‘Agency’ is currently a hot topic in applied linguistics, with many studies focusing on teacher agency and the influence it has on other variables in language-learning environments. This ethnographic text, however, zooms in on language as used by speakers both in and outside of formal education contexts, basing its evidence on observations of practices in action such as family language policies. The authors are keen to point out that the notion of agency pertaining to language use is highly constrained by the construct of ‘language(s)’ as object(s).
Definitions of agency can vary from a basic-level application of how much freedom a person has over their own actions, to complex entanglements of hegemonies and mechanisms of power exerted by government language policies, which in turn influence the capacity for human action at a sociopolitical level. As a case in point, Bernadette O'Rourke & Alejandro Dayán-Fernández explore ‘new agentive spatial dynamics’ amongst speakers of Galician, highlighting the tensions that emerge when a minority language speakers’ collective makes a choice to practice a monolingual policy as a solution to revitalisation. This goes against the current translanguaging turn in multilingualism but is seen by the group as a form of positive redress to claw power back from the nation state. The authors compassionately present the history and context of the Galician-speaking initiative group, known as Semente, and their call for grass roots level language policy decision-making.
This anthology is a box of delights for those who are looking to explore the subject of agency in close and complexly nuanced depth by bringing it to life with situated examples. The first part of the book expounds upon agentive practices in action, and the second is dedicated to offerings as to how the future might play out. Many of the chapters provide insight through case studies of minority languages in use, for example, in the Gaeltacht districts of Ireland, Galician-speaking barrios of Spain, Sorbian speaking areas of East Germany, Griko usage in Southern Italy, North Frisian dialect in Germany, and Occitan in France. Each case study details instances of minority languages as tools of social resistance and how they can be used to challenge the linguistic status quo against top-down language planning. The authors present evidence from a range of diverse contexts, unified by speaker advocacy, presenting minority language speakers as agents of language change, and underlining the need to create safe non-judgemental spaces for language users (‘breathing spaces’).
However, as Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin argues, language shift in diglossic environments cannot be resolved by a simple binary outcome as previously theorised by the 1970s-founded Grup Català de Sociolingüística. It is not always desirable that a minoritised language becomes a substitute for the dominant language, nor that it becomes absorbed by the host via normalisation; the journey of a language's social status is rarely a linear one. The book's main takeaway is that minority language usage (although closely linked to social identity) does not inevitably lead to activism, nor does activism necessarily equate with oppositional resistance.
