‘Contra el Arteijo de Google’: political agency in secondary school adolescents within the framework of a participatory research study in Galicia

Abstract

This contribution examines how sociolinguistic and political forms of collective agency have emerged, oriented towards the linguistic planning of a minority language (Galician) in a participatory research project developed in a Secondary School in Galicia. The Critical Linguistic Awareness approach (García, 2016) vertebrates the ethnographic process in which students became co-researchers to analyze the linguistic landscape of their community (Cenoz and Gorter, 2008; Zas and Prego, 2018). The ethnographic process has stimulated the agentive capacity of these young people who acted as legitimate political agents in the transformation of the linguistic order. As a result, the students demanded that Google maps corrected the name of their town as it appeared with the Castilianized form of the same: "Arteijo", instead of the Galician official form "Arteixo". In this sense, the students demanded compliance with the Linguistic Normalization Law, which requires the use of official place names in the Galician language throughout Spain. These junior researchers, accompanied by their professor and University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) researchers, asked the city council to take appropriate measures to support them in their claim against Google. As a result, a form of collective agency was reinforced. This agency promoted linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2015) by taking a stand against Google's non-compliance with the Law of Linguistic Normalization. The students took the initiative to mobilize and asked for support from the local administration to resolve this situation and move towards a more egalitarian and inclusive sociolinguistic order for the Galician language in the global space.