1 Patrick W. Zimmerman Independent Researcher Electronic Media and Minority Language Politics in Spain In Spain, new digital technologies first popularized in the mid‐1990s have played an increasingly important role in the articulation of national and regional identities. Over the last decade and a half, electronic communications media have been used as community‐building and organizational tools for groups advocating the revival and legal protection of minority languages (this paper will consider the cases of Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Asturian). Institutional websites, such as the respective regional language academies, 1 online newspapers, and forums appeared during the early‐to‐mid 1990s, with so‐called ‘Web 2.0’ sites and platforms 2 arriving during the first few years of the next decade. These new communications technologies provided a new opportunity for groups (of any type or purpose) to more effectively and quickly organize themselves, circulate news, disseminate ideologies, recruit new members, and, particularly noticeable in the case of so‐called ‘social’ media, build new communities whose primary ‘face‐to‐face’ interaction was online. This paper is part of an ongoing project in its initial stages. Therefore, while future research will explore these topics in more depth, this presentation will focus primarily on 1 The Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Cataluña (1907), the Euskaltzaindia in Euskadi (the Basque Country) (1919), the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana in Asturias (1981), the Real Academia Galega in Galicia (1983), and, from 1998, the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua in Valencia). 2 ‘Web 2.0’ is a term coined in 1999 and used to describe websites and technologies that are designed to enable and/or encourage interaction on the part of website visitors (either open to the public or a circumscribed membership). This includes the broad category of technologies and communities generally lumped under the umbrella term ‘social media’, and implies significantly more participant, customer, member, or consumer feedback than the previous era of websites, which have been retroactively dubbed ‘Web 1.0’ sites, which relied primarily on visitor consumption of materials produced and posted by administrators or a specific list of consumers. Forums, although they necessarily involve interaction between website administrators or moderators and normal visitors, are generally considered ‘Web 1.0’ technology for chronological reasons, as they appeared relatively early on as an outgrowth of the ‘bulletin‐board’ systems on IRC, Usenet, or internal servers that predated the existence of websites with graphical user interfaces (GUIs).