Opening perspectives from an integrated analysis: language attitudes, place of birth and self-identification

ABSTRACT

There is a theoretical and empirical tradition demonstrating the influence of the place of birth and self-identification in the shaping of language attitudes. But very few works analyse their joint effects. The main aim of this study is to analyse both the disaggregated and joint impact of these variables on the shaping of attitudes towards Catalan and Spanish languages in Catalonia. The sample consists of 309 adolescents (aged 14–16 years) coming from Ecuador, the rest of Latin America and Morocco. Both variables have an influence on attitudes towards Catalan separately, but when analysed jointly in the same explanatory model, self-identification outweighs place of birth. This is more evident among young people who develop the most and the least favourable attitudes. Furthermore, attitudes towards Spanish are only influenced by the place of birth, and by none of the variables in the case of those with the most and least favourable attitudes. These results open new lines for research and reflection on the process of construction of language attitudes and their role in a successful process of integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Language attitudes
• self-identification
• Latin American youth
• Moroccan youth
• Catalonia (Spain)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Cecilio Lapresta-Rey http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3411-7077

Notes

1 By using the denominations ‘descendants of immigrants’, ‘young people of immigrant origin and ‘children of migrations’ in this document, we do not mean to identify immigration as a personal heritable attribute. On the contrary, in our conceptualisation these young people are the protagonist of their own existence and identity constructions, differentiated from those of their parents.

2 Schools were chosen with the advice of the Catalan educational authority for the presence of immigrants. Schools are two in the city of Barcelona, two in the province of Barcelona, one in the city of Girona, one in the province of Girona, one in the city of Tarragona, one in the province of Tarragona, one in the city of Lleida and one in the province of Lleida.

3 All the nationalities included in this category correspond to Spanish-speaking countries.

4 This variable is the result of recoding the question: ‘To what degree do you feel Catalan?’ with the response options ‘Not at all'/‘A little'/‘Somewhat'/‘Very much’. Given the subjectivity of the responses, it was decided to differentiate between ‘No/Yes’. ‘No’ includes all the individuals that responded ‘Not at All’; and ‘Yes’ includes all the rest. This codification or adaptation, has been successfully used in numerous works that analyse self-identification and language preferences of the descendants of immigrants within the Catalan and Spanish context, such as those by Gualda (2010), Portes et al. (2012), Portes, Vickstrom, and Aparicio (2012) and Alarcón and Parella (2013). The same procedure was applied to the variable ‘Self-identification with Spain’.

5 Student's t test has been used only in this case for the comparison of means, as the mean values of the same group are compared in two variables.

6 The mean of those born in Ecuador is 8.8182 (SD = 1.1396), the mean of those born in the rest of Latin America 8.6667 (SD = 0.9712), and the mean of those born in Morocco 8.9348 (SD = 1.1035).

7 The non-significance of any of the variables considered makes bivariate analysis unnecessary.

8 The group born in Ecuador reach a mean of −1.7273 (SD = 3.4085), those born in the rest of Latin American countries reach a mean of −1.9429 (SD = 3.4636) and those born in Morocco 0.0000 (SD = 2.0000).

9 The mean of those born in Ecuador is 1.0000 (SD = 1.4142), the mean of those coming from other Latin American countries is 0.8000 (SD = 1.8738) and the mean of those born in Morocco is −0.6111 (SD = 2.3044). The mean of those who do not self-identify with Spain at all is −0.2857 (SD = 2.6903) and the mean of those who do is 0.0435 (SD = 2.0775).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number EDU2014-54093-R]; the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants – AGAUR of the Government of Catalonia [grant number 2014 SGR 208].