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Xabier Benavides da Vila
Universidade de Vigo
Spain
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1070-746X
Vol 15 No 1 (2023): Estudos de Lingüística Galega, Pescuda
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15304/elg.15.8814
Submitted: 05-11-2022 Accepted: 30-03-2023 Published: 31-08-2023
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Abstract

The education system is one of the main disseminators of the newly codified standard variety of Galician. As such, a study that assesses the success of the implementation of this language variety in the education system is long overdue. This study offers a general and comparative overview of the role of standard Galician, with regard to students' first language, in students who finished their Compulsory Secondary Education studies. We conducted a quantitative research survey of second-year Baccalaureate students in the academic year 2011/2012, from which we extracted the following analyses and results. The conclusions of our research show that the surveyed students legitimise and accept the standard Galician variety without necessarily embracing its ideological tenets. As a result, the average student values their vernacular variety above its standard counterpart despite their acceptance of the latter. We will also show how – on top of mastering standard Galician to a higher degree – first-language Galician speakers (who generally speak popular or traditional Galician) have a better valuation of their speaking skills than other Galician speakers.