Please register through the Humanitix link below by 16 February 2026:

https://events.humanitix.com/la-diversidad-lingueistica-de-espana-congreso-anu

1. Authority, Authenticity, and Variation: The Sociolinguistic Ecology of Galician
M. Carme Parafita Couto, Montserrat Recalde Fernández, Carme Silva Domínguez
(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

This presentation offers a critical sociolinguistic examination of the Galician language, framing it within a complex ecology characterized by three interrelated layers: the historical dominance of Spanish, the institutional consolidation of a modern standard Galician, and the persistence of diverse vernacular varieties with strong local and contact-driven features (Loureiro Rodríguez 2007). It explores how these overlapping linguistic layers shape speakers’ perceptions of authority, identity, and authenticity in everyday life within a multilingual and socially stratified context.

The first part investigates the institutional and ideological landscape that sustains and regulates Galician’s normalization and grammatical description. It focuses on the work of the Real Academia Galega (RAG), the Instituto da Lingua Galega (ILG), and policy frameworks promoted by the Xunta de Galicia (Alonso Pintos 2006). This section highlights the tensions between standardization efforts, ideological narratives of linguistic legitimacy, and the sociolinguistic hierarchies embedded within education, media, and culture, revealing a persistent gap between prescriptive norms and vernacular practices (Iglesias Álvarez, Álvarez García & Díaz Muñiz 2017; Recalde 2021; Parafita Couto 2025).

The second part engages recent empirical studies on attitudes toward the Galician standard, hybrid linguistic forms, and the language’s manifestation in digital communication/social networks (Gugenberger, Monteagudo & Rei-Doval 2013; Regueira 2023; Recalde & Fernández 2024; Basanta & Regueira 2025). It foregrounds the ideological conflict between institutionalized norms and locally grounded varieties shaped by long-term contact with Spanish. This tension reflects ongoing renegotiations of authenticity and authority in conditions of bilingualism and sociolinguistic contestation. In this context, it is also important to acknowledge the broader sociolinguistic backdrop: recent quantitative studies have documented a worrying social retreat of Galician, most notably a sharp decline in intergenerational transmission. Among the explanations proposed, the Real Academia Galega has pointed to the Decreto para o Plurilingüismo (2010), suggesting that the reduction of instructional hours in Galician in favor of English has contributed to this downward trend in use and transmission. However, this hypothesis assumes that an increase in classroom hours in Galician correlates with an increase in its social use, something that has never been observed. In fact, instructional hours in Galician have been at their highest since the 1980s, while everyday use has continued to decline.

The presentation concludes by reflecting on what the Galician case reveals about language ideologies in minority and revitalization contexts. We will illustrate how the coexistence of institutional standardization, linguistic hybridity, and shifting transmission patterns reflect the fragile balance between cultural preservation and social modernization. Ultimately, understanding Galician’s evolving ecology offers valuable insight into the broader challenges faced by minoritized languages navigating globalized, digitally mediated, and educationally plurilingual environments.

References
Alonso Pintos, S. (2006). O proceso de normalización do galego moderno. A Coruña: Fundación Barrié de la Maza.

Basanta, N., & Regueira, X. L. (2025). Pregunta á xente vella da túa zona. Autenticidade e ideoloxías lingüísticas sobre a estandarización da lingua galega. In Fdez Rei, et al. (Eds.), Identidades e ideoloxías perante a diversidade lingüística (pp. 20–46). Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega.

Gugenberger, E., Monteagudo, H., & Rei-Doval, G. (Eds.). (2013). Contacto de linguas, hibridade, cambio: contextos, procesos e consecuencias. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega.

Iglesias Álvarez, A., Álvarez García, X., & Díaz Muñiz, S. (2017). O estándar galego nas novas xeracións: entre o afastamento e a necesidade. Revista Galega de Filoloxía, 18, 79–113.

Iglesias Álvarez, A. (2020). Actitudes e prexuízos cara ás variedades estándar de galego e español no contexto educativo. Madrygal, 23, 199–214.

Loureiro-Rodríguez, V. (2007). Are Galicians bound to diglossia? An analysis of the nature, uses and values of standard Galician. In K. Potowski & R. Cameron (Eds.), Spanish in contact: Policy, social and linguistic inquiries (pp. 119–132). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.22.10lou

Parafita Couto, M. C. (2025). Multilingüismo: factores gramaticais, cognitivos e discursivos. In E. Fernández Rei, E. Fidalgo-Garra, & M. Guisantes-Alonso (Eds.), Identidades e ideoloxías perante a diversidade lingüística (pp. 175-208). Consello da Cultura Galega. https://doi.org/10.17075/iipdl.2025.006 

Recalde, M. (2021). Indexicalidad, gentrificación lingüística y desigualdad social en el proceso de estandarización del gallego. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 271, 167–194. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/584363

Recalde, M., & Fernández, M. (2024). The subversion of dialects: Changing attitudes towards the rural varieties of Galician. Languages, 9(6), 204. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9060204

Regueira, X. L. (2023). Ideoloxías lingüísticas e redes sociais en galego: debates e usos lingüísticos nunha lingua minorizada no contexto da globalización. In Mundos en mudanza (pp. 33–66). Famalicão: Humus Edicións.

2.  Asturian in Australia: Exploring the history, identity and revitalization of a lesser-known Romance language
Imanol Suárez-Palma  (University of Florida, USA)

Asturian (asturianu or llingua asturiana) is a Romance language spoken in the northern Spanish region of Asturias and neighboring areas of León, Zamora and even in a small enclave in Portugal (Miranda do Douro). Closely related to Spanish yet linguistically distinct, Asturian represents one of Europe’s lesser-known linguistic traditions. With medieval roots in the Astur-Leonese continuum, the language developed its own phonological and literary character before being gradually overshadowed by Castilian Spanish.

This talk introduces an Australian audience to the fascinating story of Asturian—its history, linguistic features, and current revitalization. It will trace the language’s evolution from early written texts to contemporary movements promoting education, literature, and media in Asturian. Although it still lacks full official recognition, Asturian remains a powerful marker of regional identity and an emblem of linguistic diversity within modern Spain.

By situating Asturian in a global context, the presentation explores what the survival of small languages reveals about cultural resilience, identity, and belonging. Parallels will be drawn with Australia’s own multilingual landscape and efforts to maintain endangered and heritage languages.

This talk ultimately invites participants to look beyond Europe’s major tongues and to appreciate the enduring vitality of its minority voices—reminding us that each language, no matter how small, offers a unique window into human history and expression.

3.  The Interactive Linguistic Atlas of Andalusian Accents (ALIAA): methodology, preliminary results and transferability
Alfredo Herrero de Haro (Universidad de Granada)

The sixth volume of the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Andalusia (ALEA) was published in 1973; however, the data were collected in the 1950s. Several studies have shown how some of the descriptions in ALEA are no longer accurate, so an update of those descriptions is timely.

The Interactive Linguistic Atlas of Andalusian Accents (ALIAA) aims to update and expand the descriptions of Andalusian accents contained in ALEA. Online and in-person surveys have been conducted, and more than 490,000 audio tracks have been collected from 4,469 speakers. Over 138,000 audio tracks from 1,163 people from 571 locations across Andalusia have been selected for the atlas. The audios are being analysed acoustically and statistically, and the results of the atlas will be displayed using an interactive tool developed specifically for this project.

This presentation will outline the methodology developed to create this atlas and show some of the maps already created for ALIAA. This presentation will also cover how this methodology and interactive tool can be adapted to map accent variation in other regions of the Spanish-speaking world and in other languages. Examples of how to incorporate this resource in the classroom will also be provided.

4.In each other’s pockets: Asturian, Spanish, Asturñol and Asturian Spanish
Julio Villa-García (University of Oviedo/University of Manchester)

Despite its lack of official status in Spain, the Western-Iberian Romance language Asturian co-exists with Spanish in areas such as the Principality of Asturias, making this area a bona fide linguistically diverse community. Asturian and Spanish, as well as the mixture arising from their longstanding connection, which I refer to as Asturñol, along with the popular Spanish spoken in the area (also known as Asturian Spanish), all live in harmony and constitute the linguistically diverse landscape of the region of Asturias.

As is known, whenever two or more linguistic varieties exist in the same space for an extended period of time, the inevitability of language contact becomes apparent: the languages are bound to influence one another in terms of a number of aspects, such as the sounds, the words, the phrases and sentences, and even those characteristics of communicative interactions that transcend the level of the sentence. One such case is code-switching or the spontaneous mixture of two linguistic varieties in the same discourse:

1. Rico rico. Prestome pola vida. ¡Cómo me gusta!

In (1), the Asturian verb prestar ‘to like’ is used, and the weak pronoun follows the verb (-me), as expected in the Asturian language; the exclamatory sentence at the end, for its part, employs the Spanish equivalent gustar. Interestingly, prestar qualifies as a ‘false friend’, since in Spanish it means ‘to lend.’ However, (1) is quite common and totally understandable in Asturias, and in spite of the mixing, communication is not hindered among speakers at all. This confirms what we knew: that language coexistence is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, the hallmark of bi- or multilingualism. It is of note that the resemblance that present-day Asturian bears with contemporary Spanish often prevents speakers from realizing that they are employing two different linguistic varieties in examples such as (1). After all, it should be borne in mind that the very concept of language is a political, rather than linguistic, decision, much like boundary lines on political world maps. 

Amestáu (or Asturñol) actually refers to a Spanish-influenced variety of Asturian spoken at present. Thus, this contact variety is looked down upon by prescriptivist grammarians working both on Asturian and on Spanish. Nevertheless, from the scientific point of view, this ‘hybrid’ variety offers intriguing data with parallels not in Asturian or in Spanish, but in other languages of the world, which indicates that any language manifestation is worth of scientific enquiry, and that all varieties are sanctioned by the humanly possible mental grammars, that is, that any linguistic variety adheres to the natural principles of the human language faculty endowed to us. To illustrate this point, consider (2), from Villa-García (2019) and Villa-García & Sánchez-Llana (2022):

2. ¡No la matar! (cf. ¡No la matéis!)  

Neither Asturian nor Spanish allow such commands consisting of the negative word, a weak pronoun, and an infinitival verb form; in this context, both languages would canonically employ a subjunctive, as shown above in brackets. However, languages such as Italian, in particular in the centre and the south, manifest imperative sentences along the lines of those in (2):

3. ¡Non lo fare!

What is more, the Spanish spoken in Andalucia in southern Spain allows a similar configuration, the difference being the post-infinitival occurrence of the weak pronoun:

4. ¡No matarla!

Not surprisingly, Italian, especially in the north, permits analogous sentences as well:

5. ¡Non farlo!

What the crosslinguistic data above suggest is that on occasion, grammatical similarity transcends language borders: a variety of a given language may be more akin to a variety of a different language with respect to a particular feature than to a variety belonging to the same language. 

Lastly, the Spanish spoken in the region of Asturias refers to a variety of Spanish that exhibits characteristics unique to that part of Spain. For instance, the qualifying determiner vaya combines with nouns across Spanish (cf. (6a)), but in the popular Spanish spoken in Asturias, it also appears with adjectives (cf. (6b)) and with adverbs (cf. (6c)) (RAE-ASALE 2009; Villa-García 2025):

6. a. ¡Vaya casa que tiene!     b. ¡Vaya guapa que está!        c. ¡Vaya mal que está!

Overall, language contact is a natural phenomenon across the world, and the Principality of Asturian is no exception. The mutual influence that the linguistic varieties of Asturias exert on each other has led to different manifestations, which are important both from the viewpoint of linguistic diversity and scientific enquiry, while exemplifying a linguistic reality found throughout the globe. 

References
RAE-ASALE. 2009. Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa.

Villa-García, Julio. 2019. Dialectal variation in clitic placement in Andalusian and Asturian Spanish negative infinitival imperatives. In The Syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects. Gallego, Á. (ed.). Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 127–158. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190634797.003.0005

Villa-García, Julio. 2025. Lingüística para la vida. The sky is the limit (Linguistics for life: the sky is the limit). Linguistics Series. ISBN 9788446057314. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. DOI: https://www.akal.com/libro/linguistica-para-la-vida_54841/

Villa-García, Julio and Hugo Sánchez-Llana. 2022. Asturian and Asturian Spanish phenomena at the syntax-phonology interface: cliticisation phenomena and beyond. In Sound, Syntax and Contact in the Languages of Asturias. Lorenzo, G. (ed.). Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Vol. 36. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 15–44.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.36.02vil

5. Resistance and Hypernormalization: Transformations in Asturian Language and Identity from the Surdimientu to the Espardimientu
Alfredo Martínez-Expósito (University of Melbourne) 

This presentation examines the trajectory of the Asturian language from its role as a language of resistance during the Surdimientu, or Awakening (1970s and 1980s), to the processes of hypernormalization characteristic of the so-called Espardimientu, or Dissemination, a phase of media and digital expansion beginning in the 2000s. The Surdimientu articulated a poetics of legitimation: writing in Asturian was tantamount to asserting a cultural and political existence. Authors such as Manuel Asur, Xosé Lluis García Arias, and María Josefa Canellada conceived of literature primarily as a tool for symbolic reconstruction. With the Espardimientu, the llingua shifted from the margins to the centre of new editorial, institutional, and technological spaces. Yet this process generated tensions between authenticity, standardization, and market dynamics. The concept of hypernormalization helps describe this paradox: in the still incomplete and transitional process of gradual normalization, the Asturian language gains in homogenization even as it loses some of its dissident potency. Through an analysis of texts by Xuan Bello and Berta Piñán, the presentation explores how contemporary Asturian literature negotiates this dilemma between visibility and difference, between linguistic survival and cultural aestheticization. Ultimately, it proposes understanding hypernormalization as the new symbolic battleground for minoritized languages in the 21st century.

6.Decentring “Standard Spanish”: Language ideologies, accentism and curriculum innovation in Australia
Macarena Ortiz Jiménez (University of Sydney)

This presentation brings together research on Spanish as a World Language in Australia and recent curriculum redesign at the University of Sydney to examine how linguistic diversity within Spain and across the Spanish-speaking world is represented, taught, and perceived in the Australasian context. Drawing on ongoing work on language ideologies and linguistic discrimination—as well as intersectional and decolonial frameworks—I analyse how dominant understandings of “the Spanish of Spain” remain shaped by longstanding colonial legacies that privilege a narrow, standardised, Castilian-centred model, invisibilising dialectal variation. These ideologies, further reinforced by textbook norms and institutional expectations, contribute to accentism and linguistic discrimination— a problem well documented in the Australian context.

Building on post-structuralist conceptions of language as fluid, hybrid, and socially situated, the presentation then demonstrates how these insights informed our recent USYD–SLAS curriculum redesign. We critically interrogate what is accepted as language within our program by contrasting structuralist, standard-oriented models with post-structuralist, multimodal, and pluriversal approaches. This shift allows us to problematise “standard/neutral/verbal-centric” representations of Spanish in teaching materials and to re-embed linguistic practices within learners’ sociocultural realities.

By connecting sociolinguistic research and decolonial perspectives with concrete issues in teaching and curriculum design, the presentation aims to challenge entrenched linguistic hierarchies, unpack stereotypes, and promote epistemic diversity. It also underscores the importance of making visible the pluricentric and multilingual nature of Spain and the Spanish-speaking world, highlighting the crucial role educators play in countering disinformation, expanding students’ understanding of Spanish linguistic ecologies, and advancing more equitable representations of the language in the Australasian region.

All presentations will be 30-40 min followed by approx 10 mins for questions. 

8:30     Welcome to ANU and opening of the event 

8:40     Introduction (Manuel Delicado Cantero) 

9:00     M Carmen Parafita, Carme Silva and Montserrat Recalde (online) (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) 

Authority, Authenticity, and Variation: The Sociolinguistic Ecology of Galician

9:55     Imanol Suárez Palma (University of Florida) 

Asturian in Australia: Exploring the history, identity and revitalization of a lesser-known Romance language

10:45   Alfredo Herrero de Haro (Universidad de Granada) 

The Interactive Linguistic Atlas of Andalusian Accents (ALIAA): methodology, preliminary results and transferability

11:30   Break for lunch 

12:30   Julio Villa García (Universidá d’Uviéu/University of Manchester) In each other’s pockets: Asturian, Spanish, Asturñol and Asturian Spanish

1:20     Alfredo Martínez Expósito (University of Melbourne) 

Resistance and Hypernormalization: Transformations in Asturian Language and Identity from the Surdimientu to the Espardimientu

2:10    Macarena Ortiz Jiménez (University of Sydney)

Decentring “Standard Spanish”: Language ideologies, accentism and curriculum innovation in Australia

2: 45    Round table

3:15     Closing of the event and farewell

(See pdf program attached to home page. Program subject to change)