Trilingual Aragon: The Future of Minority Languages in School

The language situation of the Autonomous Community of Aragon (Spain) is reviewed in the dual context of recent national reforms in language policy & education & actual progress in language recovery in neighboring communities, eg, Catalonia. Aragon is largely a monolingual Spanish-speaking community with two minority bilingual zones, an eastern fringe lying within Catalan linguistic territory & six districts in the far north where Aragonese continues to be the usual everyday language; Aragonese is strictly latent in the rest of the far north of Aragon. A typology of bilingual education is developed & applied to the current state of language education in the schools of the Catalan & Aragonese districts to urge the adoption of one of J. Martinez Ferrer's (eg, 1995) proposals, that of maintenance of children's own language & culture throughout their education to produce fully functional bilingual & bicultural individuals with a positive image of their community. 1 Figure, 2 Graphs, 46 References. Adapted from the source document