Language ideologies and policy in Aruban secondary education: A qualitative analysis

Aruba’s sociolinguistic landscape comes with many challenges and opportunities for language-in-education policy. One point of contention is that there is a discrepancy between the most common home language (Papiamento) and the language of instruction throughout most of the education systems (Dutch). The central objective is to analyze existing policy documents, assessing their presence, absence, and implications. The focus of the analysis is on the underlying language ideologies and their implications for institutional practices. It considers how current language policies relate to colonial and decolonial influences, partly in relation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the European Union. The study then explores how monolingual ideologies perpetuate linguistic hierarchies. As such, the main research question is, “How are Aruban language-in-education policies indicative of underlying (colonial and decolonial) language ideologies?” The study is conducted as part of the Horizon Europe Pluridentities project.