From a bilingual national project to an ‘English fever’ in Catalonia

Catalonia, like the other autonomous regions in Spain, was not exempt from those socioeconomic and educational transformations. Represented as a bilingual region where Catalan and Spanish coexist, Catalonia saw a resurgence of Catalan as a key element of its national identity after the transition. The process of normalising Catalan (Normalització Lingüística) aimed to recover the role of this language in official spaces, the education system and the media, as well as making it the everyday language (llengua habitual). This status had been diminished during Franco’s regime, further complicated by the influx of monolingual Spanish-speaking migrants from other Spanish regions during the 1960s and 1970s, often referred to as the ‘second generation of migrants’. During the 1980s and 1990s, the education system focussed on ensuring that all children in Catalonia learned Catalan and facilitated social integration for those whose ‘habitual’ language was Spanish. This mission was going to become more complex with the arrival of international migrants, speakers of languages other than Spanish (mostly Arabic and Chinese), as well as other varieties of Spanish from former Latin American colonies, as a result of the participation of Catalonia and Spain in the globalised economy at the end of the twentieth century. Concurrently, there was a growing interest in learning English, a previously less emphasised aspect of education in Spain. Codó (Reference Codó, Rubdy and Tupas2021) describes this period as marked by the emergence of CLIL (content and language integrated learning) initiatives in private and semiprivate (concertada) schools and a surge in English language academies. State education began adopting measures to promote English among children from lower-middle- and working-class families who could not access private education. This ‘English fever’ peaked during the economic crisis of 2008.

Over nearly fifty years of democratic governance, Catalonia’s language ideologies have evolved. Initially centred on Catalan as the region’s ‘own language’, and the main priority of its normalisation, the focus has shifted towards promoting intercultural cohesion and recognising the diverse linguistic backgrounds of Catalan residents. Today, Catalonia exhibits a range of language ideologies and practices, reflecting different perspectives on language use (Newman & Trenchs-Parera Reference Newman and Trenchs‐Parera2015). Broadly speaking, and without claiming to be exhaustive, Catalan speakers fall into a number of categories: We can find Catalan speakers who view Catalan as their own language, as opposed to Spanish, which they perceive as imposed by the Spanish government. Another group of Catalan speakers continues to accommodate by switching to Spanish in front of perceived Spanish speakers, a traditional practice in Catalonia (Woolard Reference Woolard2013). Additionally, some Catalan speakers, raised as Spanish speakers but educated in Catalan, identify as bilingual and alternate between the two languages. Meanwhile, residents who use Spanish as their primary language, and more recently, those who speak other languages, see learning Catalan as a means of integration.

As this brief discussion shows, generalising about the Catalan language and language ideologies overlooks the complexities involved. The survey of language use by the local Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya Reference de Catalunya2019), launched in 2018, identified multiple orientations towards the Catalan language amongst resident Catalans. The results indicate that, between 2013 and 2018, the use of Catalan amongst adults increased slightly. More than one-third of Catalan residents were born outside Catalonia, but Catalan is used in their everyday lives, in addition to their first languages (including Spanish, English, Arabic, Chinese, and others). The use of Catalan has extended to public spaces in shops, and in private spaces, such as between friends and neighbours. The migrant adults see a value in learning Catalan for various reasons (intercultural marriages, social networks, work circumstances, etc). Importantly, the intergenerational transmission of Catalan in the family continues to be strong. While the local government focusses on Catalan, the media continue to transmit an anxiety amongst Catalans over having an insufficient level of English (Silva Reference Silva2024). The parents we have studied have ambivalent ideas on this. They are all fully bilingual in Spanish and Catalan, and they all interact in both languages in their daily lives. However, they embrace new forms of household relations in which English is incorporated as one of the family’s linguistic repertoires. For them, English represents a language of international engagement and mobility, which is why they are keen for their children to learn it. More interestingly, as discussed by Codó & Sunyol (Reference Codó and Sunyol2024:18), they are the kind of parents who embrace new forms of parental culture, whereby they choose to teach their children English as a means of ‘actively taking charge of their children’s education through informed and calculated choices, enabling them to manage the family’s educational investments efficiently in order to maximise their socioeconomic, educational, and professional return’.

The evolution of FLP research

The field of FLP has its roots in language policy research, and at its inception merged knowledge from the domains of language socialisation, (children’s) language acquisition, and language maintenance/language shift (Lanza & Lomeu Gomes Reference Lanza, Gomes, Schalley and Eisenchlas2020). In its early phase, FLP was dominated by Spolsky’s (Reference Spolsky2004) framework, which identified the three elements of language policy: language ideologies, language management, and language practices. Accordingly, early FLP research focussed upon identifying causal relationships between those three elements and language outcomes. It primarily considered the strategies that migrant parents used to maintain their heritage language (Li Wei Reference Wei2012; Stavans Reference Stavans2012; Curdt-Christiansen Reference Curdt-Christiansen, Schwartz and Verschik2013; Ren & Hu Reference Ren and Guangwei2013). Parents had to deal with the tensions that they and their children perceived between the language used at home and the language of school, and in their society more broadly. As King & Fogle (Reference King, Fogle and Logan‐Terry2008, Reference King and Fogle2013) noted, bilingual parenting was ‘good’ parenting. Parents navigated between socialising the language of society, in order to give their children the social capital for success, and their personal/cultural attachments to their heritage language(s). Those often-conflicting motivations have been labelled ‘profit’ and ‘pride’ respectively in the work of Heller & Duchêne (Reference Heller, Duchêne, Duchêne and Heller2012), and of those who have aligned themselves with their work. As Muth & Ryazanova-Clarke (Reference Muth and Ryazanova-Clarke2017) observed, the shift to ‘profit’ did not fully replace the ‘pride’ discourse of language, and the important symbolic role it held for many. Within this body of research were a significant number of studies that placed the role of heritage language maintenance within the family sphere (Chatzidaki & Maligkoudi Reference Chatzidaki and Maligkoudi2013; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin2013; Soehl Reference Soehl2016), whilst the economically important prestige languages were developed through access to formal education/schooling (Sunyol & Codó Reference Sunyol, Codó, Rojo and del Percio2019; Bae & Park Reference Bae and Park2020). More recently, the focus has expanded to include a consideration of how parents from non-English-speaking contexts take ownership of their children’s access to English, believing it to be important for their future success. (Patiño-Santos Reference Patiño-Santos2018; Patiño-Santos & Poveda Reference Patiño-Santos, Poveda and Codó2023).

FLP research evolved to include how language ideologies are formed, and which ones pervade different societies and inform families’ language practices and strategies (Curdt-Christiansen Reference Curdt-Christiansen2009; Song Reference Song2010; Bae Reference Bae2015). Latterly, the research focus has developed again to include notions of meaning making, biography, agency, and identity (Curdt-Christiansen Reference Curdt-Christiansen, Tollefson and Pérez-Milans2018). As Lanza (Reference Lanza2021) identified, FLP studies have kept pace with broader shifts in sociolinguistic research into multilingualism, which include the need to understand the social, cultural, and linguistic changes that result from the post-modern globalised context. Accordingly, recent studies, such as those by King & Lanza (Reference King and Lanza2019), Lanza & Curdt-Christiansen (Reference Curdt-Christiansen, Tollefson and Pérez-Milans2018), and Van Mensel (Reference Van Mensel2018), have moved the conversation in FLP on from a consideration of only language outcomes as they relate to Spolsky’s model, to an exploration of ‘language-mediated experiences within the family’ (Van Mensel & De Meulder Reference Van Mensel and De Meulder2021:695). With this shifting focus has come a growing diversity in research methods. Several scholars have called for the increased use of ethnographic approaches in FLP research, whilst noting that most FLP studies continue to base their findings upon survey and interview (Purkarthofer Reference Purkarthofer2019; Lanza Reference Lanza2021; Van Mensel & De Meulder Reference Van Mensel and De Meulder2021; Mansfield Reference Mansfield2022). Moreover, as Hirsch & Lee (Reference Hirsch and Lee2018) and Lanza & Lomeu Gomes (Reference Lanza, Gomes, Schalley and Eisenchlas2020) noted, in order to meet this new phase of research goals, FLP studies must now consider the temporal aspect of the family, suggesting an ethnographic and/or biographical approach. Thus, for example, Obojska & Purkarthofer (Reference Obojska and Purkarthofer2018) identified how the trajectories, (language) biographies, and narratives of the pasts of families and family members inform their relationship with language(s), and their perception of the extent and nature of its value. Whilst these works demonstrated the value of looking back, the work of Bryant & Knight (Reference Bryant and Knight2019) (also Patiño-Santos & Poveda Reference Patiño-Santos, Poveda and Codó2023) looked forward, showing how an understanding of the future, be that desired, aspired to, or feared, powerfully impacts the (language) ideologies and hence the practices of the present. This approach allows for an exploration of the emotional and affective dimensions of FLP, an area that remains notably understudied (but see Tannenbaum Reference Tannenbaum2012; Obojska & Purkarthofer Reference Obojska and Purkarthofer2018).

Futurity in parents’ biographical accounts

A biographical view foregrounds the value of storytelling for narrators. By narrating their lives, the tellers recall important past events that have shaped their present and future courses of action across time, but also the meaning attached to them. Through the process of narrating, the social actors offer an understanding of their present circumstances, informed by past experiences, and a rationale for their decisions to engage with imagined ‘better’ futures. As noted by Purkarthofer (Reference Purkarthofer, Purkarthofer and Flubacher2022:50), ‘By analysing individual life stories, effects of social processes that are relevant in structuring people’s lives and experiences emerge. Moments of biographical transformations, which comprise not only migration but also changes in occupation or work environment as well as parenthood or serious illness, make the effects of social forces visible and highlight power relations in societies’. In their work Anthropology of Future, Bryant & Knight (Reference Bryant and Knight2019) discuss how concern about an (uncertain) future, leads social actors to project themselves towards particular imagined futures. Their ideas about the future can be captured as future orientations, such as anticipation, expectation, aspiration, and hope that allow us to understand their different courses of action. Such future orientations are shaped by their lived experience, so by focussing on these, and what people do to realise an imagined future, we can understand human agency over time (Bryant & Knight Reference Bryant and Knight2019; Cook & Woodman Reference Cook, Woodman, Wyn, Cahill, Woodman, Cuervo, Leccardi and Chesters2020). As studies on historical memory have foregrounded, by looking into the past, we can learn how things have come to be (Stewart Reference Stewart2016), and how people envision a future ‘good life’. The imagined future—what we anticipate, dream of, long for—acts as a way to legitimate the present, but also ‘to radically shake our understandings of the past and to remake [our] identity in the present’ (Bryant & Knight Reference Bryant and Knight2019:13). Thus, for example, in her studies about Greeks’ perceptions in the aftermath of the economic recession of 2008, Bryant (Reference Bryant, Daniel and Stewart2018) found that the feelings of being immersed in ‘the uncanny present’ obliged people to rethink their difficult past in different ways. The fear of ‘repetition’ or ‘return’ to difficult pasts created different experiences of the present and hence orientations towards the future. ‘While repetition implies taking lessons from the past, but more importantly shaping our comportment and intentionality towards the future, return instead implies the past as a type of haunting of the present, where uncanniness arises not from intentionality but from the past’s unpredictability in relation to the future’ (2018:29). Importantly, social actors experience temporality individually and collectively, characterised by the author as a ‘vernacular timescale’, where cohorts of people experiencing similar present or past events orientate themselves similarly towards the future. Vernacular timescales are expressed in times such as ‘time for war’ or ‘time of crisis’. In the particular case of this article, we discuss ‘times of transition’.

Here, we focus on two future orientations, ‘expectation’ and ‘anticipation’, which emerged in the stories collected during our fieldwork. The two notions are closely related, but Bryant & Knight (Reference Bryant and Knight2019) draw a heuristic distinction between them, in the sense that they mobilise different courses of action. Using the example of rain, they claim that when we expect rain, we carry an umbrella with us. This expectation may be ‘viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace’ (2019:22). Amongst other things, for social actors, this entails actors modifying their practices, reorganising their lives, and engaging in a continual assessment of their actions. Such reflections have allowed us to believe that the families in our study, led mainly by the mothers, invest in their children’s English learning as a form of anticipation, but also of hope for the future.

Nevertheless, we would like to underline that the social, historical, and material conditions under which these mothers exist play a central role, not only in the ways in which they call upon past experiences, but also in the possibilities that they perceive as available to them in the future. What these mothers anticipate, expect, hope for, and dream about is shaped by their current social positioning and the dispositions they have acquired and reconfigured across time and space. For the mothers, the imagined futures of their daughters need to encompass all the possibilities and opportunities that either they did not themselves enjoy in the past and/or that they constructed over the course of their lives, under their particular social and economic conditions.

Pilar: Breaking with the past

Pilar, a psychologist in her late forties, is a mother of two girls, Marta and Ester, and is married to Pablo. Both are public employees with professional, well-paid jobs, guaranteed for life, which allows them to engage in a comfortable life of travelling together to other parts of Europe during their holidays or to pay for extracurricular activities for their children. The girls attend a state school where, as explained above, instruction is expected to take place in Catalan, while Spanish is normally reserved for social relations at school. Even though both parents speak Catalan and Spanish, Spanish being Pilar’s first language, she nevertheless decided to raise her daughters in English. In our online conversations, she produced all the tropes about English that circulate in non-English-speaking countries, as revealed by the literature (Park Reference Park2009a; Sayer Reference Sayer2017; Patiño-Santos & Poveda Reference Patiño-Santos, Poveda and Codó2023). By following a neoliberal logic, English is portrayed as the language of the future and of economic opportunity (Wee Reference Wee2006; Shin Reference Shin2015), so this is what she wants for her daughters. Pilar does not miss any opportunity for her daughters to practise English and does not skimp on resources to create an environment that allows her daughters to be immersed in the language. Pilar learnt English as an adult. She was born and raised in a Madrilenian family, of Andalusian background, during the 1970s, the years of the Spanish transition. Pilar recalls that English was not an important subject at school, nor in higher education when she was a university student in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, she recounted memories of her early interest in English. She described a desire to pursue a family story about the origin of her ‘red hair’, which explained that they had Irish ancestors who had settled in Andalusia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a wish, as a young Spanish woman in the 1990s, to ‘discover the world’. She went to Ireland, to work in a hotel, when she was around twenty-six with the ultimate aim of learning English. However, this experience turned out to be something of a reality check.

In this small story, Pilar constructs her early experiences in an English-speaking country, as ‘shocking’. Through the events that she recalls, we can understand that her surprise lies in the fact that she positions herself in the story as a non-English speaker abroad, even though she had studied English at school. Importantly, she reflects upon this mismatch between her expectations and the reality she experienced by drawing on the comparison between the English she learnt at school and the English used in everyday life in Ireland. She contrasts the English learnt at school, with its formality and well-constructed structures, with the informal English, through which she failed to communicate in Ireland. This testimony reveals how English was taught in the 1990s. It focussed more on the grammatical structures and vocabulary than on real communication (Barbero et al. Reference Barbero Andrés, Gutiérrez Almarza and Beltrán Llavador1995). As reported by other mothers, English at school was taught through the medium of Catalan. During our conversations, their disappointment with their own English learning at school emerged regularly. Pilar made clear that she left school unable to communicate in English, and, on two occasions, defined learning more informal English, which she encountered in Anglophone countries as an adult, as an “agony”.

Importantly, and despite her difficulties, Pilar framed learning English as an “eye-opening” experience. Once she had learnt the language in Ireland, she gained the confidence to look for jobs requiring English language skills. With time she was able improve her job situation and started working as a Spanish teacher in Dublin. This led her to work in the UK, Indonesia, and Germany, before settling in Catalonia. In her biography, learning English is portrayed, not merely as an experience of speaking another language, but as a key asset to becoming what Benson & O’Reilly (Reference Benson and O’Reilly2009) term a ‘lifestyler’. Thanks to English, she was able to travel and experience other cultures. This assessment of the value of English was also expressed by the other research participants.

Once Pilar, now settled in Barcelona, became a mother of two girls, she decided to “save [her] children from that agony”. Her past traumatic experience as an adult English learner led her to make the decision to anticipate her children’s future and raise them in English. She felt it to be a kind of mission. For that reason, they put in place a set of rituals designed to socialise the girls in English: both girls communicate in English effectively as we could appreciate during our observations of the online drama lesson and the various activities that we organised with the families. One of the rituals established at home was the systematic language policy “Mum speaking English and Dad speaking Catalan”. Since Spanish is the dominant language of their neighbourhood, according to Pilar: “that will come” unaided. The girls had been exposed to English through a series of activities dating back to when they were babies. They met up with other families and parents with a similar interest and created English singing groups and English days for other children’s activities. Excerpt (2) illustrates the way in which Pilar describes her home language management.

In this excerpt, Pilar reports the negotiation of the language policy at home. As is discussed in the literature (De Houwer & Bornstein Reference De Houwer and Bornstein2016), it was the mother who decided the language use and was actively engaged in the language education of her children. Pilar’s plans aimed to involve the whole family, but her husband is portrayed as not being as competent an English speaker who therefore cannot keep up with the family’s activities in English. The different actions Pilar reports being put in place construct her as a committed mother who creates opportunities for the family to speak English: “during the holidays”, “two weeks a year”, and so on. Importantly, the portrayal of her husband as a busy man who cannot communicate in English as effectively, mirrors the “agony” she experienced herself back in Ireland when trying to communicate in English as an adult. This is constructed in the story as requiring a huge effort.

As a result of their family rituals, Marta, the elder daughter, communicates in English fluently and confidently. Ester, the younger one, unlike her sister, prefers not to display her English language skills in public. For that reason, her mother stopped talking exclusively to the girls in English a couple of years ago. Now the girls watch cartoons in English, and their mother continues to seek out activities run in English across the city and beyond. The virtual drama lesson in which we observed them, and the activities that we proposed to them, are among the activities in which she has enrolled the girls.

After several years of speaking to the girls exclusively in English, Pilar now rarely communicates with them in English. The girls have shown that they are advanced speakers, which makes her feel that her efforts have been rewarded. She feels that her daughters are able to communicate effectively in English, even speaking more fluently than their teachers at school. The following in (3) illustrates the results of Pilar’s investment.

Through this small story, Pilar aims to demonstrate her daughter’s skills as an English speaker. This, for her, was the evidence to illustrate that her job as an English-speaking mother was done. Marta, on a bus in Scotland, is able to communicate successfully with a native-speaking interlocutor—an old lady. Pilar’s recall of the situation, by voicing the dialogue between the old lady and Marta, indicates her daughter’s high level of proficiency. Pilar’s realisation that Marta speaks English (“that was the first time I heard Marta to speak English”) confirmed that her task was complete, and hence her evaluation “it was worth it”, which provides a happy ending to her story. This is in line with similar findings reported by Codó & Sunyol (Reference Codó and Sunyol2024).

Pilar’s family story illustrates how parents’ pasts can influence their future orientations regarding their children’s (language) education. Based on her experience of learning English as an adult, as an “agony”, she anticipates a painless future for her daughter and takes extreme measures to bring this about: English was instituted as the home language, despite the fact that this might exclude their father. The sacrifice is seen as worth it, as Pilar demonstrates that she has fulfilled her ultimate expectations. In a way, Pilar sees the future she has anticipated in her children’s linguistic skills: Marta can communicate in English effectively. Since she sees her job as done, she has relaxed the language policy at home, and she now speaks in Spanish to her daughters, while their father continues to speak to them in Catalan. We were able to witness this ‘successful’ intergenerational language change by speaking with Marta in English and appreciating her English skills when she interacted with our English-speaking children. Marta herself reproduced her mother’s pride when she confirmed that she corrected her English teacher at school.

Reme’s family: Forging a multilingual future

Remedios’ (Reme’s) family is Catalan, consisting of her husband Mario, and their daughter Lucía (11), who work for a multilingual international company as administrators. As in Pilar’s case, their economic stability allows them to provide opportunities for the family to spend long holidays abroad and to enrol their daughter into some relatively costly extracurricular activities. Both parents are the children of members of the massive cohort of internal migrants (second generation migrants, as discussed above) who arrived during the 1960s, coming from Spanish-speaking areas. Spanish was the first language for both parents, while Catalan was learnt at school. According to their stories, in the late 1990s, when Remedios and Mario were in their twenties, they both felt they needed to have new experiences in life and decided to learn English. As in Pilar’s testimony, they recall that “this was not common at that time”. English was not as important in Catalonia as it is nowadays. Reme and Mario were not a couple at that time, but coincidentally both decided to travel from Barcelona to London. For Reme, the trip was initially intended to last one year. However, she, like Pilar, explains that, after learning English, she had a significant life-changing experience. She became interested in teaching English, and she travelled around Asia as an English language teacher, before returning to Barcelona. Her interest in travelling led her to work at the airport. Even though she works as an administrator, she states that the fact that she is in contact with passengers from all over the world makes her work interesting. At the airport she can practice the languages she has learnt over the course of her trips: English, French, and Turkish.

When Reme and Mario had their first child, she made the decision to raise her as a multilingual person.

In contrast to certain studies in FLP, which construct the ‘good’ mother based on her efforts to transmit the heritage language to her children (King & Fogle Reference King, Fogle and Logan‐Terry2008), Reme positions herself as being a ‘good’ mother by furnishing them with English. However, it is only at the end of the story that we understand that her discursive construction of a ‘good’ mother entails socialising her new-born daughter in English. At the beginning of the excerpt, Reme lists a series of activities in which she planned to engage her baby daughter. Although it is not explicit, the coda to this story allows us to understand that the ultimate goal was to immerse her in an English-speaking environment, through meeting foreigners, learning English, and finding groups that “were doing something” (in English). She even reports creating a group herself and stopping working in order to be with her daughter, learning English together. She defines this decision as an aspect of sharing “all this” with her daughter, with the experience of learning English seen as part of “all this”. Reme continued to be the primary carer at home with Lucía until she started her mid-primary school education.

As in Pilar’s case, Reme began to organise trips abroad for the family in order to give Lucía the opportunity to interact with “native speakers”. Thus, when Lucía was in preschool, the family took some leave and settled in the UK for five months. Reme and Mario wanted her to attend a UK school to learn English fluently.

This excerpt illustrates the agency displayed by Reme in order to provide a suitable English-speaking environment for Lucía. First, the five months in the UK are recalled as “busy times”. The reiteration of the determiner “many” to define the number of activities (and things) in which they engaged during this short period evokes the sensation that they were very active during this immersive experience. Second, Reme’s agency can be appreciated as she positions herself as a resourceful mother in the story. The fact that they did not have enough money in the UK was not an obstacle to making Lucía a competent, literate child in English. At the beginning, Reme acted as a translator for her daughter by reading Spanish-written stories in English, but once Reme understood the British second-hand market, she managed to buy second-hand books in English for her daughter.

Nowadays, Lucía speaks in English with her mother, Spanish with her father, and Catalan at school. Within the Catalan context, where the Catalan language is seen as an important identity marker, Reme and Mario distance themselves from the discourses that vest speaking Catalan with this symbolic value. They mentioned to us that some parents look at them oddly when they speak English in public spaces. The following excerpt, collected in an interview with the whole family, illustrates the ways in which they contest discourses and actions that they perceive as criticisms.

In this example, Reme and Mario use the space of the interview with us for two purposes. The first is to report other parents’ views about their FLP: English first, then Spanish or Catalan. In line 1 Reme defines the way in which they feel they are perceived by other parents as a paradox: “I think they [other parents] admire it/ her English but they think we’re a bit weird/”. Mario aligns with Reme’s definition of the situation by introducing a small story in line 4. There, Mario recalls an incident in a park when Lucia was two. In the narrated world, Reme found a piece of paper upon which somebody had written repipi. This is interpreted by Mario in line 7, as a criticism of the fact that they speak to their little girl in English. His interpretation of repipi as “don’t be like that” signals that those who circulated the note do not approve of their linguistic behaviour. We, the researchers, aligned ourselves with Mario’s interpretation with an affiliative surprise in line 8.

Their second aim in this interaction is to use the space of the interview to socialise their daughter into recognising and contesting such criticisms. Thus, to her mother’s explanation of the paradox in which they live: admired but criticised as “weird”, Lucía distances herself from that assessment in line 2, clarifying that, unlike these adults, her friends do not find her “weird”. Reme takes the opportunity in line 3 to explain to her daughter that she cannot be criticised because she did not make the decision to be raised in English. Reme takes full responsibility for her actions and exonerates Lucía. Again, in line 5, after Mario introduces the term repipi in his small story, Reme contests the implied criticism (line 6) in explaining to Lucía the meaning of that word: “we are doing something that is snob”.

All in all, Lucía (age eleven) is very proud of her English skills. She is able to speak, read, and write to an advanced level. As in Marta’s case above, Lucía corrects her teachers’ English at the Catalan school. Reme and Mario feel that their mission is not yet accomplished, however. They want Lucía to learn more languages, so she is now learning French as an extracurricular activity. They want to equip their daughter with as many languages as possible.