Policies and individuals: Investigating received language policies in French-speaking Catalunya/Catalan-speaking France

Recent research in the field of language policy and planning (LPP) has largely moved beyond viewing policy as primarily governmental legislation which is designed, created and implemented in a purely top-down process, to exploring the policies in various forms - whether as explicit actions or rules, or as observable through discourses and practices (Spolsky, 2004, 2009; Barakos & Unger, 2016; Bonacina-Pugh, 2012) - instantiated by agents throughout the various domains of society (Spolsky, 2004). Focus has been placed, for example, on the role of educators in appropriating and resisting governmental language-in-education policies within minority and language revitalisation contexts (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, 2009; Harrison, 2019; Brown, 2010; Young, 2014; Huang, 2016), as well as the parental policies instantiated within multilingual families (O'Rourke & Nandi, 2019; Gharibi & Seals, 2019; Roberts, 2019) and communities (Hatoss, 2006; Sallabank, 2005) to contribute (or not) to language maintenance or revitalisation.
Yet, two key problems would appear to remain. While much literature has focussed on analysing macro, meso and micro level language policies, and identifying and examining the roles and actions of so-called "language policy actors", further specific attention within the LPP field is required on individuals acted upon within a particular context.Most recently, Spolsky (2019) stated that language policies (in the form of explicit language management efforts, language practices or beliefs and ideologies [see Spolsky, 2004]), while continuing to exist within traditional societal domains such as at the state, home and school, could also be found at the level of the individual. Furthermore, these policies, which can be identified through an individual's beliefs about language and their "language behaviour" or "behaviour towards language" (Ager, 2005: 10), Spolsky (ibid.: 327) asserts, may be both influenced by, and may serve to resist, "external advocacy or management". In light of this, it seems to behove the field to examine in greater detail the received policies of individuals targeted by - or subjected to the influence of - the "declared" (Shohamy, 2006), "perceived" (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012) and "practiced" (ibid.) or "de facto" (Shohamy, 2006) language policies under study.
Secondly, while some such studies do exist, frequently those that have focussed on so-called "language policy reception" (cf. e.g. Augustyniak & Higham, 2019; Lonsmann, 2017) have tended to adopt a unidimensional perspective: examining the policies of only one societal domain (most often the school, the workplace or the family) or a specific policy (such as a single language-in-education or corporate policy) and their influence on the beliefs or practices of those who are directly or indirectly targeted by them. Yet, Spolsky's (2004) domain-based theory of language policy would seem to suggest that, at any given time, individuals will be subjected to a confluence of potentially influential policies - both consonant and conflicting - across myriad societal domains. Greater attention, therefore, seems warranted on the individual's navigation of their policy environment (Ager, 1999), and their interpretation, internalisation and re-enactment of, or resistance to, the various language policies which constitute it. The focus of the current research, therefore, can be characterised through the following general, overarching questions:
How are language policies received by individuals directly or indirectly acted upon by them?Or alternatively:How do the language policies within a given "policy environment" serve to shape those of individuals?
Exploring such questions would arguably contribute to answering a similar question posed by Darquennes and Soler (2019: 469) "what happens to the traditional 'top-down' versus 'bottom-up' dichotomy when the emphasis is placed on the speaker and his or her potential?