“You Have to Be Against Bilingualism!” Sociolinguistic Theory and Controversies Over Bilingualism in Catalonia

Abstract

“Bilingualism” has long been a provocative term in Catalonia, where the concept is more often treated as ideology than as a description of sociolinguistic fact. I present a critical overview of controversies over bilingualism in Catalonia and focus on excavating the rationales underlying Catalanist anti-bilingual stances. This case exemplifies issues in the social contextualization, de-contextualization, and re-contextualization of theoretical concepts that confront critical studies of sociolinguistics and language ideologies more broadly.

“Bilingüismo” ha sido durante mucho tiempo un término provocador en Catalunya, donde el concepto se trata más a menudo como ideología que como descripción de un hecho sociolingüístico. Este artículo presenta una revisión crítica de las controversias sobre el bilingüismo en Catalunya y busca desentrañar las razones que subyacen a las posturas catalanistas antibilingües. Este caso ejemplifica problemas en la contextualización, descontextualización y recontextualización sociales de conceptos teóricos, que actualmente enfrentan los estudios críticos de la sociolingüística y de las ideologías lingüísticas en un sentido amplio.

Key words:

• bilingualism
• language ideologies
• language policies
• sociolinguistic theory
• Catalonia
• Catalan

Palabras clave:

• bilingüismo
• ideologías lingüísticas
• políticas lingüísticas
• teoría sociolingüística
• Catalunya
• catalán

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to the organizers of the two events identified in footnotes 1 and 2 for their kind invitations to think about the issues addressed here, and to participants for their comments. Those presentations expanded on a briefer discussion in Woolard (2016). Pep Soler very kindly shared media sources on the Koiné controversy as well as comments on an earlier version of this article. Many thanks to Joan Argenter, Emili Boix, Joan Pujolar, and Xavier Vila who also gave generous and helpful comments. Time, space, and my own intellectual limitations have prevented me from making the most of all of their thoughtful suggestions, and I’m responsible for all errors that remain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 1st Institute Ramon Llull Workshop on Bilingualism. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, November, 2018.

2 “Lenguaje y Territorio/Language and Territory,” 64th Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association. Buenos Aires, May-June, 2019.

3 There was, however, a pro-Catalan effort from a group founded in 1999 called Organization for Multilingualism, which advocated that the Spanish state use all the official languages of the country, e.g., on national identity cards and postage stamps.

4 Catanyol labels a mix of Catalan (català) and Spanish (espanyol).

5 Joan Argenter (2007) observes that the language conventions of some local Catalan networks were also disrupted in response to mass immigration.

6 Our conversation was bilingual primarily because of my own cueing of a change in codes, which José Luis followed.

7 Raymond Williams (1983, 174) commented on the contempt that the morpheme “-ism” conveys in modern usage.

8 The Catalan upper bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did become Castilianized to a significant extent, as discussed by McDonogh (1986) and Boix-Fuster and Moran (2014).

9 See Bauman and Briggs (2003) for application of this process to the history of language studies.