Lo siento señorita pero no podrá ser. I’m sorry, miss, but it’s impossible.
La mayoría de estudiantes son cat- The majority of students are Catalan
alanes, o sea, que no creo que tenga and, I mean, I don’t think I need to
que cambiar de idioma switch to another language
Int. St. A Hay más de quince estudiantes There are over fifteen Erasmus stu-
Erasmus que no hablamos catalán y dents here who don’t speak Catalan
para usted no es un problema hablar and for you speaking Spanish is not
español a problem
Professor Mire, yo la entiendo perfectamente, Look, miss, I understand your
señorita, de verdad, perfectamente, point perfectly, I really do, but you
pero usted me tendría que entender should understand mine too. We
a mí también. Estamos en Cataluña are in Catalonia and here Catalan
y aquí el catalán es idioma oficial. Si is an official language. If you’d like
usted quiere hablar español, ¡se va a to speak Spanish, go to Madrid or
Madrid o se va a Sur América! South America!
Int. St. B O… Oh …
All: (noise) (noise)
L’Auberge espagnole (Klapisch 2002)
Bold type: Catalan; Roman type: Spanish; Italic type: inserted comments; Int. St. = interna-
tional student
The extract above, from the film L’Auberge espagnole by the filmmaker
Cédric Klapisch, captures a moment of linguistic tension in the context of
a university classroom in Catalonia. The movie is about Xavier, an under-
graduate economics student from Paris, who decides to embark on a year-
abroad study programme as an Erasmus student, and goes to Barcelona.
Beyond capturing the then growing youth phenomenon of the study-
abroad experience, this scene in particular is of relevance to the topic that
we want to address in this book, namely the sociolinguistics of higher
education. Prior to the dialogue that we read in the extract between one
of Xavier’s friends (also an exchange student) and their professor, we see
the same student together with Xavier and their group of friends talking
(in French) before class and wondering if there is anyone who will ask the
professor to switch to Spanish when delivering the subject.
1 INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE POLICY AND THE INTERNATIONALISATION … 3
As groups of foreign students began to populate university classrooms

in Catalonia in larger numbers from the turn of the century onwards, this
type of scene became more and more familiar to both university teach-
ers and local students alike. It is something that preoccupied university
stakeholders then, and that continues to be an issue of concern now, as
we shall see in the pages of this book. While it is dramatized and therefore
exaggerates the debate, the scene succinctly captures a moment in the
sociolinguistic life of Catalan universities, encapsulating many of the issues
that we wish to investigate in our volume. These issues are as follows:
1. In a context of increasing internationalisation, how do key stake-

holders ‘on the ground’ at universities (teachers, students, and
administrative staff) respond to their changing sociolinguis-
tic environments and to the language policy documents of their
universities?
2. What major themes emerge from officially formulated policy docu-
ments; that is, what stance do universities present in their regulat-
ing documents?
3. What is the fate of languages like Catalan, which has a relatively
solid presence at universities in Catalonia, in a context of increased
coexistence with other major languages such as English, but also
Spanish?
In the modern world, higher education has become a key site for
exploring compelling issues of a sociolinguistic or applied linguistic
nature. One of the main reasons for investigating universities from a
sociolinguistic angle is that, while they are key state (i.e. national) insti-
tutions, universities are also increasingly portrayed as internationally rel-
evant players in a global educational market (Hultgren et al. 2014). As a
result, many higher education institutions today are pervaded by a range
of different discourses, which range between the nationalising and the
globalising poles (Soler and Vihman 2018). This interplay of diverse,
sometimes opposed, discourses frequently results in important socio-
linguistic tensions, ambiguities, dilemmas, and expectations, and these
can crystallise in the formulation of specific language policy documents
authored by university councils or other relevant authorities (Källkvist
and Hult 2016) that are intended to have an impact on the actual lan-
guage practices of speakers within the context in which they operate.
This book explores in some detail how Catalan universities respond

to the challenge of becoming more international and global in nature,
while remaining very much locally grounded and nationally relevant—
something that is, of course, not exclusive to universities in Catalonia (Vila
and Bretxa 2015). What makes Catalan universities a particular case, com-
pared to many other universities in non-anglophone countries, is that uni-
versities in Catalonia already present a bilingual setting, with both Catalan
and Spanish as prominent working languages (that is, languages of teach-
ing and learning, of research, and of administration), and with English
gaining increasingly in importance (Pons 2015). This is a situation that
Catalan universities share with other higher education institutions in offi-
cially bilingual territories, for example those in the Basque Country (Doiz
et al. 2013) or some universities in Finland (Lindström and Sylvin 2014).
The general perspective that we offer in the first half of the book,
which is based on a document analysis of university language policies, is
combined in the second half with a more situated, qualitative, and eth-
nographic account of the specific situation at one public university in
Catalonia, with data collected through participant observation of class-
room practices and institutional events, focus-group discussion sessions,
and in-depth interviews, while also taking into account the university’s
web page and other university materials. This more situated perspective
allows us to present the different positions taken by a number of relevant
stakeholders at the university (teachers, administration staff, and interna-
tional students); in our analysis, we aim to show how the positions that
these stakeholders take are discursively shaped, and how their positions
are associated with particular vested interests. Before summarising the
key points of our analysis and providing an outline of the volume, in this
first chapter we situate the book with respect to current scholarly dis-
cussions around language issues in the context of higher education and
trends in internationalisation, where language, and particularly matters of
language policy, are seen as key sites of struggle, anxiety, and ambiguity.

from a Language Policy Perspective: Methodological
and Theoretical Issues
As mentioned above, universities today are under more and more pres-
sure from seemingly opposed discursive poles, the ‘nationalising’ and
the ‘globalising’ (Soler and Vihman 2018). In the last few years, it has
become very clear that this can easily lead to a number of paradoxes and
ambiguities that are played out in the terrain of language (cf. Haberland
and Mortensen 2012; Cots et al. 2012; Liddicoat 2016). To put the
issue as briefly as possible, at the same time as they are attempting to
strengthen their international profile, universities are being portrayed
as key national flagships, assets of the nation-state that should be mak-
ing a key contribution to the welfare and economy of the nation. As a
result, sociolinguistically speaking, different languages in the university
are positioned in ways that conflict, with a clash between languages of
wider communication (most frequently English) and national or local
languages (Hultgren et al. 2014). This may be one of the reasons that
most recent research on internationalisation comes from contexts outside
anglophone countries, where the discourses are more easily observed (cf.
Hultgren et al. 2014; Vila and Bretxa 2015).
However, this does not mean that higher education and the ‘knowl-
edge industries’ have attracted the interest of sociolinguists only recently
(see e.g. Ammon 2001), nor that universities in anglophone countries
have remained exempted from critical analysis. Writing in the early
1990s, Fairclough had already noted: “Institutions of higher education
come increasingly to operate (under government pressure) as if they
were ordinary businesses competing to sell their products to consumers”
(Fairclough 1993, p. 143). More recently, Holborow (2015) has made
a contribution to this debate by providing empirical data from Ireland,
showing how the discourse of ‘the university as an enterprise’ is mobi-
lised under neoliberal frameworks to hide a harsh economic reality of
budget cuts and reduced funding.
With all this in mind, one key question that we do need to ask our-
selves, however, is: Why this now? That is, why have universities recently
become such a rich site for sociolinguists to look at in more detail?
Holborow’s (2015) analysis provides some indications here, flagging the
centrality of the ways in which economic measures are affecting univer-
sity structures. Rhoades and Slaughter (2004), from a US perspective,
label the marketisation of higher education as ‘academic capitalism’:
the act of developing, marketing, and selling products as a basic source
of income. This can, of course, have sociolinguistic consequences. For
example, Piller and Cho (2013), analysing Korean higher education, are
able to document how the framework of neoliberalism and its ideological
basis act as support for an implicit language policy that leads to explicit
language policy measures, namely the restructuring of the medium of
instruction of one institution into English-only with the goal of climbing

up the popularised world university rankings. The consequences of this
measure were psychologically and emotionally drastic for the members
of the institution, including a perception that there was strong pressure
to teach and learn in a language in which university members may have
been less academically proficient (Piller and Cho 2013, p. 25). A point
arising from this, then, is that it would appear to be English and its role
in contemporary higher education, together with its coexistence with
national languages, that is key to the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic
debates outlined above.
Our goal in this monograph is to contribute to such debates from the
perspective of Catalan higher education, exploring the language-related
tensions and ambiguities that a number of key stakeholders are currently
experiencing at universities in Catalonia. To do this, we tackle the topic
from the angle of recent discursive and ethnographic approaches to lan-
guage policy (Barakos and Unger 2016; Canagarajah 2006; Johnson
2009). Such approaches seem particularly well-suited to our goals as,
within this framework, the aim is to understand how different actors
position themselves vis-à-vis prevailing discourses about language in a
given context, and how ideological spaces are fostered or hindered for
different languages in particular social constellations within the language
policy cycle of creation, implementation, appropriation, adaptation, and
resistance (Canagarajah 2006). To explain why such a framework can
illuminate the issues we wish to highlight from the context of Catalan
higher education and its internationalisation trends, we will briefly pro-
vide more details about these discursive and ethnographic perspectives
on language policy analysis.
This ‘new wave’ of language policy and planning studies distinguishes
itself by employing ethnographic and discourse-analytic approaches
(see e.g. Barakos and Unger 2016; Blommaert et al. 2009; Hult 2010;
McCarty 2011; Johnson and Ricento 2013). The ethnography of lan-
guage policy (Johnson 2009), sometimes referred to as New Language
Policy Studies, understands “language policy not as a disembodied text
but as situated sociocultural processes” (McCarty 2011, p. 335). Key
to this new strand of scholarship in language policy and planning is the
idea that language policy is a multilayered phenomenon (Halonen et al.
2015), something that social actors constantly recreate through com-
plex discursive interactions (Barakos and Unger 2016, p. 1). This line of
research draws, at least implicitly, on two main ideas: firstly, the idea of
language governmentality (Pennycook 2006), and secondly, the idea of

policy as discourse (Ball 1993), where the latter is understood as a com-
plex of interactions, productions, and interrelationships within sites of
competing power struggles. Language governmentality—how language
use, thought, and action are regulated, and how decisions about lan-
guages in institutional settings are managed (Pennycook 2006, p. 65)—
provides a basis for a discursively oriented view of language policy.
Language governmentality incorporates Foucault’s idea of gov-
ernmentality, a modality of power that seeks to govern every aspect
of the life of an individual or an entire population (Foucault 1980).
Incorporating both the macro-level (e.g. governmental action) and the
micro-level (e.g. observed interaction) of social life, governmentality
highlights the ways in which people are governed and helps to ques-
tion those ways in a reflective manner (see Dean 1999; Inda 2005). The
notion of governmentality has been key in critical language policy stud-
ies (e.g. Tollefson 2006), which in turn has paved the way towards the
renewed discursive orientations in language policy research. In short, the
suggestion is to move away from the focus on official language policies,
laws, and regulatory texts, paying attention instead to locally-grounded
discourses and practices. Pennycook (2006) goes even further and sug-
gests that such a take on language policy also underlines the need to
deconstruct preconceived ontologies such as language, policy, mother
tongue, and so on, to question concepts that are taken for granted, i.e.
unquestioned, in more ‘traditional’ language policy research.
The main motivation for current multilayered frameworks of lan-
guage policy analysis is primarily the need to address the problematic
gap between the traditionally conceived macro and micro levels of soci-
ety (Ricento and Hornberger 1996). Typically, in ethnographic and dis-
course approaches to language policy, the goal is to find connections
between critical discourse studies (focused on structure), interactional
studies (focused on agency), and studies of practices and language atti-
tudes ‘on the ground’ (focused on the interplay between structure and
agency). One of the strengths of the ethnography of language policy is
its ability to show how ideological spaces for the protection and devel-
opment of languages can be either fostered or hindered, and under what
societal conditions this happens (Hornberger and Johnson 2007). The
method has the merit of emphasising the power of ideological constructs
in a given language policy setting. By understanding how discourses cir-
culate in the language policy and planning cycle (Canagarajah 2006),
researchers can demonstrate how broader-level discourses on language

policies are created and are then interpreted and appropriated or resisted
locally in situated encounters. Using the ethnography of language policy,
scholars have the ability to not only critically describe and analyse a par-
ticular setting, but are also empowered to bring about meaningful social
change ‘on the ground’ (Johnson 2009; McCarty 2015).
Our approach in this book, then, is strongly informed by an ethno-
graphic understanding of how language operates in society. Particularly
in Chapter 4, it will become clear that our analysis adopts the perspective
of linguistic ethnography which, as its name suggests, is an interdiscipli-
nary combination of ethnography and linguistics (Creese 2008). This
assumes that language and social life are intertwined and mutually consti-
tutive, and that a close analysis of linguistic practices in everyday interac-
tions can inform researchers about the cultural and social patterns in the
human process of producing meaning (Rampton et al. 2004). The bene-
fit of combining ethnography and linguistics is that ethnography focuses
on social phenomena and provides linguistics with knowledge of the sit-
uational context in which interactions occur (which may not be explic-
itly articulated), and offers linguistics “a non-deterministic perspective
on the data” (Creese 2008, p. 233)—that is, it avoids making premature
assumptions between parallel cases and prescribing the interpretation
of the data, since it is interested not only in sociocultural patterns but
also in their particularities. Linguistics, in its turn, supports ethnography
by offering a discourse-analytical framework that permits “isolating and
identifying linguistic and discursive structures” by means of an “authori-
tative analysis of language use not typically available through participant
observation and the taking of fieldnotes”, two traditional techniques
for data collection in ethnography (Creese 2008, p. 233). Linguistic
ethnography seeks to study people in their natural contexts in order to
capture how they perceive and construct their ordinary social world,
without imposing meaning from an external perspective (Hammersley
and Atkinson 2007). This leads to the integration of both emic and etic
perspectives—the perspective of the insiders in the community being
researched together with that of the researcher—with the ultimate aim of
relating particular everyday interactions to the broader social and cultural
context (Blommaert and Jie 2010).
The use of ethnographic research methods contributes to understand-
ing the language practices of a specific community holistically. According
to Kamwangamalu (2011), overt and covert language policies may affect
the language practices of the target community, and ethnography can

provide insights at the grass-roots level to enable a better understanding
of the role of language in the lives of people who are directly affected.
Ultimately, ethnographic research can provide feedback to those devel-
oping language policy about issues such as the target community’s atti-
tudes towards the languages for which planning is being made, or the
meaning that language has for the identity of the community being
researched.
Applying ethnographic methods to the study of language policy
is not, however, without its issues, particularly if one loses sight of the
importance of the performative nature of language and of socialisation
trajectories. With that in mind, Pérez-Milans (2018) has called for more
trajectory-based ethnographic analyses of language policy in action,
investigating the self-reflexive strategies and socialisation trajectories of
social actors. Similarly, Saarinen (2017, p. 557) states that “while dichot-
omies such as macro–micro, discourses–practices, structures–agents,
ideals–realities are necessary in making policy issues visible and under-
standable, they also tend to (over-)simplify the multi-sited issues they
represent”; a key challenge, therefore, is to overcome these dichotomies
and reflect, in the analysis, on these concepts.
To overcome the task of tracing the connection between different
scales and ordered realities, policy scholars are increasingly employ-
ing discourse-analytic frameworks such as nexus analysis, because it has
a well-delineated structure but also a certain degree of flexibility that
allows for analytical manoeuvring (see Hult 2010, 2015). Considering
the different scales and actors involved in social actions, a discourse
approach to language policy can help us distinguish the different layers
of reality and bridge the connections between them. One can examine
the position of different languages in policy documents and the rela-
tionships between them, and follow this with an inquiry into how such
documents are perceived and experienced by individual speakers in daily
interactions. One can elicit explicit perceptions about such policy docu-
ments in interviews, combining this with observations of real-life interac-
tions that can provide more implicit and indirect understandings of the
policies in place. In the current volume, we develop an analysis that is
structured precisely in this way, combining a detailed document analysis
of university language policies with data from direct observation of prac-
tices and in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with key stake-
holders (teaching staff, administrative staff, and students).
Outline and Summary of the Volume

Chapter 2 provides a state-of-the-art overview of the topic of language
policy as it relates to the internationalisation of higher education in mul-
tilingual universities. Following up on the threads already introduced in
Chapter 1, we will take stock of what has been written on sociolinguistic
matters in the context of higher education. In the chapter, we engage
in some detail with two of the main concepts at the core of the present
volume: the internationalisation of higher education, on the one hand,
and language policy studies in university settings, on the other. We first
explore the ambiguous nature of the term ‘internationalisation’, and
the impact of this in current discussions in the field. We then look at
the topic of language policy in higher education, and in doing this we
explicit attempt to expand our point of view beyond European-centred
studies. Doing this allows us to critically examine frequently discussed
topics, in particular the hypothetical existence of a north–south divide
in European higher education (Dimova et al. 2015); in Chapter 2, we
problematise such a divide, normally considered to be between an inter-
nationalised north and a non-internationalised south. Finally, Chapter 2
also examines those studies which have been conducted in multilingual
higher education systems in minority language settings.
After this general contextualisation of language issues at the interna-
tional university, Chapter 3 begins to hone in on the key topic of the
book, language policy and planning at Catalan universities. The chapter
provides an overview of the major themes and ideas around the interna-
tionalisation of higher education and the role of language in it, as they
are depicted in the language policy documents of eight major universities
in Catalonia. Known generally as plans de llengües (‘plans for languages’),
these documents have increasingly been drafted and adopted by univer-
sity councils across Catalonia in order to codify an institutional stance
on the status and use of the different languages at play in each univer-
sity. Even though documents from each university are shaped in a specific
way and each institution organises the information in a particular man-
ner, there is a high level of intertextuality across the different documents
(Johnson 2015), in that the same key ideas appear in all of them, and
there are many similarities. To begin with, these official language policy
and planning documents in Catalan universities are all rather descriptive
in nature. They acknowledge the legal framework of Catalonia—the lan-
guage policy laws—and take this framework as their starting point. This
means that the documents give a special status to Catalan, legally con-
sidered as the official and ‘own’ language (llengua pròpia) of the region,
followed by Spanish, also an official language in Catalonia. The docu-
ments explicitly mention the key role of English in contemporary higher
education settings, but they emphasise at the same time the need to fos-
ter multilingualism and to increase the knowledge of languages other
than English among the university community. In general terms, these
language policy documents of the Catalan universities tend to empha-
sise that a good level of competence in different languages is important
for students, teachers, and administrators alike, demonstrating that the
debate around language(s) in higher education is seen primarily in terms
of a problem of linguistic competence. This is something that we read
as potentially specific to the Catalan case that we present here, although
when it comes to the English language in particular, we conjecture that
this type of discourse may also be present in other non-anglophone areas
where English has made fewer inroads into general society (e.g. in south-
ern and south-eastern Europe).
As we know, however, one thing is what is stated in policy
documents—reflecting the official or institutional stance of a university—
and the other is what happens in reality—speakers’ practices and their
conceptualisations of formal policies. In line with the framework of the
ethnography of language policy outlined above, Chapter 4 presents
a case study of a single Catalan university. The data were ethnographi-
cally collected between 2009 and 2011, as part of a broader multi-sited
ethnographic project which aimed to examine ambiguities and tensions
between internationalisation and language policies in universities in three
bilingual contexts (Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Wales). In a
bilingual context such as Catalonia, which is immersed in the process of
reversing language shift, the introduction of multilingual policies aimed
at making Catalan language revitalisation compatible with the promotion
of international languages such as Spanish and English is a highly sen-
sitive issue. Speakers of minority languages can feel pressured by dom-
inating lingua francas (such as Spanish or English), even though these
may facilitate communication in linguistically heterogeneous contexts,
and may reassert their right to use their own language. In parallel with
individual speakers reasserting their own language, universities are also
obliged to safeguard the cultural identity of their territory, while at the
same time being perceived as spaces for the social and economic promo-
tion of the territory. Chapter 4 adopts an emic perspective to examine
how the language policies which regulate the languages at this particular
higher education institution in Catalonia are interpreted by three differ-
ent sets of actors: international students, administrative staff, and teach-
ing staff. The data include individual and group interviews, participant
observation of classroom practices and other events organised by the
university to welcome international students, and also materials collected
during the observations. The analysis is developed from a discourse-ana-
lytical perspective, and focuses on how individuals construct their stance
in interaction (Du Bois 2007; Jaffe 2009) towards the language policies
at the institution.
Taking account of the analyses presented in Chapters 3–5 explores
more deeply the key issues which emerge. In summary, as will become
apparent, we argue that regulating languages and assigning specific roles
to those languages in the context of a small university like the one we
analyse in Catalonia creates inclusions as well as exclusions, and it is
important to see the effects that this has on people and what the con-
sequences are. The language policies discussed in Chapter 3 and the
qualitative ethnographic data from the case study presented in Chapter 4
suggest that further reflection is needed around the language policies at
Catalan universities when it comes to promoting Catalan and protecting
it from being excluded as a language of instruction while at the same
time ensuring that everyone feel linguistically and academically included.
Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the volume with a summary of the main
points touched upon in the study, indicating potential gaps that may still
exist and pointing to areas for further research. In the chapter, we sum-
marise the three positions in connection to the Catalan language taken
by key stakeholders in the university context (administrators, teaching
staff, and international students). We reflect further on the ambiguity of
these positions and connect them to the discourses emerging from the
set of language policy documents analysed in the volume. We conclude
with our views in relation to the fate of Catalan in higher education vis-
à-vis Spanish and English, and suggest some ways of meaningfully inte-
grating all three languages in teaching.
Looking beyond the context of Catalonia, language policy is one of
the tools that higher education institutions employ in order to grapple
with anxieties and ambiguities of the type described in this volume. In
line with the discursive turn in language policy and planning studies,
we contend that beyond purely descriptive documents, language poli-
cies are better understood as cultural artefacts aimed at regimenting and
governing linguistic practices in a given context. Key questions that need

to be uncovered, then, have to do with issues of legitimacy, of differ-
ence, and of (in)equality, that is, of who gets to define who has access to
which social spaces where discursive practices and resources are distrib-
uted, awarded value, or contested. In our view, universities in Catalonia
are particularly fruitful sites for insightful analyses of this type. Catalonia
has long been considered a rich sociolinguistic laboratory, with Catalan
challenging the position traditionally associated with many minority lan-
guages in Europe and beyond. After more than three decades of offi-
cial language policies promoting and developing the language in key
domains, particularly in the field of education, it is widely accepted that
Catalan now enjoys a safer position within Catalonia’s sociolinguistic
ecosystem than it had at the end of the dictatorship in 1975. However,
discourses presenting Catalan as a language in a minoritised position
have not disappeared completely; on the contrary, they can still be mobi-
lised by important stakeholders, including university administrators
and teaching staff, as we show in the volume. Against the background
of the internationalisation of higher education, then, our study delves
deeper into what discourses are mobilised within the university context
in Catalonia, showing how ideas about ‘the internationalised university’
are grounded locally within specific universities, and showing the conse-
quences that the discursive struggle has on the actual ability of speakers
to access certain social spaces and valuable resources.
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CHAPTER 2
Language Policy, Internationalisation,

and Multilingual Higher Education:
An Overview
Abstract  The term ‘internationalisation’ is fraught with different mean-

ings and ambiguities. As such, when applied to the university domain,
it may end up obscuring, rather than illuminating, the major issues cur-
rently facing higher education around the world. Sociolinguistic stud-
ies of higher education, for their part, have focused on language policy
as a site of struggle and tension. In non-anglophone contexts, it seems
that the introduction of English is both linked to the internationalisation
efforts of institutions and also plays a vital part in many of the present
discussions and debates around the sustainability of linguistically diverse
higher education systems, particularly in situations where a minority lan-
guage has managed to attain a relatively solid presence within the uni-
versity domain. We provide an overview of these issues in this chapter,
starting with a discussion about what the concept of the international-
isation of higher education might mean, and then considering some of
the key themes emerging from recent sociolinguistic studies of higher
education.
Keywords  Higher education · Internationalisation · The ‘international’

university · Language policy · Multilingualism · English · Minority
languages


and the ‘International’ University
The term ‘internationalisation’, applied to the domain of higher edu-

cation, has become increasingly problematic and ambiguous in nature.
Indeed at times, the degree of internationalisation of a university is
conceived of as depending merely on the accumulation of international
staff, international students, and international partnerships, and the
introduction of programmes taught in English. This can be observed,
for example, in popular rankings showing which universities around
the world are ‘the most international’, such as are found in the Times
Higher Education rankings (Bothwell 2017). These types of under-
standings of internationalisation can also be seen in a 2013 survey of
the International Association of Universities, which found that outgoing
student mobility opportunities and international research collaboration
were by far the first two priorities for internationalisation at European
universities (Egron-Polak and Hudson 2014). The three editions of the
EAIE Barometer (Sandström and Hudson 2018) point in the same direc-
tion, showing that student mobility was and still is perceived as a cen-
tral feature of the internationalisation of higher education in European
universities.
However, this way of understanding an institution’s degree of inter-
nationalisation is partial and biased. In fact, Teekens (2004) argues that
universities face their main challenges at home. Indeed, past research has
already highlighted that there are several points that institutions engag-
ing in internationalising activities need to reflect on more deeply, beyond
simply considering the numbers of international staff and students. These
include, among others, the development of intercultural awareness,
engagement, and reciprocal sensitivity among home and international
students (Ujitani and Volet 2008; Spiro 2014; Pitts and Brooks 2017);
the internationalisation of the university curriculum (Leask 2015); the
adaptation of the teaching practices of lecturers in internationalised
universities (Robson and Turner 2007); the stance of faculty members
towards internationalisation (Dewey and Duff 2009); and the language
policies of the educational institution and the ways in which it is multilin-
gual (Doiz et al. 2013, 2014).
The last of these challenges is central to the analysis in our volume,
and we will elaborate on it further in the following section. The issue
of multilingualism within the international university is actually highly
complex. While the idea that ‘the more languages spoken at a university,
2 LANGUAGE POLICY, INTERNATIONALISATION, AND MULTILINGUAL … 19
the more international it is’ may seem logical for some, others consider
that teaching at an international university should be offered solely
in one global language, such as English. In the context of the Basque
Country, for example, Spanish and Basque are local official languages,
but the presence of English as medium of instruction is growing. Doiz
et al. (2014) shed light on the complexity involved here by investigating
the perceptions that the university community hold of the term ‘interna-
tional university’ and of interactions between the university and the local
language and culture. They focus on the effects of English on the minor-
ity language, Basque, and show that different members of the university
community perceive the presence of different languages and cultures
differently in their conceptualisations of an international university. In
particular, when it comes to Basque, teachers and international students
manifest a positive attitude towards it, whereas local students and admin-
istrative staff present a more reluctant attitude. The authors argue that
for university programmes to become relevant to students’ cultures and
their needs, they need to engage with the historical, social, economic,
and political concerns that constitute the everyday reality of the students.
They add as well that students who have been educated in such a system
will have a more open attitude to other cultures and languages, which
is one of the aims of the development of intercultural competence. In
a similar vein, Cots et al. (2016) study the attitude of home and inter-
national students towards the multilingual university by looking at the
advantages and disadvantages that they see in such an institution. The
results from Catalonia, Wales, and the Basque Country show two differ-
ent views, depending on whether English is the main or only language of
instruction, and also on how students perceive the status of the minority
language. Their study shows that students’ attitudes can only be under-
stood by realising that the specific sociolinguistic context plays a role in
the way that the students perceive the process of internationalisation in
already multilingual universities. We will return to these cases and delve
into them more deeply below. For now, let us turn to exploring the
potential meanings that the term ‘internationalisation’ might have.
Unpacking ‘Internationalisation’
Most scholars agree that the meaning of ‘internationalisation’ varies sig-
nificantly depending on the perspectives of stakeholders and the contexts
and characteristics of each particular university. Knight (2013) holds that
‘internationalisation’ should be understood as a process whose definition
needs to be generic enough to apply to different countries, cultures, and

education systems, while at the same time it needs to avoid becoming
a tool to standardise or homogenise the process around the world. She
states that the purpose, benefits, outcomes, actors, activities, and stake-
holders of internationalisation vary enormously across institutions. In
an earlier work, Knight (2004) proposes the following non-prescriptive
definition of internationalisation, which focuses on the objectives and
functions of education: “the process of integrating an international,
intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions (primarily
teaching/learning, research, service) or delivery of higher education”.
She adds that this definition applies at all levels, from the local level of
educational institutions to the global levels of international bodies.
Montgomery (2008) argues that an integral aim of international uni-
versities is the development of intercultural competence, which involves
reconciling both local and international elements. Intercultural compe-
tence then becomes a target not only for those who enrol in interna-
tional mobility programmes, but for all. ‘Internationalisation at home’
is defined by Beelen and Jones (2015, p. 69) as “the purposeful inte-
gration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and
informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environ-
ments”. In other words, it emphasises that university curricula should
intentionally include intercultural and international aspects, and that
these should be there for a purpose and not simply added at random.
Internationalisation at home applies to all students, not only to those
studying abroad, and by referring to “domestic learning environments”,
the authors wish to include not only the formal learning contexts of the
university but also other contexts that offer opportunities for interna-
tional and intercultural learning in the local community. However, apply-
ing these theoretical aspects to the daily practice of higher education
institutions is not a simple matter.
Jones and Reiffenrath (2018) highlight ten key features for think-
ing strategically about internationalisation at home. These features, the
authors propose, can be summed up as follows:
• offering students global perspectives within their own programmes,

including by ensuring diverse student cohorts (with both interna-
tional/exchange students and home students from minority ethnic
backgrounds) in teaching and learning activities
• making elements of internationalisation emerge systematically in the

compulsory curriculum
• developing international and intercultural perspectives through
internationalised learning outcomes in the formal curriculum
• designing informal activities parallel to the curriculum that support
an approach to internationalisation at home (language tandems,
intercultural communication workshops, etc.)
• managing cultural diversity purposefully as a classroom resource,
integrating the experiences and knowledge of both mobility stu-
dents and home students from diverse backgrounds
• motivating students to see ‘the intercultural’ and ‘the international’
by encouraging them to participate in service learning and excur-
sions, or by having community members visit classes
• involving administrative staff as well as academics and students
• thinking of internationalisation as something independent from
language: the incorporation of new perspectives and consideration
of global contexts can be delivered either in English or in the local
language
• including virtual mobility and collaborations with partner universi-
ties online
• fostering purposeful engagement among students from diverse
backgrounds, both domestic and international: successful interna-
tionalisation at home does not depend merely on the presence of
international students.
All in all, the approach to internationalisation at home proposed by

Jones and Reiffenrath (2018) presents intercultural and international
development as an important pillar of a university, and employs a univer-
sity’s own domestic cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity as a resource.
The participation of university members in activities both inside and out-
side the institution which expand their global awareness is a matter of
course rather than a matter of choice.
Along similar lines, Leask (2015) argues that domestic cultural diver-
sity is a key resource for developing intercultural awareness, skills, and
knowledge through peer interaction. However, if poorly managed, it can
lead to the reinforcement of prejudices, increased tension, and frustra-
tion. To avoid that, the internationalisation of the curriculum needs to
be carefully planned by incorporating content that includes intercultural
and international aspects of the subject matter, and which is informed

by research that crosses national and cultural boundaries. Based on her
previous work, Leask defines the internationalisation of the curricu-
lum as “the incorporation of international, intercultural, and/or global
dimensions into the content of the curriculum as well as the learning
outcomes, assessment tasks, teaching methods, and support services of a
program of study” (Leask 2015, p. 9). Having international students or
home students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds present
in the classroom is frequently misinterpreted as being enough, but it is
not sufficient to ensure the internationalisation of the curriculum. It is
also the case that good teaching practices understand that language and
culture are a prism through which knowledge is constructed, and that
a particular language and culture may not be shared by the teacher and
the students. Leask (2015) thus proposes six principles of good practice
for teaching across cultures that can guide those teachers who seek to
use diversity as a tool to internationalise the curriculum. These princi-
ples, which Leask and Carroll (2013) elaborate in detail, are that good
teaching
• focuses on students as learners

• respects and adjusts for diversity
• provides context-specific information and support
• enables meaningful intercultural dialogue and engagement
• is adaptable, flexible and responsive to evidence
• prepares students for life in a globalised world.
Diversity, then, is seen as central to internationalisation. However,

from a critical perspective, diversity is a value-laden concept requir-
ing greater interrogation, particularly in university contexts (Ahmed
2012). Leong (2013) has argued that diversity can be of strategic value
to organisations such as universities, in that it can appear as welcoming
and inclusive, while potentially maintaining existing racial inequalities.
Similarly, Ahmed (2012) demonstrates how universities that emphasise
diversity can constrain the possibilities for racial equality, using diver-
sity as a form of ‘impression management’ rather than as transforma-
tive. What Leong (2013) and Ahmed (2012) note is a tension between
diversity and race. From their perspective, if it does not make a concerted
effort to address racism, diversity work becomes a cosmetic activity.
In recent campaigns against racism, the decolonisation of university

curricula—a process parallel to the internationalisation of the curricu-
lum—has emerged as a way of addressing racism at universities. In the
context of the UK, for example, it has been argued that:
One of the most significant problems relating to gaps in the curriculum in

higher education is the lack of representation of black and minority ethnic
groups. This is commonly referred to as the colonisation of the curricu-
lum. The content of the curriculum in our universities continues to reflect
and maintain a colonial legacy through the presentation of a white, west-
ern intellectual tradition as not only superior to other forms of knowledge
but as universal. (University of Keele, n.d.)
Thus, black and minority ethnic students are placed within an envi-
ronment in which the achievements and knowledge production of
white writers is often privileged. These students find themselves
under-represented and under-stimulated by the content of their curric-
ula, with their histories, narratives, and experiences omitted from main-
stream discourse. In order to address the privileging of white knowledge
production and its effects, several universities have sought to re-evaluate
their curricula in an effort to create an inclusive educational learning
environment that includes rather than isolates black and minority ethnic
students. Campaigns have included ‘Rhodes must fall’ in South Africa,
which also filtered to the UK; and later, the ‘Why is my curriculum
white?’ campaign was supported by the National Union of Students and
ran in several major cities in the UK. The decolonisation of the university
in South Africa is discussed in Hendricks (2018), Luckett (2016), Hurst
and Mona (2017), and Harvey and Russell-Mundine (2018) describe
similar attempts at decolonisation of the curriculum in an Australian
university.
In sum, the challenge for internationalisation in universities is
to adjust to a more global world and to reflect its diversity while still
addressing racial inequality and working on the decolonisation of knowl-
edge. One possibility is to embed the principles of decolonising the cur-
riculum within the internationalisation of the curriculum in order to
challenge racial inequality. Such an approach could at least contain the
possibility of avoiding the pitfall of diversity work being merely a form of
impression management. An inclusive, decolonial approach would take
a step towards racial equality and citizens with a more global outlook.
Not only is the notion of the ‘internationalisation of higher education’
ambiguous in nature, this ambiguity can obfuscate key issues of diversity
of identities, diversity of cultures, and diversity of languages.
Sociolinguistic Studies of the Internationalisation

of Higher Education
Having explored the broader issue of the internationalisation of higher

education, we now turn to an examination of studies which have dealt
with this concept specifically from a sociolinguistic and language pol-
icy angle, considering the central arguments they have raised and not-
ing some persistent absences from the ongoing discussions. Much recent
work has focused on the European context, especially the Nordic coun-
tries (e.g. Hultgren et al. 2014). However, insightful analyses have come
from elsewhere, including South Africa (Madiba 2013; Webb 2012),
Latin America (Hamel et al. 2016; Miranda et al. 2016), Puerto Rico
(Carroll and Mazak 2017), Hong Kong (Evans 2017), and the South
Pacific (Willans 2016). While studies such as these continue to show
that internationalisation discourses revolve around the role of English in
higher education, they add complementary nuances to the debate that
move it beyond an English-only discussion. It is against this literature on
the sociolinguistics of higher education worldwide that we wish to place
our analysis of the Catalan university system. The discussion here will
help us situate the case of Catalan universities in a global context, high-
lighting both common concerns among universities generally, as well as
the particularities that make Catalan higher education and its interna-
tionalisation such a specific case, namely the fact that all public universi-
ties are officially bilingual and de facto multilingual.
One particular issue that has been frequently referred to in the
European internationalisation literature is a ‘north–south’ divide (e.g.
Wächter and Maiworm 2014). If, as is usual, the divide is treated as
meaning that the north is internationalised and the south is not, we find
this view problematic. Instead, we propose that in examining university
settings and their internationalisation trends, we need to apply an eco-
logically situated view: that is, a view that understands the surrounding
context in which universities operate, reads each reality in its own right,
and finally tries to establish connections and contrasts between differ-
ent cases. It is of course important to remind ourselves that the spread
of English across university settings in different countries in Europe is

not evenly distributed (cf. Doiz et al. 2013). However, it is probably
not an adequate description to portray countries that have introduced
English-taught programmes in a more intense way as ‘leading’ in terms
of their internationalisation efforts, while countries that have not intro-
duced programmes taught in English to the same extent are presented
as ‘lagging behind’. Yet this is the position that has been taken in some
Europe-wide large-scale surveys over the past few years that have doc-
umented developments in the role and status of English in different
European university systems (see e.g. Wächter and Maiworm 2014).
While descriptively useful and, at least at first sight, not evaluative in
nature, an insistence on the existence of a north–south divide here can
lead to two problematic sets of consequences: the blurring of potential
similarities between northern and southern countries in terms of their
teaching and learning in English and in terms of the discourses associ-
ated with the spread of English in higher education; and the blurring of
potential differences of the same type between countries within broadly
homogenous regions, and between universities within the same country.
To give some examples, such a view can obscure the fact that in both
northern and southern European university contexts, languages other
than English are used as relevant teaching and learning resources in
officially English-taught courses in multilingual classroom settings (e.g.
Moore et al. 2013; Söderlundh 2012). The hypothetical north–south
divide can also obscure the fact that, much like in the south, universities
in the north may encounter challenges with the language proficiency and
the language attitudes of their members, both students and staff (e.g.
Airey 2009; Hellekjær 2009; Jensen and Thøgersen 2011).
One way of escaping the potential dangers created by the historical
focus on a north–south divide is to broaden the scope of relevant litera-
ture, and to look at how higher education systems beyond the European
context deal institutionally with multilingualism. This may allow us to
insist that, on the one hand, contrasting and comparing are useful heu-
ristic tools to understand each individual context better, but that on the
other hand, it is also important to apply an ecologically situated view to
each setting, reading it in its own sociolinguistic terms. That said, how-
ever, it is also noticeable that discussions on issues related to language
policy and practice in higher education tend to revolve specifically around
the role and the position of English, and how that affects the local lan-
guage ecology in each university context, and so we turn to this next.
Language Policy and Planning in Higher

Education and the Position of English
The broader position of English within society at large—that is, beyond
the university context—seems to influence the debates and stances taken
by the relevant stakeholders within the university. Consequently, whether
English is more of a foreign language, a second language, or a first lan-
guage will likely shape discourses around its role and position within
higher education (Doiz et al. 2013, p. xvii). Generally speaking, English
in higher education tends to be seen in binary terms, as either ‘inter-
national’ English or ‘global’ English (Bull 2012): ‘international’ English
is a language used to promote international collaboration and outreach;
whereas ‘global’ English is more frequently a language that threatens
the long-term presence of other (national) languages in higher educa-
tion spheres. This kind of binarism can be observed in Europe, both in
northern and southern contexts (Soler et al. 2018; Cots et al. 2014); but
by broadening the scope, we can see that such binarism is not necessarily
present in non-European contexts.
In Hong Kong, the use of Cantonese next to English for teaching
and learning purposes seems to enjoy a solid tradition, even though
some recent studies (e.g. Evans 2017) point out that teachers seem more
determined in their effort to use to use only English for teaching pur-
poses. As Li (2013, p. 81) suggests, “evidence points toward English
being embraced as a form of linguistic capital which is crucial for sus-
taining the economic vitality of this former British colony”. However,
English does not seem to be expanding at the expense of Cantonese.
Instead, a policy of biliteracy and trilingualism seems to be well in place,
for now at least (Li 2013). In neighbouring Taiwan and mainland China,
on the other hand, things look a bit different. Mandarin Chinese con-
tinues to be widely used for teaching and for other institutional pur-
poses, with the use of English limited to narrower contexts (Lau and
Lin 2017), sometimes leading to questions about the quality of teaching
and the consequences when English as the medium of instruction (EMI)
programmes are introduced (Hu and Lei 2014). Also reporting on
China, Sun et al. (2016) explain that the growing influence of English is
particularly felt in the higher education system of the country, where aca-
demic publication in English is seen as increasingly important, but that
this permeates down to high-school levels of instruction as well. This,
the authors note, seems to be paving the way for a language ideological
debate to easily emerge between those in favour of and those against an

expanding role of English in the country.
Still in the Asian context, recent research on EMI conducted in
Vietnam (e.g. Duong and Chua 2016) notes the existence of a peren-
nial concern with EMI teachers’ proficiency in English. Indeed, report-
ing on case studies from Vietnam, Nguyen et al. (2016) explain that
while top-down policy reform has pushed universities to become more
autonomous, including being linguistically self-sufficient, such reforms
may have left questions of educational quality to one side—institutional
autonomy, they note, could result in negative outcomes on the over-
all higher education system of the country in the absence of adequate
structural planning. Not far from Vietnam, the latest research from
Singapore (e.g. Bolton et al. 2017) has also pointed to a number of
structural difficulties experienced by institutions implementing EMI pro-
grammes. Some of these difficulties include accommodating the grow-
ing number of Chinese students that are now able to move abroad to
further their higher education training, something that can lead to
sociolinguistic challenges for the receiving institutions, according

to Bolton et al. (2017, p. 16). As they explain it, while the dominance
of English as a scientific language is likely to remain as it is today, with
an increase in transnational programmes it is important for universities
to recognise the heterogeneity of their student body. This heterogeneity
is particularly noticeable when it comes to the language skills and lan-
guage backgrounds of students, and universities will need to adjust to
the changing patterns of language contact appropriately and effectively.
Given the open-ended and changing nature of transnational higher
education programmes, it is perhaps not surprising that it is fairly com-
mon for universities to have no explicit or formal language policies in
place. Of course, this does not mean that there are no implicit ways of
regulating language practices and use (Shohamy 2006), but in the case
of Puerto Rico, for example, it seems that the non-existence of explic-
itly formulated policy documents leaves room for flexibility around lan-
guages, particularly in classroom contexts (Carroll and Mazak 2017).
A ‘no-policy’ policy can certainly work towards reinforcing the role of
the dominant language in a given context, in this case English, but the
more intense inclusion of this language in a predominantly Spanish-
speaking environment (including at higher education) has led to actors
engaging in more translingual practices (Carroll and Mazak 2017).
In universities elsewhere in Latin America, including Mexico, Colombia,

and Brazil, institutions have started drafting explicit language policy
documents in recent years, and while English is one focal point of these
documents, a significant amount of attention seems to be placed on fos-
tering multilingualism (see Hamel et al. 2016; Miranda et al. 2016).
In the rather more politically loaded context of South Africa, the
continued marginalisation of official languages other than English or
Afrikaans poses additional challenges for the higher education system
of the country (cf. Beukes 2015), particularly given that research car-
ried out there has provided evidence that the strategic use of multilin-
gual resources for pedagogical purposes enhances the learning capacity
of students (Van der Walt and Dornbrack 2011). Mwaniki (2012)
reports on the results of a survey distributed to a sample of students at
the University of the Free State, showing the extent to which language
is an important element in thinking about social justice in the coun-
try’s higher education system. For the author, it is very clear that lan-
guage plays a key role in facilitating access to higher education for some
while restricting such access to others. (See also Van Wyk (2014), who
reports that 65% of students at that same university struggle to under-
stand academic content in English.) This argument is in line with
Greenfield’s (2010) study, which shows that established practices within
South African education continue to maintain a key role for the colo-
nial languages, something that disadvantages black students in particular.
In contrast, Madiba (2013) believes that, even if multilingual educa-
tion in South Africa is not yet fully in place, the existing policies at the
University of Cape Town offer some space for agency to the benefit of
the students at that university. In sum, matters are far from settled lin-
guistically for universities in South Africa, whether in terms of formal
policy-making, implementation, adaptation, and/or resistance.
In the arguably less politically loaded context of Europe, universi-
ties have nonetheless also seen increasingly heated debates, particularly
around the role of English and its coexistence with national languages in
the internationalisation of higher education (Coleman 2006; Phillipson
2006, 2015). Although the debate has developed unevenly across dif-
ferent countries in Europe, it has resonated in all kinds of contexts,
including in largely monolingual countries with languages of strong
demolinguistic weight (e.g. Germany and Italy), and in countries with
higher levels of bilingualism across the population (primarily in the
national language and English), such as the Nordic countries.
In the case of Germany, for example, Erling and Hilgendorf (2006)

note that a lack of explicit language policies at EU and national level,
together with the existence of implicit language policies at the institu-
tional level with the establishment of EMI programmes, creates the
opportunity for English to expand its functional range in German higher
education. In Italy, EMI programmes are also expanding, although in
an uneven fashion and with important regional differences (Costa and
Coleman 2013); however, internationalisation trends have also led to
increasingly tense language ideological debates, particularly in institu-
tions in the north of the country (Pulcini and Campagna 2015). Santulli
(2015) reports on the polemics around the case of the Politecnico di
Milano, where a group of faculty members decided in 2012 to file a law-
suit against the university’s decision to turn all their graduate teaching
into English by 2014. The Italian court ruled in favour of the plaintiffs
and against the university. The court firstly acknowledged the preemi-
nent position of Italian in the country’s education system as being a prin-
ciple enshrined in the constitution (Santulli 2015, p. 276). In addition,
the court’s ruling stated that internationalisation should not mean the
exclusion of Italian from educational activities, and thus it should not
equal absolute Englishisation. However, the ruling also triggered reac-
tions from commentators in favour of the university management’s posi-
tion, mainly acknowledging the important role of English in professional
and educational contexts today, and the generally low levels of English
among Italian students (Santulli 2015, p. 277).
The Italian case seems to nicely illustrate how certain features of the
Englishisation of higher education (Lanvers and Hultgren 2018)—in
particular, the growing use of English as a language of instruction—
may lead to language ideological debates and tensions, and shows how
different actors in the field can take different positions on the issues
(cf. Soler and Vihman 2018). A generally observed pattern seems to
be that, as one might expect, state-level institutions (including inter
alia ministries of education and culture, or even the courts and the
judicial system) are less keen on the idea of allowing English more
space in the higher education system, while at the institutional level
and for universities individually, incorporating English is something
they pursue more actively and explicitly. Such a state of affairs is per-
haps not all that surprising, and it has been documented in particu-
lar in countries in the north of Europe—both in the Nordic countries
(Hultgren et al. 2014; Saarinen and Taalas 2017) and the Baltic states
(Bulajeva and Hogan-Brun 2014; Kibbermann 2017; Soler et  al.

2018)—where English has made important inroads into the higher edu-
cation systems.
However, this apparently simple dichotomy should not obscure the
complexity of the multilayered connections between different language
policy actors (Halonen et al. 2015). In Denmark, for example, Vingaard
Johansen et al. (2017) highlight a discursive move in the country’s
higher education system: from a pluralistic notion of education (empha-
sising its economic benefits, but also underscoring values of democracy
and equality) to a discourse based essentially on competitiveness and glo-
balisation within the knowledge society. The latter sorts of discourses are
commonly associated with an expansion of English and its increasingly
prominent role in higher education, as discussed above. Fabricius et al.
(2017), again with a focus on Denmark, discuss a number of paradoxes
that this expanding role of English within the internationalisation of
higher education appears to be leading to, including low levels of lin-
guistic pluralism, intercultural understanding, internationalisation, and
competitiveness.
Whether they are aligned with national interests or with academically
oriented institutional goals, it is important to keep in mind that all actors
involved in these debates operate with the same set of conceptual dis-
courses in place (Hult 2015), determined by them while acting upon
them at the same time.
Multilingual Higher Education

in Minority Language Settings
The previous subsection highlights some of the key findings from studies
conducted on the interaction between particular national languages and
English in the context of the internationalisation of higher education.
However, research has not limited itself to analysing language contact of
that type, but has also examined the situation in historically bilingual set-
tings, where a minority and a majority language already coexist in higher
education, and where the introduction of English for internationalisation
purposes would seem to make matters even more complex. Such a trilin-
gual language contact situation in Catalonia is the focus of our analysis
in this volume, of course, and we tackle this complexity particularly in
Chapter 4. But previous research on such contexts has not only looked
at Catalan universities, and interesting insights come from analysing cases

such as the Basque Country and Wales (the latter case having a notable
difference, in that the contact is between Welsh as a minority language
and English). Analyses have been conducted sometimes as individual
studies (e.g. Cenoz 2012), and sometimes comparatively (e.g. Cots et al.
2012; Garrett and Gallego-Balsà 2014; Lasagabaster et al. 2013).
Looking at Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Wales from a compar-
ative perspective, Cots et al. (2012, p. 8) underscore the extent to which
universities in Europe are frequently regarded by stakeholders (e.g. fund-
ing agencies, students, faculty staff, employees, and the society at large)
as social institutions with a number of key functions, including the pro-
tection and promotion of the language and culture of the local environ-
ment. That said, however, the three institutions compared in their study
diverge in several important ways, not least in terms of the roles and the
positions of the particular minority language and English. Although all
share a similar dominant discourse around the importance of economic
and market factors in engaging with internationalisation policies (includ-
ing the promotion of English), important differences emerge from the
“specific nature of the sociolinguistic environment, the socio-political sit-
uation and/or the academic tradition” (Cots et al. 2012, p. 28). This is
in line with Vila’s (2015) argument that, more generally, languages such
as Catalan and Basque, which Vila defines as ‘medium-sized languages’,
are highly sensitive to their sociolinguistic context and are generally vul-
nerable to changes that may take place in their environment.
One clear difference that emerges between the higher education sys-
tems of Catalonia and the Basque Country, according to Lasagabaster
et al. (2013), is that in the former one may find what they term ‘forced
multilingualism’, while in the latter there would rather appear to be
‘optional multilingualism’. ‘Forced multilingualism’ is the label, perhaps
slightly ill-fitting, that the authors coin to capture the situation where the
introduction of English is at the expense of other languages, particularly
the local minority language—there are no courses running in parallel,
one in English and the same course also in another language. By con-
trast, ‘optional multilingualism’ indicates that English is added in parallel
to available options in other languages, without replacing already offered
courses and programmes in those languages (which is, of course, a more
expensive option that smaller universities might not be able to afford).
As Lasagabaster et al. (2013) argue, this would explain why English
might be seen as a requirement at the University of Lleida in Catalonia,

while at the University of the Basque Country, this is seen more as an
option or opportunity, as there is always a parallel offering in another
language. However, Cenoz’s (2012) analysis would seem to indicate that
Basque higher education institutions are tending to move towards a pol-
icy of non-duplication of courses, a move perhaps not yet established in
formal policy documents, but indexed by more implicit practices such as
formal speeches of the Rector of the University of the Basque Country,
who, in a speech welcoming international students and staff, used both
Basque and Spanish as well as English, without simultaneous translation;
something that may indicate a willingness to move away from a policy of
‘one language at a time’.
All in all, the themes summarised through this section resonate with
issues that have been highlighted by previous research on the interna-
tionalisation of higher education specifically in Catalonia: a willingness
to move towards a more multilingual higher education sphere, marked
by a desire to include English for increasingly more functions (Armengol
et al. 2013); an indication that the learning process of university students
is enriched when their multilingual resources are effectively used (Moore
et al. 2013); and a politically and ideologically charged context, in which
English can be interpreted at the same time positively, as a key resource
for graduate employability, and negatively, as an added pressure on the
sustainability of Catalan in higher education—this last theme is salient for
both individuals (Sabaté-Dalmau 2016) and institutions (Gallego-Balsà
and Cots 2016).
One particularly prominent theme which has emerged from past
research specifically on the internationalisation of Catalan universi-
ties relates to linguistic competence (e.g. Cots 2013). In recent years,
since 2009–2010, there has been substantial public discussion devoted
to the Catalan government’s proposal that all university graduates in
Catalonia should attain a level of at least B2 on the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages in a ‘third’ language—most
of the time, this is English, although, in theory, it could be French,
German, or Italian (the other foreign languages that can be part of uni-
versity entry-level exams, the equivalent to the A Levels in the UK).
For their part, universities have expressed doubts about this require-
ment, and some of them have been very wary of it, explicitly opposing
its enforcement. This has been the case especially since 2014, when the
Catalan government framed the idea legally and proposed changing the
attainment of an intermediate level in a third language from being a rec-

ommendation to being a legal requirement (Law 2/2014, Generalitat
de Catalunya 2014). However, after some degree of heated confronta-
tion between university and government officials, an agreement was
reached in 2017 by the Catalan Inter-University Council to postpone
this requirement for four years, a postponement that was approved by
the Catalan Parliament in May 2018. In theory, then, students starting
their degrees in the academic year 2018–2019 are the first cohort of stu-
dents who will be required to demonstrate a B2 level in a foreign lan-
guage in order to obtain their degrees. This additional period of time,
however, is unlikely to be sufficient, and these language-related ques-
tions will need to be dealt with at some point later on. In fact, as the
Vice-Rector for International Relations at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona explained to Vilaweb (Puig and Forest 2017), this institution
will continue to issue higher education degrees without enforcing the
B2 requirement, as they see this measure as essentially discriminatory in
nature. Indeed, the Vice-Rector continues, it is not infrequently the case
that those students who enter university already having good levels of
foreign language skills come from more advantaged social backgrounds
than those who struggle more with languages. Imposing this added
requirement for students to graduate can then been seen as an additional
barrier for less advantaged students, a requirement that seems even more
unfair when it is not officially and formally presented in the study plans
of non-language-related university degrees.
In sum, requiring all university graduates to be able to demonstrate
an intermediate level in a foreign language to be able to graduate, and
linking this requirement to public funding, has been seen by some
universities as taking matters too far (de Planell 2017). In addition to
what they see as a lack of resources allocated by the government to help
them attain the goal of having their graduates demonstrate a B2 level of
a foreign language by the time they finish their studies, several institu-
tions, including UAB, have also raised legal red flags. If a student takes
a degree that does not officially and formally include language goals in
the curriculum (e.g. medicine or law), and is then unable to graduate
on the grounds that they do not possess a foreign language certificate,
they could appeal the decision and sue the university (Ibáñez 2017). In
sum, issues around linguistic competence are at the centre of attention
in language policy-making at the university level, and as such, they are
pervasive in the language policy documents analysed in the next chapter.
Conclusions
This chapter has provided an overview of two of the themes that are cen-
tral to the present book: internationalisation, on the one hand, and lan-
guage policy at universities, on the other. In connection with the notion
of internationalisation, we began the chapter with a consideration of the
fraught nature of the concept and the range of different meanings that it
is used to cover. A much-overused label, internationalisation has become
a buzzword that can be employed to refer to a number of issues in the
domain of higher education. Indeed, we have seen that it is used to talk
about the need to enhance students’ and teachers’ intercultural aware-
ness and competence, to cover the introduction of an international com-
ponent within the curriculum, and to ensure that all students, whether
they study abroad or not, can enjoy and benefit from an international
experience through internationalisation at home. Perhaps the fact that it
is also a highly common term nowadays outside academia adds to the
complexity of the concept, but what seems certain is that internation-
alisation is not just about enhancing student and teacher mobility and
introducing English-taught programmes, with a tacit goal of climbing
the much-popularised university rankings. Indeed, we have noted that
one of the challenges facing internationalising higher education institu-
tions is to deal with the inherent diversity that the process entails, and
that it is important to not overlook aspects of this diversity that could
easily be hidden in mainstream conceptualisations of internationalisation.
Focusing into look more specifically at language-related matters, the
literature presented here shows that, in recent years, the question of lan-
guage in higher education has become increasingly loaded down with
ideological debates and struggles. Although our literature selection has,
naturally, been far from exhaustive, it is possible to note several emerg-
ing points. First of all, when it comes to the language policy side of the
internationalisation of higher education, it seems that it is English and
its coexistence with other languages that poses the thorniest problems
at the institutional level. Regardless of the type of language ecosystem,
English appears to be the main driver behind the language policy ini-
tiatives of institutions around the world, even if this is frequently tacit
rather than explicitly acknowledged. This seems to be the case both in
contexts where English is interacting with strong, widely spoken national
languages such as Chinese, German, or Italian, and in contexts where the
interaction is with smaller, lesser-spoken languages such as those of the
Nordic countries or the Baltic states. That said, it is also important to

note that the anxieties and ambiguities around language in higher educa-
tion are always locally situated. Indeed, whenever they emerge, language
ideological debates draw directly on the local political context and are
infused by the local conditions. Finally, and to complexify things further,
language policy concerns become even trickier in language settings in
which a historically minoritised language has made it into the domain
of higher education. Such is the case, for example, in some minority lan-
guage contexts in Spain (e.g. Catalonia and the Basque Country), where
the growing presence of English seems to impose additional pressure in
an already loaded setting.
As discussed above and in the previous chapter, it is precisely these
cases that might lend themselves to richer and more insightful analyses
of language policy matters in the context of the internationalisation of
higher education. In the rest of this book, we delve more deeply into
the case of Catalonia with the hope that we can provide an analysis of
this context that will shed further light on the topic more generally and
that will contribute a rich account of the challenges facing institutions
and individuals in internationalising higher education contexts, with rele-
vance beyond minority language areas.
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CHAPTER 3
Language Policy Regulations at Catalan

Universities: A Content Analysis
of Their Narrative
Abstract  Language policy documents in Catalan universities tend to

emphasise the idea that the national language, Catalan, has to be pro-
tected and promoted at university, while also acknowledging that lan-
guages of wider communication (mainly English, but also Spanish) play
an important role within the university context. However, university
language policy documents in Catalonia additionally give a significant
amount of attention to the importance of ensuring a good level of com-
petence across different languages, particularly English. This reveals that,
more often than not, the debate around language(s) in higher education
is seen essentially as a problem of linguistic competence. Such a focus
on competence, however, can obscure the ambivalent character of the
role of language(s) in the Catalan higher education system. The narrative
approach to content analysis we propose attempts to shed light on this
potentially shadowed issue. In short, the chapter analyses how language
and language-related issues are depicted in the language policy docu-
ments of the public universities in Catalonia, and how these documents
handle the sociolinguistic complexities of the Catalan system of higher
education.
Keywords  University language policies · Content analysis · Catalan

universities · Linguistic competence

The Catalan University System: Legal Framework,

Language Knowledge, and Language Use
There are 12 universities in Catalonia: 7 public, 4 private, and 1 of mixed
nature (the online Open University of Catalonia). From the point of
view of the legal framework, higher education differs from primary and
secondary education in Catalonia in that it is not a fully devolved com-
petence, i.e. it is not a competence that is controlled by the Catalan gov-
ernment alone. The regulation of universities in Spain is shared between
the central government and the regional governments, which include
the Generalitat de Catalunya, Catalonia’s autonomous government
(Pons 2015, p. 157). In principle, the central government is respon-
sible for setting the general legal framework, and the regional govern-
ments are responsible for executing that framework. In practice, even
though universities have legally entrenched autonomy, including being
able to establish their own regulations on the use and the status of offi-
cial and other languages, the higher education system in Spain is rather
uniform in nature, and what might be considered as lax regulation by
the central state in terms of the functions and the status of languages
in higher education ends up perpetuating the pre-eminent role of the
Spanish language, the single official language recognised by the Spanish
Constitution (Pons 2015, p. 158). Only in 2007 was the Spanish Law
of Universities amended to include a statement explaining that officially
bilingual universities should support their members in their acquisition
of languages other than Spanish—without, however, including any legal
requirements on members of the university in connection to these other
languages. This reflects the linguistic asymmetry that is established in
the Spanish legal framework, something that, of course, transcends the
domain of education.
Turning to the legal framework within Catalonia, Catalan higher edu-
cation is regulated by the Catalan Statute of Autonomy (passed initially
in 1979 and renewed in 2006), the Catalan Universities Act (passed in
2003), and the Language Policy Act (passed in 1998, renewing its pre-
decessor of 1983, the Law on Linguistic Normalisation); all three laws
contain important content for the management of languages in higher
education. Summarising the main aspects of their content, Pons (2015,
pp. 159–160) proposes the following five key points as the central lan-
guage-related principles underlying higher education regulation in
Catalonia.
3 LANGUAGE POLICY REGULATIONS AT CATALAN UNIVERSITIES … 45
Catalan is Catalonia’s ‘own’ language (llengua pròpia), and as such, it

is the language of preferred use for institutional communication and by
the members of universities, particularly for teaching purposes.
• The linguistic normalisation of Catalan is a goal that universities,

especially those of a public nature, need to assist in pursuing, taking
the necessary measures to ensure an adequate presence of Catalan in
all spheres of university activity.
• Catalan and Spanish are both official languages of Catalonia, and as
such, speakers and members of the university have the right to use
either of the two languages in their communication, a choice that
must be respected by all parties.
• The non-segregation of students by reason of language should pre-
vail; that is, the conjunction model should be applied, in which stu-
dents are grouped together irrespective of their first language or
their language of regular choice, without establishing distinct par-
allel lines or different groups with different languages of teaching
(either Catalan or Spanish).
• The principle of internationalisation applies: universities have the
autonomy to establish the measures that they see fit to allow them
to engage in internationalising activities. This goal needs to be
encompassed in tandem with the protection and development of
Catalan in higher education.
As we shall see below when we analyse the university policy documents,

we can detect a certain trickle-down effect, or intertextuality (Johnson
2015), from the higher-level laws (the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, the
Catalan Universities Act, the Language Policy Act) to the lower-level rules
and regulations issued by the universities (the plans de llengües ‘plans for lan-
guages’). The most detailed and relevant exposition of what the higher-level
laws indicate more specifically in terms of language status and use is found
in Article 6 of the Catalan Universities Act. In brief, its six points state that:
• Catalan is the ‘own’ language (llengua pròpia) of the universities

of Catalonia, and therefore the language of normal use in their
activities.
• Catalan is the official language of universities in Catalonia, together
with Spanish. The use of the two official languages is regulated by
the Language Policy Act of 1998.
• In the framework of the Language Policy Act, universities need to

stimulate the use and knowledge of Catalan in all spheres of activity
and by all the members of the university community.
• In agreement with the Language Policy Act, university teachers
have to have a sufficient knowledge of both official languages.
The Inter-University Council has to guarantee that in the selec-
tion processes of staff, a sufficient level of knowledge of the official
languages is specified.
• The government needs to ensure that the incorporation of newly
hired staff does not significantly alter the normal use of languages
for teaching purposes and the process of linguistic normalisation in
Catalan universities.
• The government and the universities need to establish programmes
to foster knowledge of third languages for academic activities and to
offer specific subjects in them.
The university language policy documents that will be analysed in

more depth below follow closely the six points included in this article of
the Catalan Universities Act. At this point, we will just remark that much
attention is paid in them to the idea of fostering knowledge and compe-
tence in different languages, including Catalan and Spanish, but also ‘third’
languages. This idea of linguistic competence as a focal issue will need
to be scrutinised in more detail later in the discussion (see Chapter 5).
Before turning to a presentation of the data and the analysis, however,
more needs to be said about the current situation of language knowledge
and use at Catalan universities.
As already noted above, university members, both teachers and stu-
dents, have the right to choose either of the two official languages in
their daily communication, and this includes teachers deciding which
language to use in delivering their subjects. This may not represent any
obstacles for graduates of Catalan secondary education, as when they fin-
ish their pre-university education they all have adequate competences in
both languages (or at least, the vast majority do). However, those com-
ing from outside the Catalan system of secondary education may not
have such competences in the two languages. A potential clash, there-
fore, may emerge between teachers, who wish to put in place their right
to teach in Catalan, and students, who wish to put into effect their right
to learn in Spanish. Such situations can lead to what has been termed
‘linguistic insecurity’, and as a result, in recent years universities have
put in place the ‘principle of linguistic security’, also known as ‘linguistic

transparency’ (see Pons 2015) (in our book, we will use the formulation
‘principle of linguistic security’ throughout; this is our translation from
the original in Catalan principi de seguretat lingüística). This principle is
an important one, and appears in all the policy documents devised by the
universities, as we shall see below. We will examine this principle in much
more detail in Chapter 5, but, in essence, the principle establishes that
information about the language in which a given subject is to be taught
will be made publicly available with sufficient anticipation, prior to the
start of the registration period, by the relevant teacher or the depart-
ment. This is a binding piece of information, and it is designed to avoid
the potential clashes described above, the insecurity which might emerge
from differing language choice preferences.
One result of the principle of linguistic security is that the medium of
instruction of all courses delivered at Catalan universities is now publicly
available. On the basis of that, the Catalan government has been able to
gather large-scale data on the languages used for teaching purposes at
both undergraduate and graduate levels at public universities. Figures 3.1
and 3.2 capture these data, and as can be seen, Catalan is the predom-
inant language for teaching purposes at both levels, more so in under-
graduate courses than graduate ones; the exception is Pompeu Fabra
University (UPF), which in recent years has seen a marked decrease in
the use of Catalan in teaching, particularly at master’s level.
Clearly, at least in the officially reported statistics, the principle that
Catalan is the universities’ own language and, as such, the language of
preferred use, is mostly applied in the domain of teaching in the major-
ity of universities, for both graduate and undergraduate levels. It is also
clear that the use of any language other than Catalan or Spanish for
teaching purposes (most frequently, English) still represents a low per-
centage, by and large, so the Catalan–Spanish dichotomy still plays a
central role in Catalan universities, much as in Catalan society at large
(Pons 2015, p. 176). Notice also that these data are obtained by the
Catalan government from the official descriptions of the subjects,
which are provided by university departments. However, this may not
always coincide with the languages used in class by teachers. A survey
from the University of Lleida reporting on students’ responses to the
question of which language was used during teaching activities in class
indicated a mismatch with the officially available data, showing a higher
use of Spanish than was officially reported (see Gallego-Balsà 2014).
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Fig. 3.1 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the undergraduate level

2013–2016 (Source Based on data from Universitats i Recerca, Generalitat de
Catalunya [2016])
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Fig. 3.2 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the graduate level 2013–
2016 (Source Based on data from Universitats i Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya
[2016])
This may be taken as an indication that officially reported figures and

students’ actual experiences in university classrooms do not always
coincide. The fact that teachers seem ready to use Spanish more fre-
quently as a language of instruction than is officially reported may have
a variety of causes, including a desire to avoid face-threatening acts in
public similar to those seen in the extract with which we opened the
book, in Chapter 1. But something that this mismatch between the
official and the student-reported statistics certainly indicates is a degree
of unease on the part of the teachers to stick only to Catalan as the
language of instruction, something which would have potential conse-
quences for them as they face increasingly diverse groups of students.
We shall delve deeper into that in the next chapter, when we look at
the opinions of several teachers on the management of language(s) in
their classrooms.
At the same time, it might also be possible to argue that a certain
inertia may have established itself in Catalan universities, where the ini-
tial volunteerism of introducing Catalan for teaching purposes at uni-
versities after the democratic transition in the 1970s and early 1980s
has been replaced by a more taken-for-granted type of attitude by the
university community in Catalonia. This attitude of relaxation may
partly explain the relative degree of willingness on the part of teach-
ers to switch the language of instruction in class. In light of that,
some authors (e.g. de Rosselló and Boix-Fuster 2006) have wondered
whether this inertia should be interpreted positively—as an achieve-
ment of the normalisation process of the language—or negatively—as
a sign that lowering one’s guard can lead to an acceptance of the lan-
guage losing ground in certain domains of the higher education sphere,
including the reduction of the presence of the language in teaching
activities.
In any case, given the linguistic context of higher education in
Catalonia, the questions that emerge here are the following:
• How do universities settle their stance with respect to the role and
the status of different languages within their institutions?
• How is this stance captured in their language policy documents?
We turn to these questions in the analysis presented in the next section.

A Content Analysis of Language Policy Documents

at Universities in Catalonia
Each public university has a language policy document (see the list in
Table 3.1). These documents started to be drafted and approved by
the governing bodies of Catalan universities around 2009–2010, some-
times earlier, and a number of them have been renewed since their initial
approval. The drafting of these documents was not a random occurrence,
and the fact that they all appeared around the same time (at least in
their first version) was not a coincidence either. In 2009, as Pons (2015,
Table 3.1 University language policy documents
Institution Year Document name Languages Length

(abbreviations in (our translation) available (in words)
Catalan)
University of 2017–2020 UB Plan for Catalan, Spanish 4916

Barcelona (UB) Languages
Autonomous 2016–2020 UAB Plan for Catalan, Spanish, 1284
University of Languages English, French,
Barcelona (UAB) Occitan,
Portuguese,
Basque
Polytechnic 2010 UPC Plan for Catalan, English 3615
University of Languages
Catalonia (UPC)
Pompeu Fabra 2007–2013 UPF Action Catalan, Spanish, 11,700
University (UPF) Plan for English
Multilingualism
Rovira i Virgili 2015–2017 Language Policy Catalan 2718
University
(URV)
University of 2009–2013 UdG Plan for Catalan 8552
Girona (UdG) Language Policy
University of 2013–2018 UdL Operational Catalan 11,934
Lleida (UdL) Plan for
Multilingualism
Open University 2015 General Catalan 1220
of Catalonia Principles
(UOC) of UOC’s
Language Policy
p. 161) explains, the Catalan government decided to start allocating

funding to public universities based on a number of indicators, with the
intent of establishing a framework of funding based on meeting specific
objectives. Some of the indicators included language-related goals—and
one of these was the drafting of a clear language policy by each higher
education institution that would lead to, among other things, improving
the language skills in Catalan and English of the academic community,
improving the knowledge of Catalan by foreign members of the institu-
tion, and promoting the teaching in Catalan across different educational
levels. Much like in other contexts (e.g. Sweden, see Björkman 2014),
then, the drafting and approving of university language policy docu-
ments was a response to external incentives, in this case politically driven
goals attached to economic motivations.
The set of documents included in the analysis consists of the pub-
licly available language policy documents of all seven public universities
in Catalonia, in addition to the language policy of the Open University
of Catalonia, which is an institution of a mixed nature (public–private),
as noted above. All the documents are similar in terms of content and
structure; however, they show a remarkable degree of heterogeneity
when it comes to their length and the level of detail of the items they
cover, with some of the documents longer than 11,000 words, while
others barely exceed 1,000 words (see Table 3.1 for details about the
documents). Whenever more than one version of the policy documents
was available, the more recent one has been used in the analysis (this was
the case for the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University
of Barcelona). Some of the documents are available in more than one
language, but they all are accessible in Catalan, and it is that version that
has been used for the analysis presented here.
To investigate the documents and extract the relevant themes associ-
ated with the management of different languages at each university, we
have used the method of content analysis. Although content analysis is
usually associated with quantitative data analysis—being defined as “an
approach to the analysis of documents and texts that seek to quantify
content in terms of pre-determined categories” (Bryman 2008, p. 278,
quoted in Prior 2014)—it is nevertheless possible to depict it as a hybrid
method. In line with Prior (2014), content analysis can be used to illu-
minate quantitatively issues of a qualitative nature. More specifically, the
analysis applied here is qualitative content analysis: “a research method

for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through
the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes”
(Hsieh and Shannon 2005, p. 1278).
Content analysis is a flexible method for text analysis (cf. Cavanagh
1997), a method that can be used to detect and extract relevant themes
from textual data related to a given research topic. It has been applied
successfully in policy research, and more specifically in language policy
research (see Björkman 2014 and Soler et al. 2018 for examples of it);
the same approach is taken here. Hsieh and Shannon (2005) classify con-
tent analysis into three types—conventional, directed, and summative—
which differ from one another in the way that categories and codes are
developed. The type adopted here is summative content analysis, which
begins by identifying a set of keywords (manually or by computer),
together with the frequency counts of those keywords. The keywords are
then analysed in more depth and detail in context, which subsequently
allows for the identification of the emerging themes connected to the
research question at hand (Braun and Clarke 2006). In short, there is
a quantitative first stage in the process of analysis, followed by a qualita-
tive, more contextualised, second stage.
In the first stage, and in order to determine the relevant set of key-
words on which to focus our attention, the corpus analysis program
AntConc (Anthony 2018) was used. A first overview of the material
already allows some relevant insights into the data. Table 3.2 presents
the content words from the documents which related to language and
internationalisation that were in the most frequent hundred words,
together with the rank at which the word appears in the material, and
its frequency. We see, for example, that ‘Catalan’ (català, the masculine
Table 3.2 Ranks and frequencies of the keywords
Keyword Rank Frequency
català (Catalan, m.s.) 29 188

anglès (English) 32 180
multilingüisme (multilingualism) 40 140
catalana (Catalan, f.s.) 64 90
castellà (Spanish) 93 64
internacionalització (internationalisation) 100 62
singular form) is the highest rank content word related to language

(being the twenty-ninth most frequent word in the documents, used
a total of 188 times), followed by ‘English’, then ‘multilingualism’.
‘Spanish’ (castellà, masculine singular) is only the ninety-third most fre-
quently used word, appearing just above ‘internationalisation’ (internac-
ionalització), and after the second use of ‘Catalan’ (catalana, feminine
singular), which was only ever used in the noun phrase ‘Catalan lan-
guage’ (llengua catalana, where catalana is used to agree with llengua,
which is also feminine singular).
In the following, we combine both forms for Catalan (català and cat-
alana) in order to gauge more directly the number of hits referring to
the Catalan language in the analysed documents. The feminine forms for
Spanish (castellana) and English (anglesa) appear very infrequently in the
documents, certainly well below the first hundred most frequent content
words, and so are not included in the quantitative analysis. Another pos-
sible way to refer to Spanish (using the words espanyol or espanyola) is
even less frequently used in the documents—in fact, it is almost com-
pletely absent. However, it is used by one of the university policy docu-
ments investigated here, the Open University’s (UOC) Language Policy.
This is a singular case in itself, and we treat it separately in more detail
later on, in the qualitative analysis.
This pattern in terms of the ranking of the keywords in the entire
sample is also reproduced individually, policy document by policy doc-
ument; the only exception is the ‘UPF Action Plan for Multilingualism’,
in which the most frequent item is ‘multilingualism’, followed by
‘Catalan’ and ‘English’. In Fig. 3.3 we see the details of all keywords and
their frequency, university by university; note that the figures for català
and catalana have been added together.
Moving to the qualitative part of the analysis, a range of emerging
themes can be detected in the policy documents analysed here. However,
rather than providing a list of these themes, followed by some illustra-
tive examples of each theme (cf. Soler et al. 2018; Soler-Carbonell and
Gallego-Balsà 2016), Prior (2014) suggests that in analysing policy
documents, it is possible to extract the overarching narrative that is pre-
sented in such documents, much like when conducting a literary analy-
sis of a novel. While policy documents are more fragmentary in nature
than novels (there may be different documents touching upon one policy
issue, and they may be produced by different authors), one can provide
an analysis of the characters, the chronology, and the plot of the narrative
80
72
70
64
59 59
60
50 46
43
40
29
30 27
24 24
21 22
20 16 17
15 15 14 14
12 13 12
7 87 8 77 7
10 6
454 544 5 43
1 0
0
UB UAB UPC UPF URV UdG UdL UOC
Català/-na Anglès Mullingüisme Castellà Internacionalització
català/catalana anglès multilingüisme castellà internacionalització

UB 46 27 15 7 15
UAB 8 7 4 5 4
UPC 14 12 5 4 4
UPF 59 43 64 24 16
URV 21 13 8 1 5
UdG 59 22 12 7 7
UdL 72 29 24 17 6
UOC 14 4 3 0 7
Fig. 3.3 Hits of keywords per university
presented in a set of policy documents. What follows, then, is an attempt

at capturing the narrative that the language policy documents of Catalan
universities present.
As far as characters are concerned, the analysed policy documents fea-
ture a set of roles divided between named languages, on the one hand,
and different kinds of agents, on the other. In terms of languages, there
is the Catalan language, the Spanish language, and English; other named
languages appear in the documents, but only sporadically (e.g. Occitan,
French, German, Italian, or Chinese). Although not a named language,
multilingualism is another language-related character that appears
frequently in the policy documents, as seen from the quantitative anal-
ysis presented above. Finally, the label ‘third language(s)’ also appears
relatively frequently in the documents. In terms of the different kinds of

agents, a dominant one is the university as an institution, as are lecturers,
students, and members of the administrative staff of the university. Other
agents include the Catalan government, the Catalan Inter-University
Council and, more sporadically, EU institutions.
Chronology and plot, the other two key aspects of the narrative in
the policy documents, are, of course, intimately related. Chronologically,
all the documents are written in the period 2007–2015, so they depict
the situation at Catalan universities at around the present time. On sev-
eral occasions, though, they refer to earlier moments in time, explain-
ing that their stance towards languages at the university is rooted in the
approach taken a number of decades ago. In that respect, for example,
the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) states that:
Aquest nou Pla de llengües dóna continuïtat a un recorregut de trenta

anys de política lingüística de la UPC, iniciada l’any 1977 amb l’acord del
Claustre General sobre la recuperació del català com a llengua de la univer-
sitat. (UPC Plan for Languages, p. 2)
[This new Plan for Languages represents the continuation of a path of

thirty years of language policy at UPC, initiated in the year 1977 with the
agreement of the University Senate about the recovery of Catalan as the
language of the university.]
In addition to making reference to the past, the documents also point

towards the future, envisioning desired scenarios that each university
wishes to strive for. Here is where plot and chronology conflate more
explicitly, and where the definition of the role of each character becomes
clearer as well. With almost no exceptions, the policy documents assign
specific roles to each named language and language-related character,
and we will go through these in turn.
As the ‘own’ and official language of Catalonia, Catalan is considered
the ‘own’ and official language of each institution, the default language
normally used by the institution and its members in their daily activities.
Frequently, Catalan is mentioned as needing to be promoted within the
multilingual environment of each institution, taking the role of primus
inter pares, whose use and knowledge is to be spread within the uni-
versity community, especially among lecturers and visiting students. In
setting out the legal framework upon which the policy documents rest,
many of them refer to legally binding requirements to which the uni-

versities are subject. This is the case, for example, with the University of
Lleida’s (UdL) policy document, which briefly introduces the linguistic
hierarchy in place at the university, in which Catalan comes first:
Els Estatus de la Universitat de Lleida (2003) estableixen que el català és

la llengua pròpia i institucional de la Universitat, dins del marc de doble
oficialitat amb el castellà que es recull en la Llei 1/1998, de 7 de gener, de
política lingüística, i en la Llei 1/2003, de 19 de febrer, d’universitats de
Catalunya. (UdL Operational Plan for Multilingualism, p. 6)
[The Statutes of the University of Lleida (2003) establish that Catalan is

the ‘own’ language of the University and its institutional language, within
the framework of dual officiality with Spanish, as regulated in the Law
1/1998, of 7 January, of language policy, and in the Law 1/2003, of 19
February, of the universities of Catalonia.]
Together with Catalan, Spanish is also an official language in

Catalonia and, as such, it is official as well in each university. Whenever
it is mentioned (usually more implicitly than explicitly), Spanish is
associated with a discourse of linguistic rights, the right of individual
members of the university to use and to be understood in this lan-
guage. An example can be seen from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona’s (UAB) language policy, which in its general framework
presents Spanish thus:
El castellà és l’altra llengua oficial de la UAB, que, a més, és un centre de

referència en filologia castellana. (UAB Plan for Languages, p. 3)
[Spanish is the other official language of UAB, which, in addition, is a cen-

tre of reference in the study of Spanish philology.]
The issue of language rights is succinctly illustrated by UPC’s lan-

guage policy, in its chapter on linguistic availability:
Garantir els drets lingüístics dels membres de la UPC pel que fa a l’ús del
català i el castellà, com a llengües oficials. (UPC Plan for Languages, p. 9)
[To guarantee the linguistic rights of the members of UPC in connection

to the use of Catalan and Spanish as official languages.]
Frequently labelled as a ‘working language’ by each institution,

English is framed most of the times as a desired language, the knowl-
edge of which is key in gaining important linguistic capital for individ-
ual members and for the institution at large. Often, explicit reference to
English is obscured by the use of the euphemistic label ‘third language’,
even though it is often clear from the context that ‘thid language’ means
English. For example, in its mission statement, UB’s language policy
makes this connection clear:
La UB vol promoure el coneixement de terceres llengües entre els mem-

bres de la comunitat universitària que ho vulguin per diferents raons […].
En la seva aposta pel multilingüisme, la UB donarà prioritat a les següents
llengües: l’anglès, llengua franca de facto en la majoria de disciplines
acadèmiques, i llengua de treball en molts àmbits de les relacions internac-
ionals. (UB Plan for Languages, p. 6)
[UB aims at promoting the knowledge of third languages among the mem-
bers of the university community who so wish for different reasons […].
In its investment in multilingualism, UB will give priority to the following
languages: English, de facto lingua franca of the majority of academic disci-
plines, and working language in many areas of international relations.]
While it is not an explicitly named language, multilingualism is also

an important character in all of the policy documents analysed. An ideal
scenario of multilingualism is often referred to as the ultimate goal of the
language policy efforts of each institution, a setting in which a balance
can be found between the protection and the promotion of Catalan as
the language of general use in most of the university’s activities, and the
internationalisation goals of the institution that will naturally require the
effective incorporation of other languages. URV’s language policy docu-
ment frames this balance in the following way:
Amb aquest pla, la URV es proposa definir un model clar de política

lingüística que descansa en dos fonaments: d’una banda, l’assegurament d’una
posició sòlida per a la llengua catalana, per garantir el compliment de la funció
social de la nostra universitat i permetre l’accés al coneixement en la llengua
pròpia, i d’altra banda, l’evolució cap a un entorn universitari multilingüe, per
facilitar la poliglotització dels universitaris i la captació de recursos i talent. En
definitiva, una política lingüística de gestió del multilingüisme amb garanties
de seguretat per a la llengua catalana. (URV Language Policy, p. 7)
[With this plan, URV sets itself to define a clear model of language policy
that rests upon two bases: on the one hand, the strengthening of a solid
position for the Catalan language, in order to guarantee the fulfilling of
the social function of our university and to allow access to knowledge in
the ‘own’ language, and on the other hand, an evolution towards a mul-
tilingual university context, in order to facilitate university members in
becoming multilingual and to facilitate the attraction of resources and tal-
ent. All in all, a language policy of multilingual management with guaran-
tees for the Catalan language.]
Moving on to the plot, one theme that permeates each and every
one of the policy documents analysed is that of linguistic competence—
the need to strengthening the knowledge and use of all the different
languages found at the university, but with a particular focus on two of
them, Catalan and English.
Knowledge and use of Catalan is to be promoted as a consequence of
the legal position of the language (as the ‘own’ and official language of
Catalonia and of each university). In particular, university lecturers and
visiting students are seen as needing specific support, so that Catalan can
keep its position as the default or preferred language for the majority of
the university’s activities, particularly as the default language of teaching
and learning.
In the context of the promotion of multilingualism, the strengthen-
ing of linguistic competences in other languages, particularly English, is
seen as a key issue. Here, however, matters are a bit less straightforward.
Not infrequently, the documents refer to the need to promote linguis-
tic competence in unnamed ‘third languages’, and although English is
explicitly mentioned and sometimes used as a synonym of this ‘third
language’ label, this suggests there may be some degree of uncomfort-
ableness when discussing the role and the position of English in the
university context from the point of view of the universities. Some docu-
ments (e.g. the UdG language policy) make an explicit connection here
with Europe-wide discourses that frame multilingualism as the strength-
ening of linguistic competences in several languages by individual speak-
ers. However, in several documents (e.g. the policies of UdG, UB, and
UAB), there is a clear indication that university officials are responding
to regulatory changes of the government and their intention to intro-
duce a language requirement for students to graduate, also affecting the
ability of the universities to gain access to public funds. UAB’s policy
document formulates this in the following way:
També es tenen en compte els objectius de millora de les competencies

lingüístiques que la Generalitat de Catalunya ha establert per al finança-
ment variable per objectius de les universitats públiques catalanes. (UAB
Plan for Languages, p. 6)
[We consider as well the goals for the improvement of linguistic compe-
tences set out by the Generalitat de Catalunya in connection with the vari-
able financing of the public Catalan universities based on objectives.]
In addition to the role that these financial motives play in supporting

language competences, the picture that emerges from the documents
is an idea that, if all members of the university make good progress in
strengthening their linguistic competences, the management of lan-
guage-related issues will become easier and with fewer problems. This
becomes particularly clear when the documents discuss the principle of
linguistic security (principi de seguretat lingüística). Although this princi-
ple is referred to in several of the documents, only two of them develop
it in more depth: the documents of UdL and UPF. Both documents
develop it in very similar ways; what follows is a brief summary of how
they outline its basic tenets. As already noted, the principle requires that
information regarding the language in which a given subject will be
taught must be made publicly available with sufficient time, ideally prior
to the registration period, so that students know what language to expect.
The teacher has the right to choose any of the institution’s official lan-
guages in delivering their subject, but once established, this decision
cannot be altered. Students, for their part, have the right to express them-
selves, orally and in writing, in all course-related activities, in the official
or working language of their choice (i.e. Catalan, Spanish, or English),
although (at least in the case of UPF) if they decide to use English in a
subject that is taught in a different language, they are required to inform
the teacher beforehand. This is why the issue of linguistic competence is
particularly important—to ensure that, in any classroom, everyone has a
passive knowledge of at least two of the working languages of the insti-
tution, in addition to having active knowledge in at least one of them. In
the end, though, as the UPF policy document states:
El desconeixement o el coneixement insufficient de qualsevol d’aquestes

tres llengües [català, castellà, anglès] no és en cap cas una mancança
institucional, sinó una mancança individual, que no dóna dret, per tant, a
exigir a ningú, professor, estudiant o institució, que canviï de llengua en el

decurs de les activitats acadèmiques o institucionals. (UPF Action Plan for
Multilingualism, p. 6)
[The lack of knowledge or insufficient knowledge of one of these three

languages (Catalan, Spanish, English) is not in any case an institutional
shortcoming, but rather an individual shortcoming, and it does not give
the right to require anyone, lecturers, students, or the institution, to
change their language in conducting academic or institutional activities.]
Here we can see that the responsibility is transferred to a certain

degree to individual speakers: institutions can help by laying out the con-
ditions for their members to improve their linguistic competence in dif-
ferent languages, but in the end, it is a matter of individuals and their
decisions and choices. This is a common thread across the different doc-
uments, many of which incorporate specific measures on how to help
the different sorts of members of the university community to improve
their language competences. UPF and UdG include other short sections
in their documents emphasising the learning of languages beyond class-
room contexts and in more informal situations, although when it comes
to promoting the learning of English informally, UdG makes a reference
to the role of native speakers of the language:
Crear espais d’oci o facilitar estones de lleure en les quals l’anglès sigui la
llengua d’ús: English dinner (sopars o dinars internacionals), amb presèn-
cia de nadius anglesos, projeccions de pel·lícules amb forums, assistència al
teatre o a concerts, etc. (UdG Operational Plan for Multilingualism, p. 4)
[To create spaces of leisure and facilitate free time activities in which
English is the language used: English dinners (international dinner or
lunch times), with the presence of native English people, the screening of
films with discussion sessions, going to the theatre or concerts, etc.]
However, little reference is made to the idea that other kinds of com-
petences might be needed as well as linguistic competences. An excep-
tion to this is UPC’s policy document, which includes a section on
interculturality and the idea that it is important to foster intercultural
competences among the members of the university.
Finally, one last point to be made is that Spanish does not appear in
the plot as frequently as one might expect. As already noted, when it is
mentioned, Spanish is frequently associated with a discourse of language

rights: as an official language of Catalonia and of Catalan universities,
speakers have the right to use Spanish in conducting their activities at
the university, a right that is to be protected and respected. However,
despite its status as a language of wider communication, reference to
Spanish as an important language for internationalisation purposes is
very limited. Only the UAB and UOC policy documents contain such
explicit references. UOC’s is particularly relevant, since it mentions the
importance of Spanish for the university’s goal of expanding its pres-
ence in Latin America and the rest of Spain, something that the univer-
sity has been attempting in recent years. In addition, it is important to
note here that reference to the Spanish language throughout the UOC
document uses the Catalan label llengua espanyola and not llengua castel-
lana. In the original in Catalan (as well as in Spanish), the two terms are
not exactly synonymous, and they can carry different politically loaded
values. However, on a more denotational level, which is how we read it
being used in UOC’s document, llengua espanyola may be used to refer
to Spanish in its worldwide position. With this in mind, and given the
university’s strategic development in Latin America, it is probably not a
coincidence that UOC’s policy document uses llengua espanyola rather
than llengua castellana:
Al costat de la llengua catalana, el model multilingüe de la UOC assigna

un paper especial a la llengua espanyola, també oficial a Catalunya i vehi-
cle de projecció internacional, en el marc de la internacionalització de la
Universitat a països de Llatinoamèrica, i també pel paper estratègic que té
en el desplegament de la UOC en el conjunt de l’Estat Espanyol. (General
Principles of UOC’s Language Policy, p. 7)
[Together with the Catalan language, the multilingual model of UOC

assigns a special role to the Spanish language, also official in Catalonia and
a vehicle of international projection, in the framework of the international-
isation of the University to Latin American countries, and also because of
its strategic role in the expansion of UOC to the rest of Spain.]
Summing up, the documents analysed present a narrative in which

different languages and agents take on different roles and positions, a
narrative that presents the current stance taken by the universities insti-
tutionally with regard to the management of language matters in the
higher education sector in Catalonia. Taking Prior’s (2014) approach to

its full extent, bringing together the above items in terms of chronology,
characters, and plot, in what follows we attempt to capture succinctly the
overarching narrative that emerges from the language policy documents
of Catalonian universities analysed above. Note that this is not an exact
reflection of the sociolinguistic reality at Catalan universities, but rather
the imagined/desired scenario that emerges from the narrative in the
documents analysed.
Public universities in Catalonia have an extended trajectory of
engaging with language policy issues and debates about language in
higher education; in some cases (UB and UPC), explicit language
policy frameworks date back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when
the institutions established their commitment to the revitalisation
of Catalan and to its normalisation in the area of teaching and
learning.
There exists, therefore, a very strong consensus across the board and
by all public universities in Catalonia to single out Catalan as the
institution’s ‘own’ and official language, a language that is in need
of specific attention and promotion, particularly again in the area of
teaching and learning. However, as a result of higher education devel-
opments throughout Europe over the past two decades, a transition
towards a scenario of an enhanced level of multilingualism is now
necessary and inevitable. In that respect, the Catalan government has
recently taken action so that universities focus their attention on lan-
guage matters, and specifically on the linguistic competences of their
graduates from all fields and disciplines. Such linguistic competences
are usually associated with acquiring skills in a ‘third’ language, but
in reality, it is English that is most frequently referred to under that
label. Overall, multilingualism is seen as a resource, an asset enabling
institutions and individuals to become more competitive. Still, one
specificity of Catalan universities is that they are already bilingual in
nature, with Catalan and Spanish as regularly used languages. Despite
that, Spanish is rarely mentioned as being an asset or a resource, but
it is rather considered in the context of a language rights discourse,
given its status as an official language in Catalonia, together with
Catalan.
Students, lecturers, and other staff all have language rights and obli-
gations that they need to abide by. When it comes to the languages of
instruction, lecturers have the right to choose the official or working lan-
guage in which they will deliver their subject. They have the obligation,
at the same time, to make their decision publicly available before the reg-
istration period, so that students can know the language of instruction
beforehand. They also have a duty to allow students to express them-
selves, in written form and orally, in whichever official language they
wish. Students, for their part, have the right to receive support in order
to attain further competence in different languages, they have the right
to choose any of the official languages in order to express themselves in
class and in their exams, but they do not have the right to demand that
the lecturer change the language of instruction. Both students and teach-
ers are expected to contribute to an atmosphere of receptive multilin-
gualism in class that is welcoming of everyone expressing themselves in
their preferred language, but that is demanding at the same time in that
it requires an extra effort from all parties.
In this context, even though universities are seen to play an impor-
tant role in helping all their members to continue improving their com-
petence in different languages, it is, in the end, an individual’s personal
responsibility to take action on that and to attempt to improve his or
her language skills. There is, of course, a wide array of university units,
departments, and language support services that the universities offer
and that they encourage their members to use. In that regard, it is clear
that the more proficient the members of the university become in all the
languages in contact, namely Catalan, Spanish, and English, the easier
it will be to manage situations of complex multilingualism, particularly
in classroom contexts. In order to make multilingualism in classrooms
more manageable, the principle of linguistic security is envisaged as a
key element in order to harmonise the different rights and duties of all
parties.
Overall, multilingualism can be both an asset and a challenge, a
resource and a threat. Indeed, the act of combining the legal obliga-
tion to award Catalan a position of prominence with finding spaces for
English in an already fraught context of Catalan–Spanish bilingualism
is certainly a source of headaches for university officials, headaches that
are exacerbated at the moment by government intervention. In sum,
the position of Catalan as a historically minoritised language is seen as
the source of legitimacy for positive action on its behalf and also as the
source of challenge for its sustained presence in higher education.
Conclusions
Catalan universities represent a particular case of the use of a ‘medi-
um-sized’ language (Vila and Bretxa 2013) in higher education, hav-
ing what would seem to be sufficient historical, sociological, and political
weight to ensure a comfortable presence of the language in the sphere of
higher education. As Vila (2015, p. 5) explains, though, “medium-sized
languages are extremely sensitive to the legal and political factors of their
nation states”, and this certainly seems to be the case here, for what we
have seen is how university language policy documents in Catalonia
respond to the pressures from different types of agents, both macro and
micro. As in other multilingual settings, in both northern and southern
European countries, university language policy documents present a stance
in favour of creating opportunities in which different languages each have
their niche in their specific university contexts (Lindström and Sylvin
2014), a stance that indicates an official commitment to multilingualism
(Cots et al. 2012). To the extent that it can shape both the circulating dis-
courses in place and the interactional orders (Hult 2015), such an institu-
tional stance is important, as it reflects each university’s official orientation,
a stance that seems to emerge also in the presentation of universities’ lin-
guistic realities online (Elliott et al. 2018). However, at the end of the day,
we know that the actual practices of end-users of existing language policies
may depend on a large number of factors (Spolsky 2004). Taken together,
the accumulation of linguistic practices can tilt the balance towards the use
of one language more than another, and languages of wider communica-
tion tend to function centripetally in multilingual encounters: the more
multilingual a situation, the higher the chances that a language of wider
communication will be used, something that nowadays favours English
more and more (de Swaan 2001). Nevertheless, for the time being at least,
it seems Catalan will continue to enjoy a relatively safe position at univer-
sities in Catalonia, but the politicisation of language issues through their
linking to economic measures of public funding for universities would
seem to mark a new development in connection to sociolinguistic matters
in Catalan higher education, both in the short and the long term.
In Chapter 5, we will return to the analysis presented above and look
further into the emerging key issues in the formal language policies of
Catalan universities. Before that, though, let us turn in the next chapter
to the lived experience of language policy, and look ethnographically at
the implications of the internationalisation initiatives at a small university
in Catalonia.
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CHAPTER 4
Clashing Stances Towards Catalan:

An Ethnographic Study in a Small
University in Catalonia
Abstract  A case study of one Catalan university is presented in this

chapter. The study examines how the language policies aimed at regulat-
ing the linguistic resources available at that higher education institution
in Catalonia are interpreted by three different sets of agents at the uni-
versity: international students, members of the administrative staff, and
members of the teaching staff. The data were collected ethnographically,
primarily by means of individual and group interviews and through par-
ticipant observation of classroom practices and other events organised by
the university to welcome international students. The analysis is devel-
oped from a discourse-analytical perspective and focuses on how individ-
uals construct their stance towards the official language policies of the
UC. The analysis shows how the different stakeholders construct con-
trasting interpretations of the principles of the language policy, highlight-
ing the existence of tensions and ambiguities. The chapter highlights and
explores the sources and the consequences of the clash between the dif-
ferent ideological positions at the university.
Keywords  Linguistic practices and ideologies · Ethnography · Stance ·

Interactional sociolinguistics · Case study

A Small Trilingual University:

International Mobility and Language Use
The site for this study is a public university, referred to here using the
pseudonym UC, located in the interior of Catalonia, in an area where
slightly over 60% of inhabitants consider Catalan their main language of
daily communication, according to the latest statistics available from the
Catalan Institute of Statistics (Idescat 2013). This is one of the highest
percentages of Catalan use in Catalonia, and stands in marked contrast to
other areas such as the metropolitan area of Barcelona where, according
to the same source, only around 28% of the population use Catalan as
a daily language of communication. Probably due to its small size (just
above 12,000 students in 2017–2018 according to information pub-
lished on the UC’s website1), the number of international students who
select this university as a host institution for studying abroad is relatively
small. In the academic year 2016–2017, which is the last year for which
data are available, the UC received 324 international exchange students.
In the 2010–2011 academic year, when the data for this study were col-
lected, the UC received almost 300 exchange students from thirty-one
different countries. Of the teaching and administrative staff, 193 employ-
ees participated in mobility programmes in 2016–2017. The increasing
presence of international students and staff led to a new multicultural
reality which, as presented earlier in this book and argued by Cots
(2008), has resulted in the articulation of the language policy documents
to manage new forms of multilingualism.
Similarly to the other public universities across Catalonia (see
Chapter 3), the UC has an officially approved trilingual language pol-
icy plan which includes Catalan and Spanish as official languages, and
English as a language of academic work. However, Catalan is specifically
highlighted as the university’s ‘own’ language and the preferred lan-
guage of communication, thus engaging with the language revitalisation
campaign which has been active in Catalonia since 1983 (see Generalitat
de Catalunya [Gencat] 2013 for a view of the thirty-year evolution of
the language normalisation campaign). This campaign has aimed to
reverse the language shift to Spanish which has been ongoing since the
1 Explicit reference information for the UC’s official documents has been intentionally
omitted, to preserve anonymity.

4 CLASHING STANCES TOWARDS CATALAN: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC … 69
transition to democracy in Spain, and to correct grievances endured

during the previous decades (Lladonosa Latorre 2013).
The distribution of languages used for teaching at the UC shows a
clear prevalence of Catalan, something true for almost all public uni-
versities in Catalonia, as we saw in Chapter 3. Specifically, during the
2010–2011 academic year, when the data that we analyse were collected,
the languages used for undergraduate teaching purposes at the UC were
distributed as follows: Catalan represented around 65%, Spanish some
30%, and English almost 5% in oral and written use and for teaching
materials. These numbers show that, although Catalan is a minority lan-
guage in the context of Spain and even in the context of Catalonia, it
is the majority language within the institution. In contrast, English, a
widely spoken lingua franca in the global world, is the language which
is employed the least for teaching purposes. Considering the use of lan-
guages within the UC and in its surrounding area, Catalan represents the
unmarked language choice both at the UC and in the surrounding area,
but not in other parts of Catalonia where Spanish is the usual language
of communication.
The Study: An Ethnography of Language Policy

and Internationalisation
The study presented in this chapter is part of a larger project which

focused on the ambiguities and tensions between internationalisation
and language policies at three universities in the bilingual territories of
the Basque Country and Catalonia in Spain and Wales in the United
Kingdom which are actively engaged in reversing the language shift
towards the majority language.2 The distribution of languages in these
contexts is a highly sensitive issue because speakers of minority lan-
guages can feel under pressure from dominant widely spoken languages
(such as Spanish or English) that facilitate communication in linguisti-
cally heterogeneous contexts, and this can lead them to reassert their
right to use their own language. According to Baker (1992, as cited in
2 The project is ‘International Universities in Bilingual Communities (Catalonia, Basque
Country and Wales): A Research Project’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation (FFI2008-00585/FILO, 2009–2012) and its principal investigator is Josep M.
Cots.
Cots et al. 2012), this can lead to the emergence of a ‘bunker attitude’,
in which minority language speakers adopt a defensive stance to protect
the minority language, and this leads them to reject multilingualism.
The UC certainly does not escape complexities of this type. On one
hand, the institution is perceived as a space for the social and economic
promotion of its territory but, on the other, it is considered as an institu-
tion that is responsible for safeguarding the cultural identity of its terri-
tory (Cots et al. 2012).
In this chapter we analyse the tensions and ambiguities that emerge
from attempts to reconcile the internationalisation and language revi-
talisation agendas in the context of this small international university in
Catalonia. More specifically, we are interested in analysing the stances
that the members of the academic community construct towards the
regulation of the languages of teaching at the UC. While the data come
from students and academic and administrative staff, a great deal of
attention is paid to the voices of international students. The majority of
international students tend to know some Spanish when they arrive in
Catalonia, but they have little or no experience of Catalan and have no
interest in learning it (Atkinson and Moriarty 2012). However, the nota-
ble presence of Catalan in higher education and the high symbolic value
ascribed to Catalan in the local context can (at least theoretically) lead
students to reconsider this option.
Fieldwork and Data
The data for this study were gathered in the academic year 2010–2011,
over a period of ten months. The fieldwork started in September 2010
with the arrival of international exchange students at the UC, and the
first events which were observed formed part of the welcoming activi-
ties organised by two bodies of the UC, the Office of International
Relations and the Language Service. These activities were aimed at intro-
ducing the newly arrived students to the linguistic and cultural context
of Catalonia and the university. Part of these welcoming activities was a
Catalan language course which lasted two weeks and was combined with
cultural activities (including a visit to museums and ancient buildings in
the city where UC is located, and a day trip to Barcelona) as well as a
food-tasting activity and other events which were intended to let stu-
dents know about the organisation of the welcome weeks and the admin-
istrative procedures that they had to follow to enrol in their courses for
the rest of the term. The two welcome weeks represent one of the most
intense periods of data collection during the ten months, since about
fifty hours of observation were made then (with the Catalan course on its
own involving between five and six hours of observation per day).
The data in this study include field notes collected via participant
observation of classes and events organised by the UC, audiovisual
recordings, interviews and focus groups with teaching and administra-
tive staff and international students, and also materials gathered during
the observations, with the field notes and the audiovisual recordings rep-
resenting the bulk of the data. The data include 79 field-note entries,
24 audiovisual recordings of classes, 6 audiovisual recordings of welcom-
ing events and cultural activities, 6 focus-group discussion sessions, and
20 interviews over the ten months of fieldwork. Each separate field-note
entry corresponds to a single event at which an observation was entered
into the ethnographer’s diary, independent of the length of the event or
the time when it occurred. For example, on many occasions, field notes
were taken in two classes on the same day, and this counts as two data
entries. Classes lasted between ninety minutes and two hours; the length
of other events varied significantly, for instance, a day trip to Barcelona
involved some ten hours of observation. Table 4.1 schematically presents
the data collected, the techniques employed to gather them, and when
they were collected.
The aim of combining different types of data is triangulation, a
resource within qualitative research to provide external validity (Erickson
1990). According to Saule (2002, p. 184), all ethnographies use trian-
gulation through different sources of data or different data collection
techniques with the goal of validating the results, since consistency across
sources creates a more solid argument about what is going on in partici-
pants’ lives. Combining sources and techniques enables the researcher to
obtain a deeper and more comprehensive picture of the research site, and
also to check whether there were any misinterpretations.
A crucial aspect of ethnographic research is the attention that is given
to the role of the researcher as an agent that conditions the results of the
study during the process of data collection, analysis, and writing. Agar
(2006) argues that any two ethnographies carried out in the same setting
and at the same time but by different researchers would lead to different
studies. In the case of our study, the ethnographer was a female Catalan
PhD student in her late twenties who had previous experience as an inter-
national student and as a teacher of Spanish abroad. She was fluent in
Table 4.1 Data collection timeline

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Catalan, Spanish, English, and Italian, and spoke some German, and the
different languages that she employed to communicate with the partic-
ipants affected the relationships in the field and her own self-projected
stance and affiliation with the languages used in the multilingual site of
the UC, which ultimately affected the type of data collected (see Gallego-
Balsà 2018 for a deeper and more extended account of this matter).
Participant recruitment adopted a ‘snowball technique’ (Brewer
2000), by which participants bring in additional participants. The first
contacts were made with the administrative staff who were in charge of
welcoming international students and organising cultural activities over
the academic year. They gave the researcher access to the activities, and
established contact between the ethnographer and the teachers as well as
the international students. Table 4.2 presents a schematic description of
the participants who appear in this paper.
The academic staff participated in focus groups separately from the
students, and the administrative staff was interviewed individually to
avoid hierarchical relationships within the same focus group (Krueger

and Casey 2000). Separate focus groups were held for the subject lectur-
ers and the language instructors, because it was considered that language
teachers may represent issues about language differently from the subject
teachers. The systematic data collection during the students’ academic
activities did not begin until one month after they had arrived at the UC.
From the second month onwards, observations occurred twice a week,
with the exception of those weeks in which there were other research
activities organised, such as focus-group discussions or interviews.
Following the fieldwork, the data were organised. Following Emerson
et al. (1995), the initial analysis of field notes was conducted in three
steps: reading the field notes to establish a distance from them and writ-
ing notes to organise the emerging interpretations; coding the field notes
to label the blocks of data; and extracting the ontological assumptions
made when collecting the field notes. Whenever recurring themes were
detected, they were marked in different colours and finally extracted
in blocks. These steps already constituted a first level of analysis, since
the chunks of data selected would then be the main focus of analysis.
In addition, the field notes had to be translated in English to be under-
standable for an English-speaking audience. As for the audiovisual data,
the researchers listened to the recordings and transcribed those extracts
that were directly connected with the aims of the research. To respect
the privacy of the participants, names have been changed.
Table 4.2 Participants
Participant type Position Pseudonym
Academic staff 4 instructors employed by Maite, Sílvia, Maria, and Carme

the Language Service
3 subject lecturers Pep from the Faculty of Law, Economics
and Tourism
Rita and Lluís from the Faculty of Arts
Students Jeroen from Belgium (Flanders)
Min from Korea
Christina from England
Ullie, Hanna, and Nadine from Germany
Dolores from Mexico
Administrative Employed by the Language Xavi, in charge of the welcome weeks for
staff Service international students
Stance and Interactional Sociolinguistics

In this chapter, we are analysing how members of the UC position them-
selves with respect to the university language policies and construct their
ideology in practice. To do that, we adopt the notion of ‘stance’ as the
conceptual tool which will guide our analysis, and we analyse it from an
interactionist perspective. Du Bois (2007) defines stance as a three-step
process in which speakers evaluate an object, and as a result adopt a posi-
tion towards that object, and this in turn results in relations of affiliation
or disaffiliation with others. According to Bucholtz and Hall (2005), a
speaker who habitually takes a particular stance may become associated
with a particular social position that is, at the same time, associated with
a particular social identity.
Heller (2001, pp. 252–253) defines the interactionist perspective as
one “which characterizes reality as a social construct, and which locates
the process of construction in the interaction between an individual and
his or her world, most importantly as mediated by interaction with other
people”. Interaction is the site where individuals engage in creating dis-
course and situating themselves and others in connection with these dis-
courses. Within an interactionist approach, Du Bois (2007) focuses on
stance as a process and provides what could be defined as a strictly inter-
actional scheme for the study of stance at the level of action, emphasis-
ing turn-by-turn interaction. He presents the process of stance-taking as
consisting of three steps (evaluation, positioning, and alignment). This
triadic conceptualisation emphasises that the three steps develop interac-
tionally across turns and presents stances as emerging from the interac-
tion. They are constructed and negotiated at a micro level through the
alignment, whether positive or negative, between interlocutors. Stance is
primarily an intersubjective construction rather than a subjective attempt
to position oneself in the world (Keisanen 2007). In a sequence of turns
a ‘stance leader’ may leave traces in the ‘stance follower’ (Keisanen 2007,
p. 161), since the act of alignment takes up a previous evaluation and
positioning, ratifies it, and depicts itself as an act of stance. This delimits
the range of choices that an interlocutor has for positioning herself or
himself, as stance-taking is always shaped by the interactional context.
The three steps in the enactment of stance also take place interde-
pendently, which means that even when one of them appears alone, the
other two remain implicit. For instance, the evaluation of an object, even
without any immediate response, implies a simultaneous positioning of
the participants in connection with the object evaluated. This evaluation
may be, at the same time, a response to a previous stance taken in

another place and time by the same or another person. This suggests that
stances are involved in a broader dialogical chain, a more durable one,
which can result in the association of particular acts of stance with par-
ticular subject positions (Damari 2010).
Ochs (1996) argues that a display of stance can be of two sorts, epistemic
and affective. Epistemic stances display the degree of certainty that the
interlocutors have towards the object of a stance, while affective stances are
related to emotional states in connection with this object. She argues that
displays of affect and certainty are culturally grounded because they include
a variety of indexicalities that situate the stance in specific moral and social
frames. These social frames might recognise particular regimes for feeling
and knowing and ways for expressing them. They also legitimate ways of
evaluating people and their stances, and they establish relationships of
authority not only at an interactional level but also on a broader social level.
The concept of epistemic stance overlaps with the concept of modality
which was developed by Halliday (1985) within the framework of systemic
functional grammar. According to Halliday, modality can be of two kinds:
epistemic and deontic. Epistemic modality refers to the degree of certainty
that speakers display in their utterances while deontic modality is related to
the level of obligatoriness projected. The grammatical means which carry
modality meaning include lexical choices such as the verb (for instance,
the difference in meaning between employing or not a modal verb such
as have to or must) and adjuncts of modality which accompany the verb
(e.g. certainly, possibly, likely, sure). We consider that looking at both types
of modality is necessary to have a full understanding of what people do
when they take up a stance and how aspects such as the display of author-
ity through high levels of certainty and deonticity may affect the intersub-
jective relations constructed in the course of an interaction.
Analysis
The analysis has been organised in three main parts. First, we present the
context for stance-taking, which is based on the analysis of how the UC
presents the languages of its trilingual repertoire to the international stu-
dents. Following that, we show how Catalan is represented. Finally, we
analyse in separate subsections how the different agents who participated
in this study respond to the issue of the use and status of different lan-
guages in teaching and learning: the subject content lecturers, the inter-
national students, and the language instructors.
First Things First: The Context for Stance-Taking

It is important to begin by describing the way in which the university
presents the sociolinguistic reality of the university to international stu-
dents, because there are discourses around language that have been con-
structed prior to the students’ arrival, and what we will find in the data
is a response to that situation. To do that, then, we will briefly explore
the welcome weeks, since these represent the initial face-to-face con-
tact between the international students and the Language Service, a
body which was specifically created for the promotion and protection of
Catalan as a teaching language at the university.
During the first two weeks of their stay, international students go
through a process of immersion in Catalan language and culture that
combines an intensive Catalan language training course with a series of
‘cultural’ activities. Students attend the Catalan language course between
five and six hours a day, five days a week, and for almost two weeks. The
cultural activities are offered separately from the language course, in the
evenings and on weekends. These activities represent an opportunity for
the institution to introduce students to a series of cultural and political
institutions that are presented as key elements of the sociocultural con-
text of the UC. Although the language course and the cultural activities
are not compulsory, they are highly recommended by the institution on
its web page, and the majority of international students attend both.
The welcome programme concentrates exclusively on aspects that
form part of the specific cultural identity of Catalonia (language, food,
history, heritage, music, and politics), and does not include any activi-
ties that relate to the wider cultural context of Spain. In addition, the
language training course is available only in Catalan, with no option of
Spanish, the other official language of the region and official language
of the institution. This choice is explained in Extract 4.1 by one of the
officers of the Language Service, who is in charge of the organisation of
the welcome weeks.
Extract 4.1 Catalan should not be perceived as an obstacle (from interview
with Xavi, June 2011)
1 Xavi la idea és que quan un arribi aquí (.) the idea is that when they arrive here (.) they
2 no vegi el català com un obstacle shouldn’t see Catalan as an obstacle
3 Lídia exacte exactly
4 Xavi que cada vegada passa menys e it happens less frequently now right
5 Lídia mhm mhm
In this extract we can see that there is a circulating discourse on

‘Catalan as an obstacle’ (lines 1–2) which seems to have been con-
structed by previous generations of international students (line 4), and
that the UC is working to confront and dissipate this negative view.
Therefore, the first stance of the UC towards Catalan in the context of
receiving international students—and the point from which our ethnog-
raphy departs—is ‘Catalan is not an obstacle’. From here on, what we
will find (see Extracts 4.2 and 4.3) is that the UC uses a series of argu-
ments, via diverse channels, with the aim of persuading international stu-
dents to see Catalan as less of a challenge.
The arguments that appear in Extract 4.2, and which present Catalan
as not being an obstacle, start with the simple fact that an intensive
Catalan course is made available for international students and that this
course is free of charge (lines 1–2). The course is presented as not very
demanding, as Xavi states that it does not actually lead students to learn
the language but offers them some basic notions (lines 3–4). The actual
learning of Catalan would seem to be expected to occur when the course
is combined with other activities, such as watching television (which is
generally considered an entertainment activity) as well as more uncon-
scious and naturally occurring activities like reading signs in Catalan
around the city (lines 6–7). The fourth argument appearing in this extract
is based on the typological similarity between Catalan and other Romance
languages, such as Spanish (line 9), which projects the idea that those stu-
dents who speak Spanish (the majority) already speak some Catalan, even
though they have never studied it. Overall, then, the level of effort and
commitment demanded by the university is represented as very low.
With this in mind, it could be interpreted that the university aims at
developing international students’ competence in understanding Catalan
to avoid shifting into Spanish. In fact, later in his intervention (from
line 11), Xavi reformulates the university’s pursuit of teaching Catalan
to international students into preventing a shift to another language
(lines 19–21). Since Spanish is the most commonly shared lingua franca
between the international students and the local community, it could be
interpreted that the shift that the teaching of Catalan is trying to avoid is
into Spanish. This resonates with the discourse of language revitalisation
campaigns in Catalonia since the transition to democracy, mentioned
above. The responsibility of preventing a shift to Spanish appears as
something in which both parties (local members of the UC and interna-
tional students) are involved (lines 19–21). Xavi presents Catalan as the
Extract 4.2 Catalan is the responsibility of both sides (from interview with
Xavi, June 2011)
1 Xavi bueno tenim unes eines tens un curs que well we have tools there is a course that
2 et fem gratuït abans amb aquest curs we offer for free before with this course
3 no aprens català però quatre you don’t learn Catalan but they get an
4 pinzellades idea
5 Lídia sí yes
6 Xavi més el dia a dia si mires la te:le: (.) si plus the everyday life you watch TV (.) if
7 veus rètols si (.) te vas situant també you see signs if (.) you situate yourself
8 Lídia sí i tant i si ja coneixes alguna llengua: sure and if you already know a: language
9 Xavi romànica encara més Romance language even more
10 Lídia mhm mhm
11 Xavi és que tampoc han de marxar d’aquí in fact they do not need to leave this place
12 parlant català es que tampoc és la idea speaking Catalan it isn’t the idea either
13 però la idea és que no haguem de but the idea is that it’s not us who
14 canviar naltres tampoc ntx switches either ntx
15 Lídia no no
16 Xavi home en part sí que has de canviar una well actually you do need to switch a little
17 mica però bit although
18 Lídia sí yes
19 Xavi adoptes no però entens no però you adopt right you understand right
20 tampoc ha de ser que hem de canviar tot but we shouldn’t change everything and
21 nosaltres i ells no res they nothing
Italics: Onomatopoeic expressions
unmarked language of communication at the UC, and its status emerges

as unnegotiable (notice the use of the high level of deonticity in the use
of the modal verb in ‘shouldn’t change’ in line 20).
To sum up, the aim of the intensive introductory Catalan course
seems to be to provide students with sufficient linguistic resources in
Catalan so that they do not alter the academic sociolinguistic environ-
ment. This is achieved by presenting Catalan as easy—in terms of how
much money and effort the students need to invest to learn it—and by
deconstructing a pre-existing discourse around Catalan that represents it
as an obstacle for international students. It is also interesting to see that
the status of Catalan as the preferred language of communication, which
is explicitly articulated in the language policy documents of universities
across Catalonia (see Chapter 3), is far from contested here. The data
show a very close, almost literal reproduction of the position of the UC
language policy on this issue.
Catalan as a Legitimate Language

The reproduction of the language policy by the Language Service officer
is one of the many means by which the UC legitimates and regulates the
use of languages in the context of international student mobility. The
legitimisation of Catalan as a language of instruction is found across dif-
ferent types of data. At the highest level, the web pages of the UC con-
tain a section where the university presents the languages of tuition.
Catalan is presented as a language with equal status to other ‘national’
or ‘state’ languages, a language typologically similar to other Romance
languages, a widely spoken language in Catalonia, a language which
teachers have a legal right to use, and a language which is a bonus for
international students who come to the UC, since they can learn two
languages instead of just one. The reproduction of these data has been
intentionally avoided. If we bear in mind the interview with Xavi, the
Language Service officer (Extracts 4.1 and 4.2), we can notice resonances
in connection with the discourse of Catalan being an easy-to-learn lan-
guage because it is similar to other Romance languages. Also, the docu-
ment states that there is a legal right for teachers and local students to use
Catalan, and that they can choose to express themselves in any of the offi-
cial languages. By indicating that speakers have a right to use Catalan, the
web page is once again positioning the use of Catalan as non-negotiable.
The discourse of the right to use Catalan also permeates the Catalan
language course. Fieldnote 4.1 comes from the field notes collected on
the first day of class, and shows the transcription of a teacher’s presenta-
tion of the situation of Catalan at the UC.
Fieldnote 4.1 Teachers are FREE to choose (field notes from the Catalan lan-
guage course, Maite speaking, 30 August 2010)
1 “Some teachers teach their lessons in Catalan and they are FREE to choose among
the three
2 languages. In English, there are only a few, but they exist. It is very important to
learn
3 Catalan for the lessons. 80 per cent of the lexicon in Catalan is the same as in
Spanish. If you
4 know Spanish, you will have NO problem, don’t be afraid! If you have a Romance
language
5 as a mother tongue, no problem! You will learn very quickly! If you don’t speak
any
6 Romance language, don’t worry, a lot of words are similar to English”.
In fieldnote 4.1, Catalan is the original language employed by the

teacher but English is the language in which the fieldnotes were taken.
Apart from any informative function that this intervention may have had,
the instructor’s words can be interpreted as simultaneously trying to per-
suade students to learn the local language by highlighting the fact that
Catalan is very important for the students in terms of being able to fol-
low courses during their stay. She increases her epistemic stance by warn-
ing students that the academic staff are “free” choose to teach in Catalan
(line 1). As in Extract 4.2 and in the webpage, there is an implied ref-
erence to an institutional policy that protects the right of the academic
staff to speak in any of the three languages which are classified as official
by the language policy documents. This means that, in the event that a
teacher chooses to speak in Catalan, students cannot force them to switch
to Spanish. Every time that the discourse of Catalan as a legal right is
activated, there is an implicit reference to the principle of linguistic secu-
rity, a principle which, as we will see next, is not free from tensions.
The Lecturers’ Stance: Between Teaching the Language

and Teaching the Content
In spite of the efforts of the UC to present Catalan as an easy-to-learn
and necessary language, its intensive presence especially at the beginning
of the international students’ stay is not free from criticisms. These crit-
icisms appeared in conversations with academic faculty staff and inter-
national students, probably due to the fact that it is in the interactions
between these two that the language policies become more complicated
to apply. In those interactions, a switch into one of the two international
majority languages which are official at the UC (Spanish or English) may
facilitate communication, while continuing to speak Catalan may repre-
sent a less practical choice.
Extract 4.3 shows how Lluís, a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, evalu-
ates the intensive Catalan course at the beginning of the students’ stay as
overwhelming.
In extract 4.3, Lluís wonders if Chinese students might feel over-
whelmed by the intense exposure of international students to Catalan at
the beginning of their stay. Lluís positions himself in favour of teaching
Catalan but does not align with the method (lines 2–6), thereby con-
structing a new ambivalent stance which challenges the UC’s practices.
Despite Rita, Lídia, and Pep seeming to express alignment by nodding
Extract 4.3 Catalan, yes: Little by little (from focus group with lecturers, June
2011)
1 Lluís m: comencen a arribar gent com per m: people like the Chinese students start
2 exemple els xinesos [...] se’ls pot arriving start arriving [...] they can be
3 introduir com deies tu [points at Pep] de introduced as you said [points at Pep]
4 mica en mica […] si tu els hi vas little by little [...] if you introduce it little
5 introduint poc a poc i no en un dia o en by little and not in one day or one week
6 una setmana pues s’espanten because they are scared
7 Rita [nods] [nods]
8 Pep [nods] [nods]
9 Lídia clar sure
10 Lluís […] jo dic la meva impressió el que […] I say my impression what I have also
11 també he dit a les persones de la casa said to the people in this university
12 Rita [nods] [nods]
13 Lluís de que el català sí però amb una that Catalan yes but with a specific
14 determinada pedagogia que pot ser útil pedagogy it can be useful
(lines 7–9), Lluís seems to interpret their silence as disagreement and,

given the danger of losing face, he presents his stance as a personal and
not general opinion and adds that he has already told other members
of staff about his stance (lines 10–11), ascribing to himself the virtue
of being honest, which helps him to save face. Rita nodding in the fol-
lowing turn (line 12), and Lluís concludes the verbalisation of his stance
with a recommendation: ‘Catalan yes but with a specific pedagogy it can
be useful’ (line 14).
One of the concerns constructed by the lecturers relates to the
demands of the language policy and, more specifically, the principle of
linguistic security, which makes it compulsory for them to decide the lan-
guage that they will use in their subjects before the course starts. Pep,
who is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Economics and Tourism, reports
on problems in applying the principle of linguistic security, projecting
a certain degree of struggle between giving priority to the medium of
instruction or to the content of the subject.
In extract 4.4, Pep raises the question of what is more important, the
content of the subject or the language in which it is taught (lines 1–3).
He positions himself as being in favour of teaching using a language
that students can understand and giving priority to the transmission of
knowledge. He constructs his positioning by providing an example of
a hypothetical situation where a subject has been planned in Spanish in
order to accommodate to international students but where, in the end,
there are no international students and the teacher finds himself teach-
ing in Spanish to a class of Catalan-speaking local students (lines 5–11).
After presenting that hypothetical situation, he feels he has set the scene
Extract 4.4 Teaching the language or teaching the content? (from focus group
with subject content lecturers, June 2011)
1 Pep arriba un moment que sembla més at some point it looks like the language of
2 important la llengua en la que es dóna instruction is more important than the
3 que la pròpia assignatura subject itself
4 Lídia sí: ye:s
5 Pep […] a lo millor doncs per això perquè […] maybe because of this because there
6 tens Erasmus no sé et planteges are Erasmus students I mean you try
7 l’assignatura (.) una assignatura més making the subject more open by holding
8 oberta en castellà i después arribat el it in Spanish and later when you arrive in
9 moment resulta que no tens cap Erasmus class you find that there aren’t any
10 i que tots els que tens són catalans Erasmus and all the students are Catalan
11 aleshores què fas (.) estàs obligat a fer what do you do then (.) you are forced to
12 l’assignatura en castellà/ jo crec que la do the subject in Spanish/ I think that this
13 cosa hauria de ser bastant més flexible (.) issue should be much more flexible (.)
14 no/ i el que que el que tindria que passar right/ and what what should happen is
15 és que lo important és l’assignatura what is important is the subject the
16 l’assignatura ha de primer subject must prevail
and gained enough credibility to clearly position himself in favour of giv-

ing priority to the content of the subject rather than the announced lan-
guage of instruction (lines 11–15). Pep states that the situation should
be more flexible (lines 12–13) and that the subject should be the priority
(lines 13–15). The high level of deonticity within ‘should happen’ (lines
14–15), together with the syntactic dislocation in ‘what is important
is the subject’ (line 16), progressively increases his epistemic stance to
finally achieve the climax of his contribution and deliver his verdict ‘the
subject must prevail’ (line 16), leaving no space for contestation.
The principle of linguistic security was created with the aim of safe-
guarding the linguistic rights of speakers of Catalan, which as a minority
language needs to be protected from a shift to Spanish or English, two
languages of international scope which are also official at the university
and could both be potentially used for instruction. Pep’s reported hypo-
thetical situation in Extract 4.4 highlights an issue with this principle.
Lecturers who wish to follow the principle and avoid linguistic tensions
can program a subject in Spanish (which is the most commonly used lin-
gua franca in Catalonia between locals and foreigners) so that interna-
tional students can follow it. However this action actually runs counter
to the raison d’être of the principle of linguistic security: teachers who
would usually teach in Catalan could decide to teach in Spanish to make
their course more attractive for international students.
The Responses of International Students: A Monolingual Institution

in a Bilingual Context
The bilingualism of the local context together with the intense efforts
of the UC to facilitate the learning of Catalan by international students
from the very first moment of the welcome weeks seem to turn Catalan
into an object of concern. When we look at the students’ responses, the
UC’s investment to counteract the discourse of ‘Catalan as a problem’
seems justified—as we can see in Fieldnote 4.2, students are clearly wor-
ried about it, despite not having experienced any problems yet.
Fieldnote 4.2 Worried about Catalan: First moments of the Catalan language
course (from field notes, 30 August 2010, 11 a.m.)
1 […] Inside the class two students, one from Mexico and one from Korea tell me that they are
2 worried about the use of Catalan at the university. They have heard that lecturers do not help
3 when there are language issues and that Catalan is a difficult language. They ask me “are the
4 lectures in Catalan?” and “if we don’t understand Catalan, do they speak Spanish?” […]
In this fieldnote, two students try to check with the researcher

whether the lectures are in Catalan and whether teachers switch to
Spanish if the students do not understand Catalan (lines 3–4). The
questions may indicate that prior to their arrival they were sceptical that
Catalan would be used as a teaching language. Spanish, in contrast with
Catalan, is legitimated as a language of instruction from the beginning
(line 4). The final question implies that switching into a common lan-
guage is what international students expect from local teachers, and
that Spanish fills the function of lingua franca. The fact that Spanish (a
widely spoken language) is the other official language of the local terri-
tory could explain why the students are asking about Spanish rather than
English, the most internationally spoken language in the global academic
world and one of the three official teaching languages at the university.
The sociolinguistic environment in which the international students are
immersed is reported by these students in fieldnote 4.2 as being monolin-
gual in Catalan, which contrasts with the bilingualism of the social context
outside the UC. The university’s almost exclusive use of Catalan produces
feelings of suffering and vulnerability in the students, who construct the
institution as ‘insensitive’ and themselves as ‘victims’. In the following
extract, Mi, a Korean student, reports on the state of ‘language shock’ she
experienced at the beginning of her stay (Extract 4.5).
Mi feels that the UC tricked her (line 6). The trick appears to be the
fact that everybody speaks Catalan and, contrary to Mi’s expectations,
Extract 4.5 They didn’t care about me (from focus group with international
students, October 2010)
1 Mi so here at the first time it was SHOCK because everybody speaking catalán then I
2 said that o lo siento (.) no puede entender (.) castellano por favor {oh I’m sorry (.) I
3 can’t understand (.) Spanish please} but they didn’t care about me they just make
4 speed despacio por favor {slowly please} (.) NO (.) they didn’t understand why you
5 can’t understand you are here in Catalunya {Catalonia}but I know that this is
6 Catalunya {Catalonia} but if they invited us every university UC invited us (.) yeah/
7 but they didn’t care us so much I know that I have to use too Catalan because I’m here
8 but I think that at least they have to be used to us too but they didn’t care about us if
9 you are calling take your x here that is too late I think and I call that there is a little bit
10 more more some things for castellano {Spanish} because the Spanish people is
11 Spanish here and not català {Catalan}yeah [laughs, nods, and looks at the researcher]
12 All [laughs]
13 Mi […] I only take three class because I could find three class in castellano {Spanish} but
14 then in one class when I meet the first the professor I ask I’m from Korea and I can’t
15 understand nothing about catalán {Catalan} could you please speak in castellano ok
16 to me it’s just igual {the same}it’s ok I will speak in castellano {Spanish}and the
17 other students ok ok and then I can have castellano {Spanish} but he (.) I think that he
18 IS the normal but he is so unique in here so I hope that professor will be more like that
19 ready for the students and yeah
Roman: English; Italics: Spanish; dotted underlining: ambiguous (Catalan or Spanish);
double underlining: Catalan.
people do not accept a switch to Spanish. She portrays herself as being

in “shock” during her first days at the UC (line 1), vulnerable, and a vic-
tim of Catalan monolingualism and the unwillingness of the local com-
munity to switch to a language that she can understand (lines 3–6). Mi
uses code-switching as a resource to stage this situation (lines 2–3), using
Spanish to voice the language in which she politely asked for a switch
from Catalan to Spanish. By doing this, she is presenting herself as a
more flexible speaker than the people in the institution. From her per-
spective, international students are offered the possibility of doing their
year abroad at the UC (lines 6–10) and it is the duty of the institution to
offer courses in a language that the students can understand. As a result,
her hopes before she arrived at the UC and the reality she encountered
left her disillusioned.
Mi tries to create a balance between affiliating with the institution
and claiming her own rights. She acknowledges Catalonia as a geopo-
litical entity and that, for this reason, she has to make an effort to use
the Catalan language (lines 7–8). Thus, the relation between the univer-
sity and the students is reciprocal (a relationship that also appeared in
the interview with Xavi from the Language Service), with both parties
having rights and duties. Mi accepts that international students have to

adopt Catalan to some extent but, at the same time, the local commu-
nity has to accommodate to the linguistic needs of international stu-
dents by switching into Spanish when necessary. She constructs herself
as fulfilling her part of the agreement, or at least trying, when she says
that she “knows” that, apart from Spanish, in Catalonia she has to use
Catalan (lines 5–6). The UC, however, appears to be breaking its part of
the agreement, since the local members of the academic community do
not switch to Spanish. The presentation of the stay abroad as a reciprocal
commitment could be further interpreted as a strategy that Mi uses to
increase her epistemic stance because she is considering both perspectives
in constructing her stance.
Mi reports the case of a subject in which both the lecturer and the
other students saw no problems with switching to Spanish when she sug-
gested it (lines 14–19). The teacher’s behaviour (switching to a language
which everyone understood) is from Mi’s perspective what would be
considered normal but while this is normal, the teacher is also unique in
doing it (line 18). Also, that teacher’s behaviour is implicitly evaluated
by Mi as sensitive and caring of the needs of the students. As a result,
a refusal to switch to Spanish is presented as a lack of professionalism.
Presenting this anecdote can be seen as a second resource that Mi uses to
increase the validity of her stance against what she considers a policy of
Catalan monolingualism.
The reluctance of lecturers to switch to Spanish is presented as being
a contrast with the bi/multilingualism of the social environment and
other individuals at the university. The world outside the university is
constructed as a code-switching world that accommodates to foreigners,
unlike the world inside the university, which is represented as a monolin-
gual Catalan world. Extract 4.6 provides evidence for this.
In Extract 4.6, one of the international students introduces her lin-
guistic discomfort as an answer to a broad question not directly related
to language (whether they are enjoying their stay abroad, lines 1–2).
Dolores reports that teachers respond in Catalan when students ask
questions in Spanish (lines 5–7) and she evaluates it as a lack of profes-
sionalism since, instead of solving the doubts the students have about the
class content, they make their doubts more serious. This rigidity is con-
trasted with the flexibility of the people en la calle (lines 8–14)—‘on the
streets’—who seem to not mind switching between languages in front
of a person who seems to be a foreigner. In the eyes of the students,
Extract 4.6 A monolingual institution in a bilingual context (from focus group

with international students, October 2010)
1 Lídia pero: de momento os está gustando la bu:t at the moment are you enjoying the
2 experiencia/ experience/
3 Ullie SÍ: YE:S
4 Dolores bueno al principio me pareció un poco: well at the beginning it seemed to me a
5 extraño que: en la escuela preguntamos bi:t strange tha:t at school we ask a
6 en español y nos responden algunos en question in Spanish and some of them
7 catalán creando lagunas más grandes y reply to us in Catalan creating bigger
8 en la calle en la calle rápido no/ como gaps and on the streets on the streets
9 ven que somos extranjeros nos quickly right/ as they see that we are
10 contestan en castellano entonces foreigners they answer us in Spanish
11 decíamos por qué en la escuela cuando then we wondered why at school when
12 preguntamos algo nos contestan en we ask something they reply in Catalan
13 catalán y allá en la calle nos contestan and out there in the street they answer in
14 en español Spanish
this makes the lecturers and the institution’s language policy inconsistent
with the broader social context.
Inside the classroom, local students are positioned by international
students as being like people outside the institutional context, since they
offer linguistic help to the international students in an attempt to facil-
itate their learning. This behaviour is evaluated as ‘kind’, contrary to
that of the teachers and the institution. Extract 4.7 shows how Hanna,
a student who attends most of her classes in Catalan, reports that local
students contribute to her learning.
Extract 4.7 Monolingual institutional voice vs bi/multilingual individual com-

petences (from focus group with international students, October 2010)
1 Hanna vine y las clases eran en catalán y yo when I arrived the classes were in Catalan
2 no dije nada and I didn’t say anything
3 All [laugh] [laugh]
4 Hanna pero: las estudiantes son muy muy bu:t the students are really really
5 muy amables y se dicen a mí e: cuando really kind and they say to me e: when
6 tú no entiendes pregunta pregunta you don’t understand ask ask
Hanna presents herself as discovering that Catalan is the language of

teaching (like Mi in Extract 4.5). She constructs a stance in which the
institutional learning environment is a Catalan-speaking environment
with local students who appear not only as competent speakers of lan-
guages other than Catalan, but also offer to act as mediators between the
international students and the teachers. The local students are positioned
as very kind, and this can be seen in Hanna’s repetition of muy ‘very’
(lines 4–5), which increases her affective stance towards the local stu-
dents and their actions. In contrast to Mi, Hanna reports that she did
not try to change the use of Catalan as a teaching language (lines 1–2),
which could be interpreted as a stance of accepting the university as a
monolingual Catalan institution. She also appears to employ alternative
ways of coping with it, based on accepting linguistic help from the other
students in the class. This strategy involves opportunities for intercultural
communication between international students and local students, and
between the students and the teacher. Despite all this, however, it is clear
that Hanna found the situation something which has to be dealt with.
The experience of international students in the UC’s multilingual
environment is consistently reported in a negative way, in contrast with
the pleasant atmosphere that they seem to experience outside the uni-
versity. Figure 4.1 is a drawing that two of the participants, Nadine
and Christina, from Germany and England respectively, gave to the
researcher while she was observing one of their classes in the Faculty of
Arts. The students titled the drawing La vida de los Erasmus en C! ‘The
life of the Erasmus in C!’,3 and it portrays two opposed sides of their
study-abroad experience at the UC.
The drawing is composed of two halves. On the left, the students
have represented themselves in the centre, on a stormy day character-
ised by lighting, wind, clouds, and heavy rain. In the background we
can see a building with the name of the UC at the top of the entrance.
The two girls have portrayed themselves as being sad and alone. They
do not carry umbrellas in the rain, which projects a feeling of vulner-
ability; the same feeling which was constructed among the students in
the focus-group discussion session (see Extracts 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7). Also,
the two students are represented talking to each other, and we see them
asking Entiendes algo? (‘Do you understand anything?’) and answering
No entiendo nada! (‘I don’t understand a word!’). On the right, we see
a completely opposed scenario. The sun is shining, Christina and Nadine
are not identifiable anymore—what we see is a group of people, boys
and girls, who are smiling and saying Ahh entiendo. Si… si… vale! (‘Oh,
I understand. Yes … yes … alright!’). In the background, we can see
a building with four doors, and on the top of each door the students
3 The C stands for the name of the city where the UC is located.
have written the names of pubs and nightclubs which are popular in the
city. Also, at the front we can see two bottles of alcoholic drinks, one of
which is identified as the popular Spanish drink sangria.
The storm and the sunshine in Fig. 4.1 work as metaphors for the
environment that the students experience in their life inside and outside
the institution. The atmosphere outside the university is represented as
being more pleasant linguistically and socially than the one inside. It is
worth mentioning here that Christina was a student of Catalan as for-
eign language at her home university in the United Kingdom, and she
chose to spend a term at the UC with the aim of improving her Catalan.
On one occasion, she complained about the fact that the rest of the
international students would speak with her in English and asked the
researcher to speak in Catalan so she could practice. Adopting a stance
of opposition towards the presence of Catalan as a language of teach-
ing was part of the dominant discourse constructed among international
students, and Christina’s decision to join that discourse by appearing in
the drawing can be explained as an attempt to affiliate with the other
international students and position herself as one of them. The discourse
Fig. 4.1 La vida de los Erasmus en C! by Christina and Nadine (fieldwork mate-

rials, November 2010)
of Catalan as an obstacle is so dominant that it even absorbs the voice of

those less numerous students, such as Christina, who actually come to
the UC to learn the minority language.
Good Students and Bad Students: The Stance of the Catalan Language

Instructors
This final part of the analysis section is an attempt to close the circle by
looking at the stance constructed by the language instructors who were
in charge of the Catalan courses for the international students, both in
the intensive classes during the welcome weeks at the beginning of the
year and during the remainder of the academic year. These teachers, who
are employed by the Language Service of the UC, include as part of their
agenda the promotion and protection of Catalan as a language of com-
munication at the university (Fieldnote 4.1 illustrated this point). In the
following, what we will see is how the teachers adopt a stance towards
the international students’ experiences of multilingualism during their
stay, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis the students.
In the context of learning Catalan, the teachers create a scenario with
three types of students: the good ones, the bad ones and a third group
that they do not bother to talk about. The good students are represented
by those international students who are positive about learning Catalan
and the bad students’ group includes those students who are interested in
learning neither Spanish nor Catalan, and also those who refuse to learn
Catalan because they see it as an obstacle to learning Spanish. The follow-
ing extract shows how Maria constructs the two groups (Extract 4.8).
The group of students who adopt Catalan are depicted as being few in
number, in contrast to the group of students who refuse it, which is con-
structed as a larger group. The first group of students are enthusiastic about
learning two languages instead of one (lines 7–10). The lively intonation
used by the teacher when referring to use by these students of the evalua-
tive expression què bé ‘how cool’ (line 8) conveys a stance of appreciation
towards them on the parts of the instructor. The ‘bad’ group consists of
those students who refuse to learn Catalan, even referring to the problem
it represents for them with the word ‘shit’ (line 17). Between discussing the
two groups, Maria creates a third group of students, made up of those stu-
dents who refuse to learn either of the two local languages, but they are
excluded from the discussion by the same teacher (lines 12–13). The group
of ‘bad’ students are further represented by Maite as students who join the
Extract 4.8 Good students and bad students (from focus group with language
instructors, June 2011)
1 Lídia heu vist una: una progressió o un do you see a: progression or a change from
2 canvi des de que arriben fins que the moment they arrive to when they leave/
3 marxen/ […] […]
4 Maria jo crec que: pel que pel que he vist I think tha:t from what what I have seen I
5 veig a la classe dels meus/ hi ha les see in my class/ there are two sorts (.) those
6 dos (.) uns que comencen això no sé el who start saying what is it/ they take the
7 que és i fan el curs i després ho volen course and then they want to do it and they
8 fer i me diuen OSTI QUE BÉ tell me HOW COOL we are learning two
9 n’aprenem dos de llengües no/ (.) languages right/ (.) these are one kind and I
10 aquests són uns i crec que els menys think they’re less numerous (.) then those
11 (.) després els que jo he vingut aquí: who I came he:re (.) well also there is the
12 (.) bueno hi ha la tercera opció que és third option that are those who don’t want to
13 els que no volen aprendre ni català ni learn either Catalan nor Spanish but let’s not
14 castellà però ja no en parlarem i els talk about them and those who come to
15 que venen a aprendre castellà o a learn Spanish or to improve their Spanish
16 millorar el castellà i llavors se troben and then they find Catalan and they say
17 el català i diuen que merda és aquesta what a shit this is I don’t want anything to
18 no en vull saber res do with it
19 Maite estan gravant-nos (.) e: [laughs] we are being recorded e:/ (.) [laughs]
20 Maria O és el que diuen ells no és la meva O that’s what they say it’s not my opinion
21 opinió és el que diuen that’s what they say
22 Maite que sí dona que sí yes I know what you mean
23 Maria ells e: fan el curs d’acollida i quan they do the welcome course and when they
24 acaben diuen això què és jo no en vull finish they say what’s this I don’t want to
25 saber res que me treguin de sobre i: know anything get me out of this a:nd
26 Sílvia sí sí sí yes yes yes
27 Maite ja: ja: he complert i ja està I’ve already done my duty and that’s all
28 Carme sí jo també ho penso yes I think so too
intensive Catalan course at the beginning of their stay but, once they com-
plete it, they do not want to learn more about the language. As one might
expect from the point of view of a language instructor, Maite projects a
stance of dissatisfaction towards that choice (line 24–25), which implies that
she believes that students should ideally continue to study Catalan through-
out their stay. The other teachers express alignment with the stance con-
structed by Maria and Maite (lines 26 and 28).
Interestingly, in this extract we can see a protective stance towards
Catalan right after Maria reports that the second group of students express
their disappointment by evaluating the situation as ‘shit’ (line 17). Maite
reminds Maria that the focus group session is being recorded (line 19).
Although Maite laughs indicating that she was being ironic, Maria imme-
diately sets a clear distance between herself and those students who evalu-
ate the situation with Catalan as ‘shit’. She repeats that it is the students’
stance towards Catalan, not her own (lines 20–21). Although the state-
ment may not have been intended as serious, Maite’s reaction supports the
idea of a broader context in which taking a stance against Catalan is not
legitimated.
Conclusions
This analysis of the ideologies and practices of members of the adminis-
trative and academic staff and international students at a small university
in Catalonia has demonstrated the existence of different ways in which
the trilingual language policy of the institution is experienced. We can
suggest that there are three main stances.
In the eyes of international students, the role of Catalan as the pre-
ferred language of teaching, as prescribed by the language policy, turns
the UC into a monolingual Catalan institution. The international stu-
dents report finding support and reassurance in the local students, whom
they see as adopting the role of linguistic mediators in an attempt to help
international students follow courses in Catalan. However the students,
who see their academic and social success at stake, present the reluc-
tance of lecturers to switch to a language that the students understand
as a marker of unkindness and even lack of professionalism, since the uni-
versity is not accommodating enough to their needs. The stance of the
international students, then, is very much one of opposition to what they
see as a monolingual Catalan institution.
The lecturers emerge from the data as being caught in the crossfire
between applying the institution’s language policy and complying with
the international students’ requests to adapt to their learning needs. As a
result the lecturers call for a mechanism which would enable greater flex-
ibility around language use, allowing the use of Spanish as a lingua franca
if required, but balancing this with promoting and protecting Catalan as
a language of teaching.
The teachers employed by the Language Service project a dichoto-
mised environment, divided between students who show an interest in
learning Catalan and those who refuse to study it, with the latter appear-
ing in their discourse as the dispreferred option. The stance of these
teachers—in favour of promoting and protecting Catalan as the main
language of teaching at the university—corresponds directly with their
role—they are employed as promoters of the Catalan language at the
university, being specifically assigned by the UC to the job of teaching it

to international students.
It is clear from the data that the practices of the members of the insti-
tution and also the framing of the language policy correspond to an
understanding of multilingualism as an accumulation of parallel mono-
lingualisms (Heller 1999, 2007). The institution could consider adapting
to the demands of international students and lecturers by developing a
plurilingual language policy based on the complementariness of Catalan,
Spanish, and English, making the three simultaneous and essential medi-
ums of instruction. In the conclusions of this volume we will refer to the
work of Van der Walt (2016), who considers that multilingual universi-
ties should shift their focus away from language-in-education policies and
concentrate in developing mechanisms for classroom decision making.
The legitimisation of more flexible practices such as translanguaging
(Creese and Blackledge 2010; García and Li Wei 2014; Li Wei 2018) as
a normal practice in daily academic interactions could be implemented to
elevate Catalan as a language of intercultural communication in an inter-
national university. Translanguaging as a practice in multicultural educa-
tional institutions places the emphasis on the plurilingual individual and,
in the case of Catalonia, it would enable the development of Catalan at
the same time that students develop their skills in Spanish, English, or
other languages. These ideas will be taken up again in Chapter 6, when
we consider the fate of Catalan in higher education.
Against the background of what has been presented in this chapter
and the analysis we saw in Chapter 3, it seems that the perennial pol-
icy–practice mismatch is present in the context of Catalan higher edu-
cation as it is in many other contexts. In the following chapter, we turn
to examine this disconnect in more detail, and analyse the consequences
of the different stance-taking processes given a background of ongoing
policy changes.
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
x unintelligible syllable
: long sound
/ rise
\ fall
Capital letters: loud voice
[…] text omitted

[laughs] description of communicative features which accompany
language
(.) pause of less than one second
{} translation inserted within the transcription of an extract
ntx the sound of a click made with the tongue as a sign of
disapproval
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CHAPTER 5
The Internationalisation
of Catalan Universities: Multilevel
Language Policies, Circulating Discourses,
and Stakeholders’ Stance-Taking
Abstract  In any given social setting, in this case the university sphere,
regulating languages and assigning them specific roles and functions can
potentially lead to tensions and ambiguities. In this process, those who
feel such tensions and ambiguities and those who contribute to their
generation are the key stakeholders involved in the context. Amidst a
background of ongoing regulatory changes and policy reformulations,
the preceding two chapters have unpacked a number of central points
around the internationalisation of universities in Catalonia, exploring
the narrative of the policy documents issued formally by Catalan pub-
lic universities, and the stance taken by university teachers, university
administrators, and exchange students towards language, international-
isation, and higher education in Catalonia. In this chapter we consider
in detail the layered circulation of discourses from the policy documents
to the primary stakeholders involved in the university context, as well
as some of the practical implications of each policy actor’s stance-taking
processes.
Keywords  Internationalisation · Language policy ·

Policy documents · Exchange students · University teachers ·
Stance · Ethnography · Multilingual classrooms · Higher education ·
Catalonia

Introduction
One of the key messages from the analysis presented in the previous
chapters of this volume is that regulating languages and assigning spe-
cific roles to them may lead to potential tensions and ambiguities, and
it is important to consider the effects and the consequences of these
processes. In light of the qualitative, ethnographic data that we have
seen in Chapter 4 from an international university in Catalonia, we
can identify at least three categories of stakeholders that navigate, and
sometimes struggle with, these processes of inclusion and exclusion. In
the first place, Language Service administrators and Catalan language
instructors have to try to find the right balance between the differ-
ent languages at play, considering both legal obligations and ways to
maximise communication with international and exchange students.
Secondly, lecturers find themselves as the public face of institutional
policy-making, while having to juggle with increasingly complex,
multilingual classrooms. Finally, students, and particularly those in
exchange programmes, have to find ways of managing their own indi-
vidual goals and expectations within the goals and expectations of the
institution that hosts them, and these may not always coincide. With
this in mind, it is not unrealistic to argue that the formal, institutional
language policies analysed in Chapter 3 need further consideration
when it comes to finding out how they act within the social reality that
they wish to address.
None of this is all that surprising, as it is certainly not an original
insight to suggest that there is a disconnect between the discourses that
we find in formally authored language policy documents and the prac-
tices observed and ideologies reported by speakers ‘on the ground’.
Language policy research has a long record of documenting such dis-
connects between policy and practice (Ricento and Hornberger 1996).
In addition, and perhaps as a consequence of highlighting this discon-
nect, language policy scholarship has more recently emphasised the
need to conceive of policy documents as cultural artefacts aimed at regi-
menting and governing linguistic practices in a given context, so instead
of ‘language policy’, we should perhaps think of ‘language policing’
(Blommaert et al. 2009). From that point of view, key questions that
need to be uncovered have to do with issues of legitimacy, of difference,
and of (in)equality, that is, of who gets to define what language(s) are
5 THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF CATALAN UNIVERSITIES … 97
appropriate in what spaces. Inevitably, the follow-up questions have to

do with access, with considerations of who has access to which social
spaces where discursive practices and resources are distributed, awarded
value, or contested. This is precisely the thrust of what we have referred
to in the introductory chapter as the ‘new wave’ of scholarship in lan-
guage policy (e.g. Barakos and Unger 2016; Hult 2010; McCarty
2011; Johnson and Ricento 2013). Anchoring language policy within
an ethnographic framework, recent research centres its attention on
the creation and circulation of discourses across the policy cycle, thus
emphasising how different policy actors employ the resources they
have available to them in order to position themselves in a given social
setting.
The goal of our volume is to present and analyse universities in
Catalonia as particularly ripe sites for insightful analyses of this type.
Beyond the university context, Catalonia has long been considered a rich
sociolinguistic site, with Catalan challenging the position traditionally
associated with many minority languages in Europe and beyond. After
more than three decades of official language policies promoting and
developing the language in key domains, particularly in the field of edu-
cation, it is widely accepted that, however fragile it may still be, Catalan
now enjoys a safer position within Catalonia’s sociolinguistic ecosystem
than it had at the end of the period of dictatorship in 1975. However,
discourses presenting Catalan as a language in a very weak position have
not disappeared completely; on the contrary, they can still be mobilised
by relevant key stakeholders, including university administrators and
teaching staff, as we have shown in the volume.
Against the background of the internationalisation of higher educa-
tion, our study attempts to shed light on what discourses are mobilised
within the university context in Catalonia, showing how ideas about ‘the
internationalised university’ are grounded locally at a specific university,
and what the consequences of this discursive struggle are for the ability
of actual speakers to access certain social spaces and valuable resources.
In this discussion chapter, we first of all take stock of what we have pre-
sented in the previous two empirical chapters (Chapters 3 and 4), then
we delve deeper into what we think are the key points to emerge from
our analysis.
The Institutional and the Individual Sides

of the Internationalisation of Higher Education:
Taking Stock of Some Initial Key Points
Chapter 3 provided a content analysis of the language policy docu-
ments approved by the councils of public higher education institutions in
Catalonia. The chapter sought to uncover how language and language-re-
lated issues are depicted in these university documents and how they
handle the sociolinguistic complexity of the Catalan system of higher edu-
cation. We found that the policy documents which we analysed portray
a set of ideologies around the role and position of languages at Catalan
universities, in a context where these universities are becoming more
and more internationalised. More specifically, Chapter 3 addressed the
research questions of how universities settle their stance with respect to
the role and the status of different languages within their institutions, and
how this stance is captured in their language policy documents. The anal-
ysis showed that language policy documents in Catalan universities tend
to emphasise the idea that the national language, Catalan, has to be pro-
tected and promoted at university, together with the idea that languages
of wider communication (mainly English, but also Spanish) necessarily
play an important role within the university context. However, with a few
exceptions, the data currently available about the use of Catalan as a lan-
guage for teaching and learning at universities in Catalonia does not show
that the language is at serious risk of being moved to the background in
favour of the other two languages of international scope.
The analysis also showed how university language policy documents
in Catalonia focus very much on the importance of ensuring a good
level of competence across different languages, particularly with regard
to English, as though the difficulties of implementing a trilingual pol-
icy would fade away once the individuals involved are competent in all
three languages. The focus on linguistic competence suggests that the
debate around language(s) in higher education in Catalonia is frequently
seen as a matter of individual deficit. Beyond issues of linguistic compe-
tence, however, there is little mention in the language policy documents
of aspects relating to intercultural competence among the members
of the university. The only exception in that regard is the Polytechnic
University of Catalonia (UPC), whose pla de llengües ‘plan for languages’
does include several mentions of the need to enhance the intercultural
skills and awareness of its members. Intercultural competence is one of
the pillars of internationalisation (Montgomery 2008) and language

learning is one of the main sites which open up opportunities for the
development of a sensitivity towards and an understanding of other cul-
tures. This is perhaps another aspect that indicates a need to rethink the
goals of the formally issued language policy documents of the universi-
ties, and to reconsider whose interests these documents primarily address
and cater for.
Chapter 4 presented a microanalytic ethnographic study on the prac-
tices and ideologies around the three languages which are official at one
small university in Catalonia, which we referred to as UC. The chapter
showed how administrative and teaching staff, on the one hand, and
incoming mobility students, on the other, construct three main stances:
a stance in favour of promoting and protecting Catalan as the main lan-
guage of teaching and communication at the university; a much more
nuanced stance which tries to find a balance between the promotion and
protection of Catalan together with the use of Spanish as a lingua franca
to facilitate communication in an international context; and a stance of
opposition to a monolingual Catalan university. The first stance is trig-
gered within a context intended to persuade international students into
seeing Catalan as not being an obstacle. However, following Damari
(2010), this stance appears in a broader dialogical chain which implic-
itly opens up a possible position of perceiving Catalan as problematic.
Similarly to the findings of Chapter 3, in Chapter 4 we saw how the uni-
versity tries to persuade students into overcoming the ‘not-an-obstacle’ of
Catalan by learning the language, thereby continuing to perpetuate the
idea that linguistic competence is the key to implementing a policy based
on trilingualism. Together with this stance, we see (in Extract 4.2) how
the ideal intersubjective relationship projected by university staff between
themselves and the international students is one in which both sides make
an effort to accommodate to the linguistic demands of each other (see
also de Rosselló and Boix-Fuster 2006, who report on the views of local
students at a university in Barcelona that they have no problems with
switching languages to facilitate the communicative exchange).
That said, however, it is perhaps the idea of the need to accommodate
to other speakers’ languages that may lie behind the worry expressed by
some that Catalan may eventually fade away from the domain of higher
education. That is why in bilingual communities, according to de Bres
(2008), the attitude of minority language speakers may not be enough to
preserve their language, and it is the majority language speakers (in our
case, international students who speak Spanish and English) who affect
the status and role of the minority language. The long-term success of
initiatives to revitalise a minority language depends partially on the sup-
port of the dominant linguistic group. So, altering the attitudes of inter-
national students, if required, and making them receptive to Catalan
would seem like a necessary course of action. In the case of universities
in Catalonia that find themselves in the process of becoming more inter-
national and welcoming growing numbers of international students,
offering courses in Catalan language to these students needs be accom-
panied by initiatives to develop the students’ tolerance of Catalan, the
language of teaching and communication preferred by the universities.
This is most likely particularly the case for smaller universities outside the
capital Barcelona, such as the one we have analysed here, where Catalan
plays perhaps a greater role in university life, not least as a language for
teaching and learning. Initiatives to develop such courses to foster pos-
itive attitudes towards Catalan language and culture are already occur-
ring in universities such as Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona (URV
2018), whose Department of English and German has offered the mod-
ule ‘Catalonia and Spain in a European Context’ since 2017. This course
promotes intercultural debates which lead students to reflect upon the
hosting culture and their home culture, and goes through such topics as
geography, history, architecture, music, literature, art, and popular cul-
ture among others.
These are some of the initial points that we believe the analysis of the
previous chapters allow us to flag as important concerns for universities
in Catalonia and in particular, as was just mentioned, for the smaller
institutions. In the following sections, we enquire more deeply into what
we see as the central findings of our study, connecting the results from
the policy document analysis in Chapter 3 with the outcomes of the eth-
nographic study presented in Chapter 4.
Formal Language Policies at Catalan Universities:

The Narrative of the Policy Documents
The picture that emerges from the analysis of the formal language
policy documents in Chapter 3 is that there is a clear and strong con-
sensus by virtually all Catalan public universities establishing, to a cer-
tain extent at least, a linguistic hierarchy in which Catalan comes first,
Spanish next, and English third. The positions of Catalan and Spanish
are uncontested, as a result of the legal framework in which universi-

ties operate: Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy, the Language Policy Act,
and the Universities Act. In this framework, Catalan is Catalonia’s ‘own’
language and, together with Spanish, it is Catalonia’s official language.
As such, Catalan is also the ‘own’ language of public universities, and
both Catalan and Spanish are official languages of public universities. On
the other hand, the position of English is somewhat more negotiable,
although all policy documents refer to it explicitly and to a significant
extent, particularly in connection with the need to foster knowledge and
competence in this language among all university members. Overall,
emphasis is placed on the need to foster a scenario of balanced multilin-
gualism, in which different languages fulfil different functions, and where
a place of centrality is reserved for Catalan. In addition, keeping in mind
Ruíz’s (1984) well-known model of orientations in language planning,
we can see that the ‘language-as-right’ orientation is associated with
Spanish and Catalan (depending on whether it is the international stu-
dents or the staff working for the Language Service who are adopting a
stance), languages whose speakers have the right to use them in the con-
text of higher education in Catalonia. In the case of English, it does not
appear connected with the discourse of ‘language-as-right’ but it does
appear seen as a resource to be fostered and promoted in the context
of Catalan universities. As was seen, however, the ‘language-as-resource’
orientation is only linked with Spanish in the policy documents of UAB
and, more particularly, UOC. In connection with Catalan, the ethno-
graphic study has shown that the university, its staff and even interna-
tional students (see Extract 4.8) portray it as a resource. The third of
Ruíz’s orientations, ‘language-as-problem’, is more difficult to associ-
ate with any given named language in the documents analysed, but it
emerges in a more abstract way, in the sense that multilingualism poses
an important challenge, and therefore become a problem, for the long-
term sustainability of Catalan in the context of universities in Catalonia.
Interestingly, the ethnographic analysis of the practices of a small uni-
versity in Catalonia presented how the institution’s discourse adopts an
orientation towards Catalan at the beginning of the international stu-
dents’ stay as ‘not a problem’, which deep down implies that an orien-
tation towards Catalan as a problem exists and permeates the university.
The analysis of the focus groups with international students and lecturers
has pointed out that the problem seems not to be Catalan per se but the
use of monolingual teaching practices. Therefore, as argued elsewhere in
this volume, Catalan universities could reconsider the use of multilingual

pedagogies to confront this issue.
These would all seem to be rather unsurprising views and com-
mon-sense points to raise in language policy documents of this kind.
After all, what institution would not want all its members to know as
many languages as possible, and as well as possible? The question that
we need to ask, then, is: Why this now? That is, why are these issues
deemed worthy of attention at this particular moment in time? The
data which are available at present do not seem to show Catalan in any
great danger of being displaced from the sphere of higher education.
With the exception of a few universities (in particular, UPF) and some
disciplines in which historically Spanish has played a more central role
(e.g. law), it seems that Catalan is still widely used as a language of
teaching and learning in most Catalan public universities, especially at
the undergraduate level. When we move outside the domain of teach-
ing, but still within the university context, it also appears that there is
a functional distribution of roles between the three languages, Catalan,
Spanish, and English, each language being used depending on the spe-
cific situated linguistic configuration, with the choice of language being
determined by the intended audience and their perceived linguistic rep-
ertoire (Bretxa et al. 2016). So why have universities in Catalonia, almost
unanimously, turned to language as an element that needed to be man-
aged and planned for?
We noted in Chapter 3 that the reason for the very existence of the
university language policy documents which we analysed was external.
In around 2009–2010, the Catalan government, via the Catalan Inter-
University Council, issued a recommendation that all universities should
have their own language policy documents, and the availability of cer-
tain public funding depending on having such a document. This was
designed as a means to a further, more ambitious aim: to push universi-
ties to require all their graduates to demonstrate an intermediate level in
a third language, most frequently (but not exclusively) English. Again,
this would be linked to variable access to public funds. In short, to the
extent that universities showed an explicit commitment to manage lan-
guage issues formally (by issuing a pla de llengües), and to the extent
that they showed a growing number of their graduates possessed a B2
level in English, they would be granted more access to public funds.
Taking this a step further, in 2014 the Catalan government decided that
the requirement for all university graduates to possess an intermediate
level in a third language would become legally binding (Llei 2/2014,

Generalitat de Catalunya 2014). However, in 2017, just as the first gen-
eration of students would have to demonstrate they possessed a B2 level
in English in order to graduate, discussions between the government and
university officials became more intense (de Planell 2017). As a result,
seeing that an estimated 25% of third-year university students did not yet
have the required B2 level in the third language (ARA 2017), a four-year
extension was approved in 2017, meaning that this requirement would
not be enforced. At a plenary session in May 2018, the Catalan parlia-
ment approved postponing the B2 requirement for another four years,
following a petition issued by the Inter-University Council (Generalitat
de Catalunya 2018b); however they noted that students enrolling for a
degree in 2018–2019 need to be made aware of the fact that they will
have to show they possess a B2 level by the time they graduate.
Overall, we have seen in the vast majority of the documents ana-
lysed in Chapter 3 that there is great emphasis on the need to continue
to improve the linguistic competence and language proficiency of all
university members, especially when it comes to third languages, and
English more specifically. This strong focus on linguistic competence can
be seen to result from pressure by the government, but it can also be
interpreted as an instantiation of a broader, Europe-wide discourse on
language and multilingualism. In fact, for the vast majority of univer-
sity students in Catalonia, the active knowledge of a third language puts
them in a position of fulfilling the long-term EU goal of ‘mother tongue
plus two’ other languages, as Catalan university students have a good
knowledge of both Catalan and Spanish. In fact, some of the language
policy documents analysed in Chapter 3 explicitly refer to this Europe-
wide discourse as a kind of baseline from which their discourse begins.
In addition, a focus on language and on the acquisition of a foreign lan-
guage resonates with the widespread belief that, as a region of Spain, a
southern European country, the inhabitants of Catalonia do not master
foreign languages (Montero 2017). Partly because of that discourse, the
former Catalan Minister of Economy and Knowledge was quoted as say-
ing that he hoped that what were then his proposed legal reforms would
help settle the issue about university graduates’ abilities in the English
language “once and for all” (La Vanguardia 2013). So, considered at a
higher level, the focus on language proficiency in the policy documents
would seem to respond to discourses about language which are circu-
lating more broadly: the EU objective of ‘mother tongue plus two’,
and the generally perceived lack of competence in English in southern

European countries.
Another European discourse that may be impacting on the current
university language policy environment in Catalonia is the alleged north–
south divide, discussed in Chapter 2, whereby universities in northern
European countries are seen as more internationalised than their south-
ern European counterparts, because universities in the north offer a
larger number of courses and programmes taught in English. Believing
that lagging behind in terms of introducing English-taught programmes
means lagging behind in educational and economic competitiveness,
public officials in southern European countries seem to be under pres-
sure to find viable ways to modify their higher education systems to
include more programmes taught in English. While it may be happening
more gradually than has been reported for some universities in the north
of Italy (Santulli 2015; Pulcini and Campagna 2015), it would appear
that Catalan public universities are following a similar route to their
Italian counterparts in trying to enforce a push towards more English,
even if that conflicts with the established legal framework. Whether or
not it helps universities handle their complex linguistic realities remains
to be seen. At the very least, it prompts managers and other key univer-
sity members to consider issues of a linguistic nature in more detail; but
just as has happened in Italy, tensions are bound to arise in Catalonia.
Indeed, the economic angle that the legal reforms have been taking has
made many university administrators very uncomfortable with the cur-
rent policy and regulatory changes—hence the renewed postponement
of the requirement for all university graduates to possess a B2 level in a
foreign language before they can graduate (Llei 1/2018, Generalitat de
Catalunya 2018a), a postponement passed unanimously by the Catalan
parliament on 3 May 2018 (Generalitat de Catalunya 2018b).
In fact, as we argued in Chapter 2, the north–south divide is in many
ways an artificial construct, and it is important to adopt an ecologically
situated perspective to better understand the nature of the challenges fac-
ing universities, in this case universities in Catalonia. In fact, it can be
argued that university classrooms in Catalonia have been multilingual (or
bilingual, at least) for some time. English now poses an additional chal-
lenge, but traditionally, universities have had to deal with the interplay of
Catalan and Spanish. As opposed to other education levels in Catalonia,
the language of teaching and learning in higher education has been
always more open for discussion and negotiation, as, at least in principle,
teachers have the right to decide the language in which they will deliver
their subjects. In the early 2000s, with the arrival of increased num-
bers of visiting students, a debate arose within the university commu-
nity about how to determine the language of teaching. One particularly
thorny question had to do with whether it was legitimate for students
to ask for a change in the medium of instruction. As a result, the prin-
ciple of linguistic security (principi de seguretat lingüística) was devised,
to avoid potentially open conflicts in the classroom between teacher and
students, as was depicted in the extract from the film L’Auberge espagnole
with which we opened the volume. As we have seen, this principle is
mentioned in almost all the language policy documents analysed in
Chapter 3, but only two of them develop it at length (the University of
Lleida and, in particular, Pompeu Fabra University).
The principle of linguistic security—requiring lecturers to publicise,
in advance, the language of instruction of their subject—operates on the
basis that no one has the right to demand a change of language from
others (so a student cannot ask a teacher to switch from one language to
another, nor vice versa). In addition, everyone has the right to be under-
stood in their language of choice (Catalan, Spanish, or English). In an
ideal scenario, the principle is underpinned a high degree of complemen-
tary multilingualism, where everyone has an active knowledge of at least
one of the three working languages of the institution, and passive knowl-
edge of the other two. From that perspective, it is perhaps not surpris-
ing that the broader language debate is framed primarily around issues
of linguistic competence, as we have seen above, with the idea that an
improvement in overall competence in the different languages will lead
to an improvement across the entire context. More generally, what seems
to be lurking behind the principle is a form of receptive multilingual-
ism (ten Thije et al. 2012; Verschik 2012), an idea that many speakers
in Catalonia are already familiar with. Indeed, bilingual conversations in
Catalan and Spanish take place rather frequently, especially in informal
domains, but they are not absent from more formal situations (e.g. inter-
views in media outlets).
Well-meaning and well-intentioned, then, the principle of linguistic
security aims at fostering and sustaining multilingualism in university
classrooms in all fields and disciplines. It could be claimed that ena-
bling the presence of different languages in the classroom helps every-
one involved with their language learning. Not only that, the use of all
the linguistic repertoires of those involved in the classroom may also help
in learning the content of a particular subject (e.g. Moore et al. 2013).

However, a strict implementation of the principle may in fact lead to a
situation of ‘one language at a time’, at best, and a situation of ‘one lan-
guage only’ at worst. Frequently, the principle has been read as indicat-
ing the single language in which a given subject is run, with no explicit
mention of the fact that other languages may also be used during con-
tact hours in the course, as well as in assessment tasks. So, even though
it may be designed with the aim of solving potential communicative
problems in the classroom, the principle of linguistic security can end
up working against the resolution of these issues (Moore 2016), hin-
dering rather than fostering the possibilities for all linguistic resources to
be effectively used. Finally, the principle can have further consequences,
including a shift towards lecturers opting for Spanish as the language
of instruction, as noted in the previous chapter, since Spanish is more
widely shared between teachers and international students than Catalan.
Overall, it is historically language contact between Catalan and
Spanish that has been the central language issue for universities in
Catalonia. However, English has recently entered this already fraught
situation, making matters even more complicated. From an individ-
ual perspective, it seems that the majority of students have no problem
switching languages and adapting to the interlocutor’s preferred lan-
guage, if that eases the communication (de Rosselló and Boix-Fuster
2006). This coincides with the broader suggestion that there has been
a relaxation of the marked nature of language choice in Catalonia over
the past decades (Pujolar and Gonzàlez 2013; Woolard 2016), an idea to
which we will return in the following section. Considered in the domain
of higher education, some have wondered whether this should be inter-
preted as indicating a taken-for-granted attitude towards the presence of
Catalan at that level, and if this may pose a serious challenge to the sus-
tainability of the language in the long term (Pons 2015). In any case,
while speakers, individually, may not find it problematic to adapt to the
sociolinguistic context at hand, institutions would seem to find them-
selves in a more difficult position. Legally, they are bound to observe the
requirement to maintain a pre-eminent role for Catalan, particularly as
a language of teaching and learning, and none of them seem to find it
comfortable to break away from the established consensus that Catalan
comes first. However, at the same time, the linguistic environments of
universities continue to evolve and change, with the changes nowadays
exacerbated by the arrival of more and more international students.
Once in their receiving institution, these students can find themselves in

an awkward position, asked to actively engage with the Catalan language
while often it is Spanish, not Catalan, which they imagined they would
be learning and practising (Gallego-Balsà and Cots 2016). We further
explore the complexity of the different stance-taking processes of the dif-
ferent stakeholders (both individual and institutional) in the following
section.
Stance-Taking: Juggling Different Languages

and Ideological Positions at Higher Education
As noted above, the micro-level analysis presented in Chapter 4 allowed

us to uncover how university teaching and administrative staff, on the
one hand, and exchange students, on the other, construct three main
stances in connection to the languages at play: a stance of promoting
and protecting Catalan at the university; a more nuanced stance trying to
find a balance among all the languages in contact; and a stance of oppo-
sition to a monolingual Catalan-speaking university. In what follows, we
develop each of these three stances further and elaborate on their mean-
ing and their implications.
The stance which supports promoting and protecting Catalan as a
language of teaching and learning at the university is underpinned by
a series of appraisal processes. Different sources of data (including the
university’s web page and the opinions of the Catalan language instruc-
tors) reiterate the evaluation of Catalan as a legitimate language which
has equal status to Spanish and is typologically similar to other Romance
languages. Catalan is also presented (on the web page and by the repre-
sentative of the university’s Language Service and the Catalan instruc-
tors) as a bonus language which is easily, almost unconsciously, learnt via
studying and living in the area of the UC.
These evaluations reproduce a promotional discourse of acquiring two
languages for the price of one which, despite sounding very appealing
at first sight, may turn out not to be enough to motivate students to
continue learning Catalan to higher levels—it may be initially effective
in persuading international students to enrol in an entry-level course
in Catalan, but once the official academic term starts and the students’
academic calendar begin to fill up, their commitment to learning the
language can quickly fade away. One way in which universities could
consider increasing the students’ persistence is by giving them a purpose.

This is the case for Jeroen, for example, one of the students who partic-
ipated in the study in Chapter 4. He achieved a B1 level of Catalan by
the end of his stay, and had immersed himself in local society by joining
a football team (he was a big Barça fan). His plan was to study a master’s
degree in Barcelona after graduating, and to achieve that, he wanted to
gain enough linguistic competence in Catalan to attend a Catalan univer-
sity as a home student. Universities could consider including activities in
the entry-level Catalan course that not only increase the students’ toler-
ance towards Catalan, but also give them a purpose for it—for example,
engaging in the language revitalisation campaign in Catalonia by learning
the minority language.
In addition, the presentation of Catalan as a language that coex-
ists with Spanish and other languages in Catalonia (including the lan-
guages of the international students) could lead to a more meaningful
learning environment. This would tie in with ongoing efforts under
the principle of linguistic security discussed earlier in this volume.
One possibility would be to explore with students aspects of language
choice, code-switching, and translanguaging or plurilingual practices in
classroom environments, all much-discussed topics in Catalan sociolin-
guistic research. Newman et al. (2008), for example, study the evolu-
tion of language attitudes of linguistically heterogeneous adolescents in
an urban setting in Catalonia a generation after the Law on Linguistic
Normalisation became effective (Generalitat de Catalunya 1983). Their
study shows that the differences in attitudes between informants with
Spanish background and those with Catalan backgrounds have softened.
In terms of status and solidarity, the differences have become more bal-
anced, and even though language choice can be highly gendered (see
also Pujolar 2001), being proficient in Catalan and Spanish is valued
by young speakers of both Spanish and Catalan backgrounds. Newman
et al. (2008) refer to the support for bilingualism and the blurring of lin-
guistic divisions as indicating a growth in ‘linguistic cosmopolitanism’,
a stance that looks beyond conservative own-group communities and
favours bridging linguistic boundaries. The authors conclude that minor-
ity languages can be valued when they assume such symbolic roles. In
a similar vein, other studies presenting analogous arguments have been
conducted over the last ten years in Catalonia (see, for instance, Corona
et al. 2013; Gallego-Balsà 2018; Gallego-Balsà and Cots 2018; Pujolar
2010, 2011; Pujolar and Gonzàlez 2013; Woolard 2008, 2013, 2016;
Woolard and Frekko 2013). Studies of this type could usefully inform
the designers of Catalan language courses for internationally oriented
classrooms. Designing a course of Catalan for international students that
prepares students to navigate the discourses around Catalan and Spanish
that they will face during their stay would lead to more meaningful learn-
ing and probably increase their engagement in learning Catalan dur-
ing their stay. Additionally, integrating student experiences outside the
university into the classroom context would lead to more constructive
and reflective learning. According to Kärki et al. (2018), a meaningful
approach to learning includes problem-solving in authentic situations
and the use of authentic materials. An authentic learning environment
makes it easier to transfer the newly acquired skills into real life, which is
the ultimate aim of teaching.
The second stance which emerged in Chapter 4, a much more
nuanced and ambivalent one, seeks for a balance between accomplishing
the directives of the official language policies in using Catalan as a teach-
ing language and adapting to the linguistic needs of an international
audience. This stance stands in marked contrast to the two other, rather
categorical, stances. The lecturers who construct this stance position
themselves as mediators or ‘in-betweeners’. On one side, they struggle
to execute the official language policies with their international students,
who are represented as not being open to attending courses in Catalan.
On the other, they project empathy and understanding of the position
of the students, probably resulting from their prolonged face-to-face
contact with students (a minimum of one term) and from being more
exposed to the cost of teaching in a language that the international stu-
dents declare they do not understand. This stance also develops a rather
critical view of the principle of linguistic security—while this principle
may look after the linguistic rights of teachers and students, it can also
lead to a general shift to Spanish, since teachers who often have interna-
tional students in their classes may decide to avoid conflict by teaching in
the lingua franca most commonly used between the local and the foreign
communities.
According to Busch (2009), language policy-making can occur in two
directions: top-down and bottom-up. On the one hand, language policy
may be pictured as circulating from top to bottom when state author-
ities or institutions intervene in the practices and language ideologies
of speakers ‘on the ground’. On the other hand, keeping in mind the
circulation of discourses within the language policy cycle, a community
affected by policies simultaneously interprets, appropriates, and negoti-

ates them from the bottom to the top, at the level of human interac-
tion (Johnson and Ricento 2013). However, it follows, according to
Johnson and Ricento (2013, p. 108), that the dichotomy between top-
down and bottom-up “obfuscate[s] the varied and unpredictable ways
that language policy agents interact with the policy process” (see also
Saarinen 2017). As explained in more detail in the introductory chapter,
this vision underlies much current discussion in language policy research.
Johnson argues, and we would agree, that top-down and bottom-up
notions merge in a highly complex, interacting, and dynamic way that
makes it impossible to distinguish one from the other. In the case of the
UC, the language policy documents appear as a top-down policy, and the
students’ reactions as a bottom-up response to those policies. The lectur-
ers, however, are the point at which the two fronts meet, and are respon-
sible for negotiating between them. Despite being the actual enforcers
of the language policy, they are the ones with the least power, or with a
more prominent need to find a balance between the different positions.
In our view, following McCarty (2011), the reported experiences of the
lecturers corroborate that language policy is not a simple matter of top-
down or bottom-up, but it is a multilayered process that is produced in
and through daily human interactions (Hult 2010).
Moving finally to the third stance—that of opposition to a monolin-
gual Catalan-speaking university—this is most clearly activated by sev-
eral of the international students, but it is also voiced (perhaps more
implicitly) through the ambivalent stance of some of the lecturers. The
students position the UC as a non-switching monolingual institution
within a bilingual context, something that is presented as illogical and
indexing a lack of sensitivity towards international students. In that
regard, the tensions experienced by the exchange students are perhaps
not all that different from what can be observed with other kinds of
globalisation-influenced mobility, such as tourism.
Viewed from the perspective of tourism discourse, a university that
chooses to promote a minority language, in this case Catalan, as the
only language of teaching and learning could be understood as choos-
ing a particular promotional strategy. Doerr (2012) shows how travel
brochures present studying abroad as an opportunity for adventure.
One way of creating exoticism and awakening the feeling of adventure
is to present the study-abroad destination as an enclave where the local
community does not accommodate to the language of the students. The
students in Chapter 4 who evaluate the UC as unwelcoming and lack-

ing sensitivity for not switching to Spanish could be seen as projecting
their study-abroad period as an experience in which the local community
should accommodate to the language of the tourists, so that the tour-
ists remain in an “environmental bubble” (Cohen and Cooper 1986,
p. 540). In the tourism industry, the tourist is situationally positioned as
more authoritative than the natives (who adopt a position intended to
please). Looking at the discourse of the language instructors in Chapter 4,
we can argue that by demanding that international students learn
Catalan and align with the institution’s efforts to promote and preserve
it as a language of teaching and learning, they are asking students to live
an experience of full immersion in Catalonia, almost an experience of
immigration—still following Cohen and Cooper (1986), the immigrant
is the most disadvantaged of hosted individuals, and has a responsibil-
ity to learn the language of the locals. Overall, then, we can say that,
to some extent at least, the stance of resistance towards Catalan at the
university can be read as an effect of turning higher education into an
industry that exploits symbolic resources and mobility in ways that are
strategically similar to tourism. Much like tourism, though, this kind
of economic model is not invulnerable to tensions and anxieties, a pro-
cess that is indeed perceivable in the domain of language and discourse
(cf. Heller et al. 2014).
Taken as a whole, the analysis presented in the two previous chapters
shows a macro context, which includes large-scale planning made up
of specific rules and practices aimed at producing standardised results,
and a micro context, which involves a series of contextual factors and
agents who make their own interpretations of how to apply the formally
designed language policies. Chua and Baldauf (2011, p. 938) refer to
this process of interpretation as the “translation process”, and conclude
that, as a consequence of the open-ended nature of policy interpretation,
language policy outcomes will likely not be standardised, with the results
varying depending on the different appraisals in the day-to-day linguis-
tic practices of speakers. Thus the ‘micro’ interpretations can ultimately
determine the effectiveness of the ‘macro’ language policies, or their lack
of effectiveness. We have already referred to Ruíz’s (1984) model that
describes the adoption of a specific language policy as having three main
orientations to language—language as a problem, language as a right,
and language as a resource—and we have suggested that all three ori-
entations can be detected in the university language policy documents
analysed in Chapter 3. Importantly, such orientations are not the pre-

rogative of formal institutional policy-making; we would argue that they
have also emerged from the analysis of the stances constructed by the
stakeholders at the UC. This seems to be particularly the case of the
‘language as a problem’ orientation, which in the policy documents had
been less explicitly articulated than what we have seen with the micro-
level analysis.
Conclusions
Taking stock of the material analysed in the previous two chapters, here
we have emphasised once again the idea that, in any given social space,
assigning languages to specific roles and functions is bound to create ten-
sions and ambiguities. In our case, taking the context of the internation-
alisation of higher education in Catalonia as the focus, we can see how
tensions and ambiguities emerge and how, in their production, different
stakeholders position themselves by employing the available discursive
and symbolic resources to which they have recourse. Ongoing legis-
lative and economic changes in the administration of higher education
in Catalonia have pushed universities to reconsider their languages, and
to come up with more or less elaborate plans to manage their multilin-
gual realities. The hierarchy that emerges from the university language
policy documents reserves a central space for Catalan, emphasises the
need to respect the language rights of other speakers (especially Spanish-
speakers), and promotes the idea of incorporating English as a working
language of higher education. Thus, Catalan enjoys institutional support
as well as still having a relatively solid presence as a language of teach-
ing and learning, particularly in smaller universities outside the Barcelona
area, such as the one we have seen in detail in this book. However, uni-
versity lecturers—who are those who decide in the end the language of
teaching—find themselves in a difficult position, juggling both the insti-
tutional priorities (to treat Catalan as a language which is primus inter
pares) and the expectations of international students (who often wish
to engage with Catalan just minimally, certainly not as the language of
teaching and learning).
Institutionally, one way of dealing with this clash of stances is by pro-
posing the principle of linguistic security—that is, by asking teachers to
publicise the language of instruction of their subjects in advance. This
principle may be designed to enable everyone in a classroom to express

themselves in their preferred language, and for everyone’s choice to be
respected. However, without specific training and preparation, it is hard
to imagine it being implemented extensively in this flexible way; rather, it
may end up constraining language choice in classrooms, making it diffi-
cult for all the languages to be used in a meaningful way.
University officials in Catalonia, particularly those closely involved
with the drafting of their institutional language policy initiatives, have
already dedicated an enormous amount of effort to attempting to dis-
cover effective ways of handling the increasing linguistic complexity of
their spaces—perhaps more effort than in many other equally complex
university systems. However, in what was an already fraught Catalan–
Spanish bilingual contact situation, and particularly given ongoing polit-
ical developments in the region, language-related tensions are unlikely
to disappear; rather, the contrary appears more likely. More effort, and
greater collaboration from all stakeholders involved (from government
officials, to university administrators, teachers, and students), will be
needed to take some of the heat off university classrooms in particular
and off the higher education system more generally.
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusions
Abstract  This book has explored in some detail how the attempts by

Catalan universities to respond to the challenges of becoming more
international in focus, while remaining very much locally grounded and
nationally relevant, affect the languages of teaching and learning, par-
ticularly Catalan. Universities are a key site for exploring compelling
issues of a sociolinguistic and applied linguistic nature because they are
important state (i.e. national) institutions which are increasingly por-
trayed as internationally relevant players in a global educational market.
Consequently, many universities are saturated with discourses which
fluctuate between the nationalising and the globalising poles. The inter-
play between such discourses frequently lead to tensions, ambiguities,
dilemmas, and aspirations, which can materialise in the articulation of
specific language policy documents authored by university councils or
other relevant authorities. In this chapter, we summarise the key findings
around the stance-taking processes of the different stakeholders primarily
involved in the higher education system of Catalonia.
Keywords  Language policy · Higher education · Catalonia · Stance ·

Policy documents · Stakeholders
This book has explored in some detail the ways in which the attempts
by Catalan universities to respond to the challenges of becoming more
international and global, while remaining very much locally grounded

and nationally relevant, have affected the languages used in teach-

ing and learning within the universities, particularly the Catalan lan-
guage. Universities are key sites for exploring issues of a sociolinguistic
and applied linguistic nature because they are important state (i.e.
national) institutions which are increasingly portrayed as internationally
relevant players in a global educational market (Hultgren et al. 2014).
Consequently, many universities are saturated with discourses which fluc-
tuate between the a nationalising force and a globalising one (Soler and
Vihman 2018). The interplay between these discourses often leads to
tensions, ambiguities, dilemmas, and aspirations that can find their way
into the specific language policy documents approved by university coun-
cils or other relevant authorities (Källkvist and Hult 2016).
The processes by which universities implement policies that project
a view of internationalisation while simultaneously seeking to coun-
ter the threat to diversity posed by globalisation can be interpreted as
an instance of ‘glocalisation’ (Palmer and Cho 2012; see also Bastardas-
Boada 2012). As a part of this process of glocalisation, as Catalan univer-
sities attempt to find the balance between their global and local agendas,
language policies have been devised to deal with the challenge of intro-
ducing English into an already fraught bilingual setting.
This pre-existing bilingual setting is something that distinguishes
Catalan universities from many other institutions in non-anglophone
countries. The two local languages, Catalan and Spanish, both of which
are prominent working languages at universities in Catalonia, have their
own common history prior to the introduction of English. This history is
in great measure marked by the campaign for the revitalisation of Catalan
and its associated discourses. These discourses, although very much still
relevant in present-day Catalonia, have been constantly evolving since the
end of the Franco dictatorship (Woolard 2016). The main challenge cur-
rently facing Catalan language-in-education policies is making room for
English, a language of international communication which enables stu-
dent and staff mobility. At the same time, policies cannot forget to attend
to the promotion of Catalan and its protection from a shift to Spanish
(Cots 2008), particularly in higher education, one of the most prestigious
key domains for the long-term sustainability of the language (Vila 2015).
In order to address the complexity of this situation, we analysed the
language policy documents of the public universities of Catalonia, com-
bining this with a more situated, qualitative, and ethnographic analysis
of one public university in Catalonia, concentrating specifically on the
6 CONCLUSIONS 121
context of incoming international students. An ethnographic perspec-

tive allowed us to present the ways in which different stakeholders at
the university (including teachers, administrative staff, and international
students) interpret the language policies which regulate their daily lin-
guistic practices, and construct a stance towards them. This is in line
with current ethnographic perspectives on language policy (e.g. Johnson
2009). It is important to analyse the stakeholders’ positioning, because
the way in which they see languages and language-in-education poli-
cies—their beliefs—will be reflected in their habitual patterns of language
use and language choice—their practices—which are at the same time
influenced by the institutional attempts to intervene in these practices—
management and planning. In this way, we also draw on a more clas-
sic conceptualisation of language policy, namely Spolsky’ s (2004) three
components of language policy (language beliefs, practices, and manage-
ment strategies).
At the beginning of this volume we presented the following research
questions:
1. In a context of increased internationalisation, how do key stake-

holders ‘on the ground’ at universities (teachers, students, and
administrative staff) respond to their changing sociolinguistic envi-
ronments and the language policy documents of their universities?
2. What major themes emerge from officially formulated policy docu-
ments; that is, what stance do universities present in their regulat-
ing documents?
3. What is the fate of languages like Catalan, which has a relatively
solid presence at universities in Catalonia, in a context of increased
coexistence with other major languages such as English, but also
Spanish?
The issues underlying these questions have been examined in the

preceding chapter. Here, we briefly summarise the essential points
around each of them.
The Stance of Stakeholders ‘On the Ground’

We have been able to capture three stances in our ethnographic analysis
of stakeholder practices at a small university in Catalonia: (1) a stance
of promoting and protecting Catalan as the main language of teaching
and learning at the university; (2) a stance which is positioned between

the expectations of the regulating documents of the university and the
linguistic expectations of incoming exchange students; and (3) a stance
of resistance towards studying at a monolingual university. Each of these
stances was triggered and constructed in interactions with different bod-
ies of the university.
In the first case, the stance which is in favour of the promotion and
protection of Catalan by making it the most extensive working language
at the university, even in the context of internationalisation, appears
almost as a literal reproduction of the official institutional stance. The
university makes its stance visible via its official website and through
those administrative and teaching staff who work for the Language
Service, a body originally created to promote and protect Catalan at the
university from a shift to Spanish. The relationship of intersubjectivity
between the administrative staff and the language instructors is one of
alignment with the university’s official stance but does not align with
the stance of the international students, who express discomfort in the
face of a university that they perceive as a monolingual Catalan-speaking
setting. This stance which is constructed by the international students,
listed as the third stance above, sits in opposition to the university’s
stance.
Between these two stances we find that of the subject content lectur-
ers, who adopt an explicitly intermediate stance, projecting their position
as being one between two opposing sides and one which does not fit
with the requirements of the language policy documents of the univer-
sity, particularly with the principle of linguistic security. In their view,
that principle is too rigid, and does not allow them to accommodate to
the linguistic needs of the international students. The lecturers also chal-
lenge this principle further by stating that teaching in Spanish may be
the only way to abide by the principle, since in this way it is possible
to use a medium of instruction that international students can under-
stand and in which they are academically competent. This last stance is
one which deserves particular attention, not only because of the way in
which the lecturers are juggling between the agendas of the university
and the international students, but also in terms of the future direction
of language-in-education policies in international higher education insti-
tutions. As we explain below, Van der Walt (2016) suggests reconsid-
ering the role of language-in-education policies, and moving towards a
6 CONCLUSIONS 123
strategy of classroom decision-making, a system which would give the

lecturers the flexibility that they wish to claim.
Nevertheless, our work should not be read as identifying the members
of each collective as sharing one particular stance or as making gener-
alisations about the attitudes of teaching staff, administrative staff, and
students. Even though we have talked about it as general patterns and
as though the individuals within each set share all beliefs, in fact it is not
as monolithic as the presentation would make it appear. If we bear in
mind the case of Christina, one of the authors of the drawing (Fig. 4.1)
in Chapter 4, it is also clear that these are dominant discourses of the
various groups, which can override any individual attitudes. What we
have tried to do across this volume is to show how language policies are
negotiated at different levels, and analyse the problematic issues we have
observed. In the end, we could say that the stance of the language policy
makers and the staff of the Language Service, the stance of the lectur-
ers, and the stance of the international students are not so different. All
three groups are in favour of a multilingual university. Yet they have dif-
ferent interests, and the way in which language interacts with these inter-
ests requires more attention and deserves more prominence. Whereas
the university clearly adopts a discourse which resonates with that of lan-
guage revitalisation in Catalonia, the international students articulate a
discourse in which minority languages are in the background at a global
university.
The Stance Formulated by the Universities

in Their Official Language Policy Documents
The university language policy documents that we have analysed in this

volume indicate a number of areas in which a shared consensus exists
between university officials across the different public universities in
Catalonia. The central consensus, it seems to us, is that universities are
multilingual spaces, sites where more and more languages will come into
contact, in different degrees of intensity, of course, but nevertheless to
a greater extent than in the past. In light of this situation, universities
propose the following: (1) to make sure that the Catalan language has
a position of prominence within the university sphere; (2) to respect
everyone’s language rights, particularly those of speakers of the Spanish
language, and to make sure that such rights are not undermined; and
(3) to work towards strengthening the linguistic competences of

everyone in a ‘third’ language—that is, English—and in so doing to

promote a context of multilingualism with a functional distribution of
the different languages in contact.
The first two of these proposals are almost predetermined, emanating
as they do from the legal framework in which universities in Catalonia
operate. Indeed, Catalan is considered Catalonia’s ‘own’ and offi-
cial language in fundamental laws in Catalonia, such as the Statute of
Autonomy (passed in 1979, modified in 2006), and the Language Policy
Act (passed in 1998, a modified version of the 1983 Law on Linguistic
Normalisation). Affirmative action around Catalan has a well-estab-
lished history in the region, and as public institutions, public universities
in Catalonia are seen as playing an important role in that respect. It is,
therefore, not surprising to find university policy documents enshrining
this position of prominence for Catalan. Spanish is not only the major-
ity language in the context of Spain but also across several areas of
Catalonia—like the metropolitan area of Barcelona—and already enjoys a
fairly privileged position in academia.
It is also not surprising, we would argue, that the documents which
we have analysed place considerable emphasis on a need to enhance
the linguistic competences of all university members, particularly their
competence in English. This position derives from a range of sources,
including the discourse that, generally speaking, the people of Catalonia
have poor levels of English and in general in other languages (Montero
2017).
However, the focus on language issues, and particularly on English,
represented by these language policy documents has not come about
simply because universities find that they need to think strategically
about language matters at their institutions. In particular, we have
argued that it has been the actions of the Catalan government, over the
past decade or more, that are behind many of the initiatives of and the
measures taken by universities to deal with linguistic issues, including the
drafting of the very language policy documents that we have analysed
in the volume. In this regard, we find it highly problematic that a con-
nection should be established between language-related measures and
universities’ access to public funds. Particularly controversial is the link
between funding and requiring universities to ensure all their students
possess a language certificate by the time they graduate. It is doubtful,
6 CONCLUSIONS 125
to say the least, that such a requirement will ever be legally enforced,
because it edges close to (if it does not transcend) the legal limits of
what universities can require in awarding qualifications and degrees. Of
course, this assumes that deeper structural reforms are not put in place,
such as revising the study plans for all degrees so that they include a lan-
guage component. In the current context, however, it seems that such
structural reforms are unlikely to happen. With that in mind, these
restrictions of access to public funds would seem in fact to be a rather
unfair way of managing—under the table, so to speak—the decreasing
budget for public universities in Catalonia; and this is what seems to lie
behind much of the heated discussion and confrontation between uni-
versities and government officials.
All of this may have important consequences, particularly for the pri-
mary stakeholders and for speakers ‘on the ground’, as we have seen
above in the analysis of the ambiguities and tensions resulting from the
different stance-taking processes. We are not suggesting that it is a bad
thing that universities consider language-related matters in their institu-
tion in more detail or that effective measures are proposed for working
towards enhanced multilingualism. However, the trickle-down effect of
the government action is to push all stakeholders to find adopt a view,
to take a more explicit stance in connection to language, and to search
for legitimacy for the position they take. In that regard, if the goal is
to find ways in which different positions can be more closely aligned, a
more open discussion of the goals and expectations of each of the stake-
holders involved will perhaps need to be fostered. As we have seen, the
chain of mismatching positions does not stop at the differences between
the government and university officials, but continues further down, to
university lecturers and students. In considering a more open discussion
of everyone’s goals and desires, we find it important to mention, if just
in passing, the role of Spanish. Specifically, when it comes to the mis-
matches between the stances of the institution, the lecturers, and the
international students, it would seem that Spanish is the ‘elephant in the
room’ that everyone acknowledges is there but that no one (except the
international students) wishes to discuss openly. Indeed, Spanish even
appears relatively invisibilised in the formal policy documents, and lectur-
ers find themselves in a rather uncomfortable position when they admit
that they might just switch over to Spanish as a medium of instruction in
their courses, not least because this would contravene the institutionally
formulated stance of giving priority to Catalan. This, of course, connects

with deeper anxieties around language shift, and the idea that Catalan
might progressively lose ground in higher education—the final point to
which we now turn.
Towards a Trilingual Classroom Decision-Making

Policy in Catalan Universities: The Fate of Catalan?
Speakers may select one language over another and resist specific lan-
guages because they are respecting and abiding by an official language
policy which is in place, but it also occurs because of the personal beliefs
and ideologies that the individuals carry with them (Spolsky 2004). In
fact, the university language policy documents analysed in Chapter 3 rec-
ommend giving Catalan a preferential role but they leave room for teach-
ers to manoeuvre and decide which language they use for teaching. In
principle, teachers are relatively free to decide whether they will engage
with the campaign of language revitalisation in Catalonia, by promoting
Catalan as a teaching language, or if they will operate on the basis of a
rather more pragmatic and client-oriented discourse by prioritising those
languages which will reach a wider audience and make courses more
accessible to international students.
Language policy documents in Catalonia operate with the assumption
that, in a situation in which all the members of the university are compe-
tent in the three official languages of instruction (therefore, trilingual),
teaching in any of the three languages is not problematic. However, in a
context of increasing internationalisation, it is harder to ensure the mul-
tilingual competence of the student body, even more so when the local
context is bilingual; and this makes language planning hard to stand-
ardise. Van der Walt (2013) argues that, in multilingual universities, the
responsibility for making language arrangements should be transferred
to the lecturers, who need to include these arrangements as part of the
design of the course programme for a particular class. The lecturers need
to anticipate the students’ abilities to follow the course materials and
academic activities, based on their own teaching experience at univer-
sity. Following on from this, Van der Walt (2016) again suggests recon-
sidering the role of language-in-education policies and moving towards
classroom decision-making. She provides a framework for developing
awareness and collecting the information required to make decisions and
6 CONCLUSIONS 127
construct activities in multilingual classrooms which use the students’

languages as a learning resource. She proposes three steps that should be
followed to plan for multilingual support and collaboration in lectures
and assignments (Van der Walt 2016, p. 97):
a. surveying the academic language profile for a particular semester,

b. canvasing the language competence of the lecturer and the
students,
c. discussing students’ expectations regarding the use of a dominant
language for lectures, group work, and assessment.
In the specific context of internationalising universities in Catalonia,

classroom decision-making would probably lead towards the implemen-
tation of multilingual courses in which Catalan, Spanish, and English
would function jointly as languages of teaching and learning. This would
enable the flexibility which the lecturers in Chapter 4 are asking for, and
maintain the universities’ commitment to protecting and promoting
Catalan as a teaching language at university.
Van der Walt (2016, p. 99) presents a hypothetical classroom lan-
guage survey for an international English programme. Table 6.1 is an
adaptation of her hypothetical survey to the context of a course in the
Faculty of Law, Economics, and Tourism (where Pep was a lecturer),
using as international students those who appear in Chapter 4.
Van der Walt (2016) suggests strategies for creating a multilingual
learning context based on this survey. If we adapt her strategies to the
specific case of a classroom in a university that aims at trilingualism,
course materials and bibliographical resources could be made available
in any of the three languages, the materials could be discussed in class
in groups organised by language proficiency, and the teacher could use
more than one language in spoken interactions, making the three lan-
guages visible. Even if a teacher is only receptive in English, they can ask
questions of the students in Spanish or Catalan to check that there are no
misunderstandings.
We would suggest, then, that one of the routes that language policy
makers in Catalan universities may need to explore is a dynamic model
of trilingualism of the type in which, as García (2009) puts it, multilin-
gualism is not only the aim but the engine of the programme. The use of
translanguaging practices (García and Li Wei 2014) as legitimate means
for teaching would open up space for the official and working languages
Table 6.1 A hypothetical classroom language survey for a course at the UC
Language profile Language competence (lecturer) Language competence (students) Language expectations
Catalan most strongly repre- Spanish–Catalan bilingual for Catalan and Spanish and Students’ expectations regard-
sented, also Spanish, English, academic purposes, also recep- English as academic languages; ing language use would be
and the home languages of tively competent in English international students lack discussed, and the best way
international students competence in Catalan, and to accomplish them would be
home students tend to be less decided
proficient in English than their
other two languages
6 CONCLUSIONS 129
to cooperate within the same learning situation and facilitate communi-

cation in an intercultural environment. However, the implementation of
a translanguaging model in a sociolinguistic context such as Catalonia,
where Catalan is a minoritized language, needs to include measures to
impede that Catalan loses presence as a teaching language vis-à-vis pow-
erful international languages such as Spanish or English. Cenoz and
Gorter (2017) argue that in globalised contexts the contact between
regional minority languages (Basque in their context of research) and
other languages can both represent a threat for the survival of the minor-
ity language and an opportunity for its development. To avoid a shift into
the majority language, the authors argue that a translanguaging pedagogy
should respect five principles. First, there should be a space where the
minority language is used freely and without the presence of the majority
one to avoid the competition between both. Second, the minority lan-
guage and the majority one should be alternated within the same text, to
make it a requirement for individuals to be competent in both languages
to understand the whole text. Third, the knowledge that the students
have of other languages is a resource that should be activated to enhance
metalinguistic awareness and learning similarities and differences between
the languages. Fourth, the multilingual pedagogies should explore the
knowledge of the students of the sociolinguistic situation of the lan-
guages that they learn. Finally, spontaneous translanguaging (or the pluri-
lingual practices which occur naturally among plurilingual speakers) and
pedagogical translanguaging (or the planned use of the languages) should
be combined. We believe that in the case of Catalan universities, provided
that Cenoz and Gorter’s measures are considered, a translanguaging
perspective would create opportunities for the international students to
learn more about the relation between Spanish and Catalan as well as it
would provide local students and staff with opportunities to practice for-
eign languages thereby enhancing the social practice of multilingualism.
Additionally, these practices would move Catalan into a position of being
a language of intercultural communication in an international university
and, finally, it would respect the ecology of the classroom, as trilingualism
would continue to thrive.
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Index
A Catalan government, 124

AntConc, 52 Catalan Language Policy Act, 44, 45,
Auberge espagnole, L’, 2, 105 101, 124
Catalan-Spanish language contact, 113
Catalan Statute of Autonomy, 44, 101,
B 124
Baker, Colin, 69 Catalan Universities Act, 44, 45, 101
Barakos, Elisabeth, 6, 97 Catalan university system
Björkman, Beyza, 51, 52 language knowledge and use, 44
Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) legal framework, 44
students, 23 Cenoz, Jasone, 31
Blommaert, Jan, 6 content analysis, 50, 51
Bretxa, Vanessa, 102 characters, 54
Bucholtz, Mary, 74 chronology, 55
Bull, Tove, 26 conventional, 52
Busch, Brigitta, 109 directed, 52
narrative, 53, 61
plot, 55, 58
C qualitative, 53
Canagarajah, Suresh, 6, 7 summative, 52
Catalan, 57, 124 Corona, Víctor, 108
as ‘own’ and official language, 55, Cots, Josep M., 31, 69, 120
58, 62, 124 Creese, Angela, 8
language revitalisation, 126 critical discourse studies, 7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 131

under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
J. Soler and L. Gallego-Balsà, The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16677-9
132 Index
D I
decolonisation of knowledge, 23 implicit language policy, 27
Doiz, Aintzane, 4, 25 interactional sociolinguistics, 74
Du Bois, John, 74 interactional studies, 7
intercultural awareness, 21, 34
intercultural competence, 20, 34
E Internationalisation at home, 20
English internationalisation of higher educa-
‘global’ English, 26 tion, 4, 18
‘international’ English, 26 bilingual contexts, 11
native speakers, 60 buzzword, 34
working language, 59, 112 definition, 20
Englishisation of higher education, 29 diversity, 22
English medium instruction, 5, 29. See language ideological debates, 34
also English-taught programmes language policy, 4
English-taught programmes, 25, minority language settings, 30
104. See also English medium ‘nationalising’ and ‘globalising’
instruction discourses, 4, 120
Erasmus, 2 neoliberalism, 5
ethnographic fieldwork, 4, 70, 99 north-south divide, 10, 24, 104
‘snowball technique’, 72 race, 22
ethnography of language policy, 6, 8, sociolinguistic studies, 24
69, 121 internationalisation of the curriculum,
21
international students, 96
F the ‘international’ university, 19
Fairclough, Norman, 5 intertextuality, 10, 45
G J
Gallego-Balsà, Lídia, 72, 108 Johnson, David C., 8, 10, 45, 97, 110,
glocalisation, 120 121
H K
Haberland, Hartmut, 5 Klapisch, Cédric, 2
Heller, Monica, 74, 111 Knight, Jane, 19
Holborow, Marnie, 5
Hornberger, Nancy, 7
Hult, Francis, 9, 110 L
Hultgren, Kristina, 29 language attitudes
‘bunker attitude’, 70
international students, 100
Index 133
minority language speakers, 99 linguistic ethnography, 8

language conflict, 5 Li Wei, 92, 127
language policy llengua pròpia, 11, 45. See also Catalan
and governmentality, 7
language policing, 96
macro and micro levels, 7 M
top-down bottom-up dichotomy, macro micro dichotomy, 7
109 marketisation of higher education, 5
language policy cycle, 6, 97, 109 McCarty, Theresa, 6, 97, 110
language policy in higher education, medium-sized languages, 31, 64
26 monolingual institution, 83, 110
Baltic states, 29 Moore, Emilee, 25, 106
Basque Country, 31 Mortensen, Janus, 5
Catalonia, 12, 51, 64, 78, 98, 104, mother-tongue-plus-two, 103
126
China, 26
Denmark, 30 N
economic dimension, 102 Newman, Michael, 108
English, 26 nexus analysis, 9
Europe, 28 Nordic countries, 24, 29
Germany, 28
Hong Kong, 26
Italy, 28 O
Latin America, 28 Ochs, Elinor, 75
Puerto Rico, 27 Office of International Relations, 70
Singapore, 27 orientations in language planning,
South Africa, 28 101, 111
Taiwan, 26 language-as-problem, 101
tourism, 111 language-as-resource, 101
Vietnam, 27 language-as-right, 101
Wales, 31
language practices and ideologies, 99
Language Service, 70 P
languages for teaching purposes Pérez-Milans, Miguel, 9
graduate level, 48 Piller, Ingrid, 5
undergraduate level, 48 Pla de Llengües, 10, 98
languages of wider communication, 64 UAB, 50, 56, 59
Lasagabaster, David, 31 UB, 50, 57
Leask, Betty, 21 UdG, 50, 60
linguistic competence, 32, 46, 58, 98, UdL, 50, 56, 105
103 UOC, 50
linguistic cosmopolitanism, 108 UPC, 50, 55, 56
134 Index
UPF, 50, 60, 105 Catalan language instructors, 89

URV, 50, 57 international students’, 122
policy and practice mismatch, 96 lecturers’, 80, 109, 122
Politecnico di Milano, 29 protection of Catalan, 107
Pons, Eva, 44, 106 Spanish as a lingua franca, 83
principle of linguistic security, 47, 105, stancetaking, 76, 125
112, 122 study abroad, 2
one language at a time, 106 Swaan, Abram de, 64
Prior, Lindsay, 51, 62
Pujolar, Joan, 106, 108
T
ten Thije, Jan, 105
R translanguaging, 108
Rampton, Ben, 8 trilingualism, 127
receptive multilingualism, 105
Ricento, Thomas, 6, 97
Ruiz, Richard, 101, 111 U
Unger, Jonathan, 6, 97
universities in Catalonia, 97
S university administrators, 96
Saarinen, Taina, 9, 110 university language policies, 4
Santulli, Francesca, 29, 104 university language policy documents,
Shohamy, Elana, 27 46, 50, 120
Soler, Josep, 3, 30 university teachers, 3, 46
Spanish, 125
official language, 11, 19, 45, 56,
101 V
Spanish Constitution, 44 Van der Walt, Christa, 126
Spanish Law of Universities, 44 Verschik, Anna, 105
Spolsky, Bernard, 64, 121, 126 Vila, F. Xavier, 4, 31, 64
stance, 74
Catalan as a legitimate language, 79
Catalan as an obstacle, 77 W
Catalan as an opportunity, 77 Wächter, Bernd, 24, 25
Catalan as a problem, 83 Woolard, Kathryn, 106, 108, 120

The Sociolinguistics of Higher Education: Language Policy and Internationalisation in Catalonia

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The Sociolinguistics

ISBN 978-3-030-16676-2 ISBN 978-3-030-16677-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

We would like to acknowledge the support received from the following

a. “Internationalisation and Multilingualism” in Universities in Bilingual

1 Introduction: Language Policy and the

2 Language Policy, Internationalisation, and Multilingual

3 Language Policy Regulations at Catalan Universities:

4 Clashing Stances Towards Catalan: An Ethnographic

5 The Internationalisation of Catalan Universities:

Stance-Taking: Juggling Different Languages and Ideological

Fig. 3.1 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the undergraduate

Table 3.1 University language policy documents 50

Introduction: Language Policy

Abstract In recent years, universities have increasingly attracted the

Keywords Language policy · Internationalisation · Higher education ·

© The Author(s) 2019 1

As groups of foreign students began to populate university classrooms

1. In a context of increasing internationalisation, how do key stake-

This book explores in some detail how Catalan universities respond

The Internationalisation of Higher Education

instruction of one institution into English-only with the goal of climbing

language governmentality (Pennycook 2006), and secondly, the idea of

researchers can demonstrate how broader-level discourses on language

the language practices of the target community, and ethnography can

Outline and Summary of the Volume

governing linguistic practices in a given context. Key questions that need

Canagarajah, S. (2006). Ethnographic methods in language policy. In T. Ricento

Inda, J. X. (Ed.). (2005). Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality,

Pons, E. (2015). The position of Catalan in higher education in Catalonia. In

Language Policy, Internationalisation,

Abstract The term ‘internationalisation’ is fraught with different mean-

Keywords Higher education · Internationalisation · The ‘international’

© The Author(s) 2019 17

The Internationalisation of Higher Education

The term ‘internationalisation’, applied to the domain of higher edu-

needs to be generic enough to apply to different countries, cultures, and

• offering students global perspectives within their own programmes,

• making elements of internationalisation emerge systematically in the

All in all, the approach to internationalisation at home proposed by

and international aspects of the subject matter, and which is informed

• focuses on students as learners

Diversity, then, is seen as central to internationalisation. However,

In recent campaigns against racism, the decolonisation of university

One of the most significant problems relating to gaps in the curriculum in

Sociolinguistic Studies of the Internationalisation

Having explored the broader issue of the internationalisation of higher

of English across university settings in different countries in Europe is

Language Policy and Planning in Higher

debate to easily emerge between those in favour of and those against an

In universities elsewhere in Latin America, including Mexico, Colombia,

In the case of Germany, for example, Erling and Hilgendorf (2006)

(Bulajeva and Hogan-Brun 2014; Kibbermann 2017; Soler et al.

Multilingual Higher Education

at Catalan universities, and interesting insights come from analysing cases

might be seen as a requirement at the University of Lleida in Catalonia,

attainment of an intermediate level in a third language from being a rec-

Nordic countries or the Baltic states. That said, it is also important to

Bretxa (Eds.), Language policy in higher education: The case of medium-sized

Lanvers, U., & Hultgren, A. K. (2018). The Englishization of European educa-

Phillipson, R. (2006). English, a cuckoo in the European higher education nest

Language Policy Regulations at Catalan

Abstract Language policy documents in Catalan universities tend to

a. “Internationalisation and Multilingualism” in Universities in Bilingual

Fig. 3.1 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the undergraduate

Table 3.1 University language policy documents 50

Abstract  In recent years, universities have increasingly attracted the

Keywords  Language policy · Internationalisation · Higher education ·

1. In a context of increasing internationalisation, how do key stake-

Outline and Summary of the Volume

Abstract  The term ‘internationalisation’ is fraught with different mean-

Keywords  Higher education · Internationalisation · The ‘international’

Sociolinguistic Studies of the Internationalisation

(Bulajeva and Hogan-Brun 2014; Kibbermann 2017; Soler et  al.

Language Policy Regulations at Catalan

Abstract  Language policy documents in Catalan universities tend to

Keywords  University language policies · Content analysis · Catalan

Fig. 3.1 Use of languages for teaching purposes at the undergraduate level

h h hW hW& hĚ' hĚ> hZs tĞŝŐŚƚĞĚ

A Content Analysis of Language Policy Documents

Table 3.1 University language policy documents

Table 3.2 Ranks and frequencies of the keywords

Català/-na Anglès Mullingüisme Castellà Internacionalització

Fig. 3.3 Hits of keywords per university

Abstract  A case study of one Catalan university is presented in this

Keywords  Linguistic practices and ideologies · Ethnography · Stance ·

Table 4.1 Data collection timeline