“Or even Frisian, yes. No, no”: The negotiation of space for a minority language in narratives by pre-service teachers

Negative attitudes towards minority languages in educational settings
can have far-reaching consequences for pupils’ academic achievement and wellbeing, yet they prevail in most education systems. The current study adds to research on language attitudes in education by analysing the narrative negotiation of the value of Frisian, a minority language from the northern Netherlands. For this analysis, a number of narratives on experiences with Frisian in a variety of learning environments will be discussed. These narratives come from interviews (n=8) that were selected from a larger corpus of semi-structured interviews on multilingualism in education with pre-service teachers from the northern Netherlands.
Our analysis shows that in these narratives, Frisian is continuously cast as
having to be neutralised, as it threatens classroom order, academic success, and
the quality of teaching. Even in narratives that instead propose Frisian as something positive, the language needs to be somehow managed, often by ascribing it to a marginalised space, thus reifying implicit or explicit language hierarchies, as well as the supposedly peripheral, rural, and outdated character of this language. This study paves the way for future research on the regulating effects of dominant narratives for the value of minority languages in actual learning environments.