March 2025

Significant changes are currently being observed in the use of minoritized languages, particularly among young people across the world. Even when these languages are taught in schools, social use is tending more and more towards hegemonic languages.

This residency hopes to discover the processes that entourage and discourage the use of minoritised languages in youth, as well as young people’s attitudes and positions to language. It will bring together activists from linguistic minorities in Poland, Catalonia and Aran, among other regions.  

The residency, organised jointly by Faberllull and Linguapax, is part of a project to analyse changing linguistic habits among young people, which came out of a collaboration between Linguapax and the University of Warsaw Centre for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity. From the very different contexts and perspectives of Catalan and Polish, participants will share diagnoses and strategies from the two countries and propose elements to help reverse these trends that could be useful for other communities in the world.  

Historically, family languages have been passed down from generation to generation, ensuring their survival, above all in monolingual regions. However, factors like colonisation, mass economic migration and new technology have changed the linguistic panorama in cities and the dynamics of family language use. Factors like the usefulness of the majority language or the community’s language identity influence family language decisions, often to the detriment of the languages passed down. Delving deeper into these dynamics is essential to reversing the trend of abandoning non-hegemonic languages.