Methodology

This chapter presents the methodology adopted in this study. Following an overview of the San Pedro community and the justification of its scholarly interest across fields’, participants are presented through anonymized, non-traceable demographic information. Participants’ recruitment process is also well detailed, and so are the ethical questions that arise from the study. Finally, the three instruments or tasks employed are discussed in terms of participants’ profiles, procedures, and analysis. Following a series of early word-of-mouth contacts, Task 1 consisted of an early approach to the community, providing potential participants with information about the study and encouraging their collaboration. Task 2 encompassed a series of 60-minute sociolinguistic interviews (N=49), which were conducted in 2021 and the early quarters of 2022. Specifically, participants were presented with a set of questions in Catalan about their childhood that sought to assess their linguistic competency in the target language. This led to remarkable discoveries, such as when participants who had initially denied speaking the language, after being cued with strategic follow-up questions, to use it with varying degrees of fluency. Task 3 was conducted in a more controlled, experimental setting, featuring a collaborative task in which pairs of participants were prompted to share directions using a map of an Argentinian town and after being explicitly prompted to use Majorcan Catalan “to the best of ability” (e.g., at the word/phrase level in combination with Spanish, as receptive bilinguals, or as full bilinguals—among non-generalizable particularities that eventually required a case-by-case approach).