Countering government's low-intensity language policies on the ground: family language policies in Castilian-Spanish dominated Galicia and Navarre.

Current research on language policy underscores how top-down policymakers tend to endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalize minority languages, and attempt to perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequity. In the Castilian-Spanish-dominated sociolinguistic terrains of Galicia and Navarre, this article examines the rise of grassroots level actors or agents in the form of parents who have decided to contest the government's low-intensity language policy models through various bottom-up efforts. The principal focus of this article is to examine how ideologies, language planning strategies, and practices of pro-Galician or Basque parents act as instruments of language 'governmentality' (Foucault 2000) leading to grassroots discourses of resistance. Through their individual as well as collective linguistic practices, as this article underscores, these parents have the potential to generate visible and invisible language policies on the ground, influencing their children's language ecology. Drawing from ethnographic research tools, including observations from field sites, individual interviews, and focus groups with parents from both geopolitical domains, we investigate how these parents exercise their agency and become policymakers in their homes and the community. The endeavor is also to reveal the key challenges they come across while implementing these policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]