Family, school, and crossroads

In this article, we analyse the language regimentation of multilingual repertoires and plurilingual practices of young people of Moroccan origin in three different areas of Spain – Barcelona, Galicia, and Madrid. By focusing on the family and the school as two highly interconnected settings (Heller, 2012) which have an impact on their socialisation trajectories and on their development of functional bi/multilingualism – and, thus, on their linguistic practices – we consider, on the one hand, how these young people position themselves regarding multilingualism and the conception of a local and transnational plurilingual speaker and, on the other, how they invest their linguistic repertoire in the transnational space or what Hornberger (2005) calls the ‘implementational spaces’ of multilingual practices. Following a sociolinguistic and discursive critical analysis of the data collected (ethnographic data, the results of several didactic activities, focus groups and interviews), the results point out how family and school discourses surrounding multilingualism contribute to maintaining a situation of multilingualism, which includes both the heritage languages and the institutional and national languages and varieties. Moreover, the results show the ways these plurilingual youth navigate this multilingualism but also how they reconstruct it by deploying hybrid and creative practices.