The Legal Rights of Aragonese-Speaking Schoolchildren: The Current State of Aragonese Language Teaching (Spain)

Aragon is an autonomous community within Spain where, historically, three languages are spoken: Aragonese, Catalan, and Castilian Spanish. Both Aragonese and Catalan are minority and minoritised languages within the territory, while Castilian Spanish, the majority language, enjoys total legal protection and legitimation. The fact that we live in the era of the nation-state is crucial for understanding endangered languages in their specific socio-political context. This is why policies at macro-level and micro-level are essential for language maintenance and equality. In this article, we carry out an in-depth analysis of 57 documents: international and national legal documents, education reports, and education curricula. The aims of the paper are: (1) to analyse the current state of Aragonese language teaching in primary education in Aragon, and (2) to suggest solutions and desirable policies to address the passive bilingualism of Aragonese-speaking schoolchildren. We conclude that although Aragon is a trilingual community, education policy actually does not reflect this reality. There is also a need to implement language policies (bottom-up and top-down initiatives) to promote compulsory education in a minoritised language. We therefore propose a linguistic model that brings to the forefront minority languages. This study may contribute to research into Aragonese-Castilian bilingualism in contexts of possible language loss.This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain by the Grants EDU2014-54093-R, EDU2017-82479-R and IJCI-2016-28250; the Catalan Government’s Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) by the Grant 2017 SGR 322