Catalan in the twenty-first century: romantic publics and cosmopolitan communities

Abstract

The politics surrounding identity in Catalonia traditionally have been based in a monolingual Romantic ideal that pits Catalan and Castilian against each other as two mutually exclusive languages and corresponding identities. Public discourses and debates over language policy often still draw on these traditional assumptions about language. In contrast, in the language contact zones where actual speakers live, there has been a collective restructuring of language resources over recent decades. Not only autochthonous Catalan native speakers but also individuals of varying social, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds now routinely mobilize varying forms of Catalan in varying combinations and for varying purposes in daily life. New sociolinguistic solutions, problems, and possibilities have emerged, particularly around new immigration and polylingualism brought by globalization from both above and below since the millennium. In addition to the intrinsic interest of the apparent success of Catalan language policy, the historical transformations in linguistic practices and ideologies in Catalonia permit us to explore key phenomena in current theoretical debates, including: 1) cosmopolitanism; 2) the concept of scale; 3) shifting boundaries and hybrid forms of language and identity; and 4) the shifting ground of modern ideologies of authenticity and anonymity.

Keywords:

• Catalan
• language ideologies
• educational language policy
• cosmopolitanism
• scale, authenticity and anonymity

Acknowledgements

This collection derives from a panel of papers presented at the 18th International Conference of Europeanists in Barcelona in June 2011. We are grateful to Colin Baker for encouraging this special issue project and to Bernadette O'Rourke for valuable feedback. We thank Chantal Tetreault for incisive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. Note on terminology: throughout this issue, authors generally try to use labels for the languages and their speakers that reflect informants’ own uses. In Catalonia, ‘Spanish’ and ‘Castilian’ refer to the same language; the term ‘Castilian’ (castellano, castellà) is used most often there and will be used throughout the issue except where informants use the term ‘español,’ or where authors note other rationales for their terminology. Regarding speaker categories, compound lexemes (parallel to Canadian ‘francophone’ and ‘anglophone’) are used in Catalonia to identify speakers socially by their first or dominant language: e.g., catalanoparlant; castellanoparlante/castellanohablante. To gloss these lexicalized social categories, the noun phrases ‘Castilian speaker’ and ‘Catalan speaker’ will generally be used in this issue. In such a gloss, a ‘Castilian speaker’ is generally a home and/or habitual speaker of Castilian and a ‘Catalan speaker’ is a home and/or habitual speaker of Catalan. Neither term implies that the speaker is monolingual.