Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity

Abstract

During the early catalanization of schooling in the Barcelona area in the 1980s, Castilian-speaking teenagers of working-class immigrant descent often struggled against Catalan language and identity. This longitudinal study followed a group of high-school classmates and found that as young adults, some but not all of the resistant working-class Castilian speakers have incorporated Catalan into their lives and identity. This article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the ‘chronotope’ or time-space frame to analyze the accounts of language and identity given by informants who adapted positively to Catalan and that of a peer whose hostility to Catalan increased over the years. Drawing on three contrasting chronotopes, informants give different meanings to personal experiences and linguistic practices. Those who adapted positively to Catalan present their linguistic development within biographical and cosmopolitan chronotopes that emphasize individual maturation and experience. They reject the politicization of language and an ideology of authenticity that links language choice to origins. The more anti-Catalan peer presents a socio-historical chronotope that frames his own experience as political and related to national and state debates, and he draws on an ideology of ethnolinguistic solidarity and linguistic authenticity.

Keywords:

• Catalan
• language and identity
• bilingualism
• chronotope
• language ideology
• second language acquisition

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork for this article was carried out while I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I thank the Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya (grant # 2005PIV2-31) and Professor Joan Argenter for sponsorship, as well as the Wenner-Gren Foundation (grant #7563) and the University of California, San Diego for further support of fieldwork. None of these agencies is responsible for the views expressed here. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the 2011 American Anthropological Association, and a limited number of extracts discussed here appeared in Woolard (2011). My thanks to the informants and the many colleagues who made this work possible, and to Bernadette O'Rourke and Susan Frekko for helpful suggestions. Persistent errors are my own.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, the terms ‘Castilian speaker’ and ‘Catalan speaker’ will generally be used to identify social categories and are not intended to suggest monolingualism. A ‘Castilian speaker’ is from a home where Castilian is the primary language spoken, and is likely to be Castilian-dominant in language habits. There is no implication that a ‘Castilian speaker’ will be monolingual and not speak Catalan, or vice versa. When I wish to stress the native language of an individual, I will use the terms ‘first language’ or ‘L1’ Castilian or Catalan speaker.

2. The response rate was higher among native Castilian speakers than for the full group, with responses from three of the six who had acquired Catalan by high school, and five of the seven I had classed as functionally monolingual in Castilian. This last is a very high rate for a long-term follow-up study, but there still could be self-selection bias in the response. All informant names are pseudonyms.

3. These accounts were developed in interaction and thus co-constructed with the interviewer. However, limited space here allows only abbreviated extracts that are not adequate for the close interactional analysis needed to display the mechanisms of co-construction. All interviews were carried out by the author.

4. Transcription conventions: Normal font = Castilian; italics =Catalan; [words] = overlap; […] = material omitted; (()) = transcriber's comment; :=elongation; - =word breaks off; (.) = pause; (xx) = unintelligible. In the English gloss, words added to clarify the meaning that have no correspondents in the original are bracketed [ ]. Informants’ first initials are used to identify their turns; ‘KW’ refers to the interviewer.

5. Only the chronotopes used by the sub-sample of formerly monolingual Castilian speakers have been analyzed in detail. The fifth such informant, a male, drew on a chronotope similar to that used by Elena and Adela, that is that of biographical time, and so he is not discussed separately here.

6. ‘Changing the chip’ is a popular technological metaphor for what Pujolar and Gonzàlez (this issue) call a ‘muda.’

7. This patterning of personal vs. generalizing accounts is reminiscent of that found by Reichman (2011) in relation to Honduran migrants’ decisions to emigrate. Those who left gave socially generalizing accounts of their actions, while those who remained behind gave gossipy personalistic interpretations of their neighbors’ decisions.

8. Elena also asserts that some Catalan linguistic policies could be viewed as unjust, but distinguishes her personal situation – ‘it's not unjust for me, I'm not affected’ – from that of a hypothetical Spaniard wishing to move to Catalonia for a job.

9. This interpretation is complicated by the fact that while Elena and Adela may seem to draw on a neo-liberal model of the freely choosing self, it is Josep who casts himself as an enterprising individual aligned with neo-liberal politics and economics.