Abstract :
[en] The analysis of language transmission within families is particularly relevant in the case of languages that have undergone historical processes of minoritization (Nelde, Strubell, & Williams, 1996). As the primary site of socialization, the family constitutes a crucial institution that shapes language transmission through a series of micro-decisions (Boix-Fuster, Bastardas-Boada, & Torrens, 2019; Curdt-Christiansen & Huang, 2020; Lanza & Lomeu Gomes, 2020), especially in contexts where languages have only partial societal reach, that is, where they lack the support of key social institutions necessary to sustain intergenerational transmission (Lamuela, 1994, 2004).
This paper is part of the AMRELSE project, which aims to analyse the family language policies of Aragonese, Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Occitan (Flors-Mas, 2024) in a range of localities where these languages enjoy different levels of institutional recognition but share a common sociolinguistic feature: a context of high demographic minoritization (HDM). Within the project, HDM has been operationally defined as characterizing localities where the proportion of native speakers of the minoritized language is below 30% of the total population (Brenzinger, 2007; Edwards, 2010; Junyent, 1992). The HDM context examined in this study is the municipality of Encamp, in the Principality of Andorra. With a population of approximately 15,000 inhabitants divided between the town of Encamp and the tourist resort of Pas de la Casa, it presents a distinctive sociological profile. A substantial share of the local population is employed in the winter sports industry, while the geographical separation of Pas de la Casa from the main urban centre has contributed to a higher proportion of migrant workers and to specific social dynamics that differ from those observed in other Andorra’s municipalities. At the same time, these characteristics coexist with increasingly explicit public language policies promoting Catalan, which reinforce the family language policies of households committed to transmitting the country's national language.
The paper presents the preliminary findings of fieldwork conducted in Encamp in 2023. More specifically, it reports on a semi-structured questionnaire administered to two groups of families: those with children under the age of 12 and those with adolescent children aged 12 and above. Our objective is to highlight the specific challenges and opportunities of conducting fieldwork in a sovereign micro-state such as Andorra, where the national language benefits from relatively strong institutional support, and to examine how this context contributes to a critical reassessment of the operational usefulness of the concept of high demographic minoritization.
