The construction of linguistic identities in officially bilingual contexts

Zusammenfassung

The aim of my research is to find out about the ways through which people construct our linguistic identity and ideology. In order to do that, I have carried out fieldwork in two high schools of two towns of two officially bilingual communities (Basque Country and Catalonia). The data I have collected there - semi-structured interviews, focus group sessions in their native language/s and in English, field notes, and so on - have then been duly treated / transcribed. At this point, I have started analysing the data both from a micro and a macro perspective. At the micro level, I have taken notions from ethno-methodology and discourse analysis in order to understand in some depth what went on in the recorded speech events (concepts such as participant alignment, speaker selection, topic management, and so on). But due to my political commitment with the issue of investigation, I wanted to take that to a more general level, and thus I have come up with linguistic profiles of the subjects (myself included), in relation to what these subjects do, know and think/feel about the languages and varieties they use/learn, and the relationship they perceive between these and the wider socio-political context in which they live, a context that, as I see it, is basically dominated by the two phenomena of globalisation and nationalism.