Is Translanguaging a Threat or an Opportunity for Minority Languages?

Is translanguaging a threat or an opportunity for minority languages? | Jasone Cenoz University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU

On March 2nd, the Yale University Center for Language Study will host a virtual discussion on the impact of Translanguaging on minority languages.* The discussion will delve into how the isolation of languages in the school curriculum has been regarded as positive for the survival of minority languages so that they do not get “contaminated” by majority languages. These ideas have been challenged in the last years and nowadays there is a strong trend to replace them with approaches that take multilingual speakers and the way they use their multilingual repertoire as a reference. In this presentation, translanguaging will be analyzed from the perspective of the use of minority languages in education in schools where majority and international languages are learned as well. There will be a specific focus on translanguaging in the context of multilingual education in the Basque Country where the minority language, Basque, is used as the main language of instruction. Translanguaging will be discussed both as a threat and an opportunity in the context of maintaining and promoting minority languages.

Jasone Cenoz is a Professor of Education at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU and a member of the Advisory Board for the Organization of Ibero-American States (Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos). Her research focuses on multilingual education, bilingualism, and multilingualism. She has published extensively and has presented her work at conferences and seminars in the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Brunei, New Zealand Singapore, and most European countries. She has been the AILA publications coordinator and President of the International Association of Multilingualism.

*Event zoom link: the zoom link for the event will be shared shortly.