HCIAS Wednesday Colloquium – Perspectives on Ibero America Urban Ecology of Early Bilingual Education: Exploring Inequalities in the Distribution of Linguistic Capital

The German education system is based on a monolingual language policy that leads to two types of multilingualism, differently perceived by society and institutions: cosmopolitan or elite multilingualism that corresponds to speakers of German and those international languages that promote the maximization of opportunities to participate in global processes (exemplary, English or French); and vernacular or migrant multilingualism, which is often perceived as problematic for the linguistic integration of migrant communities, such as Turkish. The authors talk about their work mapping the educational programs in languages other than German to analyze the factors that determine their spatial distribution in the German capital of Berlin, applying a quantitative spatial analysis. They describe patterns of unequal distribution of linguistic capital by comparing different languages, migratory communities and types of bilingual programs. The explanatory model combines spatial factors of neighborhoods with socio-economic and cultural/linguistic factors.