ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I ask how multilingualism features in contemporary processes of class differentiation amongst new speakers of Catalan. By using life trajectory narratives, I query whether neoliberalism is informing people’s attitudes towards language learning and use. The analysis pivots between the related notions of entrepreneurship and agency. I examine how people make sense of the things they can or cannot do, the persons they can or cannot be, and the languages they can or cannot learn and speak.
In the analysis of the data I produce a classification of interviewees according to how active and creative, that is, how entrepreneurial, they claimed to be in the way that they learned and used the languages of their repertoires. The two main categories included those who were highly educated, mobile and very resourceful learners; and at another pole those who did not show a substantive interest in learning languages and minimally adjusted to social pressures.
I conclude by suggesting that entrepreneurial dispositions may or may not be ideologically constructed as the expression of a neoliberal ethos; but this is contingent on the political and ideological struggles that seek, as always, to conceal the mechanisms of reproduction of class difference.
