ABSTRACT
In Part I we saw that there are very few countries in the Spanish-speaking world where only Spanish is spoken. Spanish is certainly the official language in all. It is also the dominant language in all. It is the language of public life and of the governing classes. It is, therefore, the language of power. In this chapter, then, we will see how far those in power and therefore in control of policy-making set out to identify and respect the linguistic rights of all the communities living within their jurisdiction. Are these rights repressed or promoted through government policies? What kind of Language Planning, if any, is pursued as a result of language policies? Do attitudes towards language rights in this century in any way differ from those we examined in the earlier history of the Castilianisation process? In much of this history, decisions affecting language were the consequence of other policies of national integration; in this century we will observe examples of where the politics of language actually shape other social policies.
