Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This article aims to explain the linguistic ecology of Bajo ethnic students in elementary schools on Maringkik Island, East Lombok, by examining the link between home language, peer language, and school language in minority spaces. This study departs from the criticism of the deficit approach, which tends to interpret children's linguistic symptoms as interference. Within the frameworks of language ecology, mother tongue-based multilingual education, and schoolscape studies, this study employs a linguistic-ethnographic approach with a case-study design. Data was obtained through student and teacher speech, peer interaction, school language signs, teacher and parent interviews, and learning documentation. The analysis was carried out through thematic coding, language domain-function mapping, and source triangulation. The results showed that the Bajo language remained dominant in the realm of home and intimate solidarity, the Indonesian language was dominant in formal learning and assessment, while the peer language showed a flexible mixed pattern. In addition, the school environment is dominated by Indonesian, while the Bajo language is not represented at the institutional level. These findings suggest that minority spaces in this study are institutional, i.e. when children's home languages are not adequately represented in schools. Thus, the main problem is not interference but the linguistic-ecological imbalance between home and school.</p>