Receptive Multilingualism in the Iberian Peninsula: Current Perspective

Bilingualism and multilingualism have long been in the focus of contemporary linguistic research and fieldwork. In the majority of cases, multilingualism has been perceived and thus considered as an active competence, which has led to a notable number of studies that focused, for example, on the balanced competence of two or more languages of one speaker (ie., a list consisting of pros and cons of multilingual knowledge etc.). Contrastly, in our article, we aim to process its counterpart which is passive or, in other words, receptive knowledge. In the case of the Iberian Peninsula, receptive multilingualism has been a common occurrence since the beginnings of the romanization of this area and therefore could not and should not be classified as monolingual. The situation has changed dramatically with the introduction and rise of the ideology of monolingual habitus (i.e., one nation calls for one language) which tends to consider multilingualism and linguistic diversity an obstacle to nation building. From the current perspective, we face pressure from Spanish national language planning, which severely, and to a considerable extent implicitly, limits the functions of the present minority languages. Our aim, therefore, is to map this diverse reality of current trends and thus provide a modern overview of this topic.