This contribution explores why secondary schools in the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland invest -or not invest- in language education and cross-border language contact events such as pupil exchanges. As a theoretical perspective, language ideology highlights the often conflicting values that are discursively constructed during these decision-making processes. On the one hand, there are national educational policies which assign a certain value to language education in general, and specific languages in particular, typically the national language(s) plus English. On the other hand, there are Euregional policy actors who, often with financial support from the European Union through so-called INTERREG programmes, assign special value to the education of what they call "neighbouring languages" (in this case: Dutch, French, and German). Besides that, technological developments, labour market developments, the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsidy programmes such as Erasmus+ significantly impact the possibilities for language education and cross-border language contact events. Within this context of stimuli and constraints, secondary schools gather diverse directors, deans, teachers, pupils, and parents, all of whom have specific backgrounds and priorities. By exploring why these schools invest in certain language education and language contact events, or not, this contribution thus simultaneously puts a spotlight on the characteristics of the language-ideological discourse that emerges in times of Euregionalising borderlands, and on the relation between this discourse and other aspects of secondary schools' decision-making processes. In this way, the research adds to conceptual discussions on the relation between language ideology and language policy (Hovens 2021; Johnson 2013; Shohamy 2006; Spolsky 2004).
The contribution is primarily based on about 30 interviews with teachers, deans, and directors from secondary schools in the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland (i.e., about 10 interviews per country), most of which are conducted online (using MS Teams) by the author in 2022. The interview sample is not supposed to be representative, but to reflect a diverse spectrum of existing perspectives in this borderland. Regarding the perspective of pupils, the contribution makes use of findings from a representative survey among secondary school pupils from the Dutch province of Limburg (i.e., the Dutch part of the borderland), which is conducted by a group of scholars from Maastricht University in the same year. Furthermore, the survey makes use of the findings from a focus group pilot study in the Dutch province of Limburg, which the author conducts towards the end of 2022 in order to deepen the understanding of the survey results. The author's research is partly financed by the INTERREG project EMRLingua, which aims to stimulate the education of "neighbouring languages" in the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland. Rather than taking this situatedness as a given, the author aims to reflect upon the role of INTERREG projects such as EMRLingua, as well as his own research, in broader language-political and language-ideological developments. Hence, besides the contribution's conceptual goal, the author also aims to discuss his research at the level of application, i.e., how the findings might be used for language-political and/or language-ideological purposes.
