LAUSR

When, why, and how do people who regularly speak a majority language decide to become speakers of the minority language where they live? How do we understand their motivations, challenges, and behaviors? And how do these experiences vary across diverse sociolinguistic and political contexts? In the last two decades, the phenomenon of ‘new speakers’ of minority languages has achieved greater visibility and prominence in Europe, prompted in part by the avid interest of minority language advocates who see the growth of new speakers as necessary to ensuring the continuity of their languages. Research on new speakers has been unfolding at a fast pace with the support of a variety of local, regional and European research grants which has spurred international conferences, intensified documentation, comparative studies, theoretical exploration and a relevant number of key publications. In this Special Issue, we present some of the latest work on new speakers carried out in Spain’s historical linguistic minority regions of Aragon, the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, with the added distinction of including work that looks at new speakers of Basque who reside in both France and Spain. New speaker research has been exceptionally active in the Spanish state. Indeed, some of the theoretical questions, concepts, and methodological proposals that we see today in new speaker research – e.g. the notion of ‘muda’ and questions exploring new speakers’ sense of authenticity and legitimacy – were initially addressed in the Spanish context and extrapolated to other territories and languages (e.g. Smith-Christmas et al. 2018). The prominence of the Spanish context is rooted in particular historical, material and political factors that made its minoritized language regions fertile ground for new speaker research. Below, we provide an overview of the historical and variable sociolinguistic contexts that have shaped language revitalisation and therefore new speaker research in each of the areas. Although located within the same state (with the exception of the Northern Basque Country), the sociolinguistic contexts of these cases are quite different. Bringing them together makes salient the variability of the Spanish context and also gives us a window into some of the conceptual, practical and political challenges that are likely to be on the agenda for new speaker research elsewhere. If the past decades of research sought to document the trends in numbers, demographic profiles, and subjectivities of new speakers, the current papers show us a concerted interest in better understanding the problematic of trying to become an active speaker of a minority language. Key questions that are emerging: What are the conditions, spaces, and ideological stances that facilitate and explain the usage of the minority language in new speakers’ everyday lives? Which theoretical and methodological tools are best suited to the study of this process of linguistic conversion? And how can research itself become a tool in this process of speaker ‘activation’?