Introduction
The possibility of Catalonia breaking away from Spain and becoming an independent state has received sporadic focus in the international media over a long period, but hit the headlines dramatically in October 2017 in the wake of the abortive referendum on independence in Catalonia, and the viral images of Spanish state police violence that accompanied the reporting of it. Catalonia and the independence question then remained at the forefront of much media attention for the remainder of that year and beyond, not least due to the jailing by the Spanish state of a number of Catalan politicians, and the flight abroad of the former Catalan President and others, in the context of charges such as ‘insurrection’, which carry sentences of up to thirty years’ imprisonment. At the time of this writing (June 2018) some observers argue that the new Spanish government (since June 2, 2018) may be intending to adopt a somewhat less extreme approach to the issue, which remains to be seen. One thing that is certain, however, is that the issue of independence of Catalonia will remain at the forefront of relations between Catalonia and the Spanish state for the foreseeable future, not least as a result of the narrow victory of pro-independence parties in the December 2017 elections in Catalonia. The focus of this article is one of the aspects of the linguistic dimension of that issue.
If at some point Catalonia does indeed become an independent state, then one of the many challenges it will face is the development of a language policy. Due to Catalonia's history (see e.g. Woolard Reference Woolard1989, Guibernau Reference Guibernau2004, and Crameri Reference Crameri2014 for synopses), a major plank of any such policy will necessarily be the question of whether both, or only one of, Catalan and Spanish (and indeed any other languages) will have official status in such a putative new state. Currently Spanish and Catalan both have ‘equal official’ status (see below in Officiality and linguistic authority in Catalonia at present) in Catalonia, but Catalan has no such status in most of the rest of the Spanish state, and the issue of the potential respective situations of Catalan and Spanish under independence has already received considerable attention in diverse quarters of Catalan society. Indeed, one recent article characterises the lack of a ‘united front’ on the officiality question among supporters of independence as ‘an open wound in the pro-independence position which its proponents should be attempting to stitch’ (Sendra & Vila Reference Sendra and Vila2016:47, my translation).
The specific research question that I set out to address in this article, from a qualitative perspective, is what views on the relationships between linguistic authority (see below in Linguistic authority: Authenticity and anonymity) and officiality emerge in an example of actual language-ideological debate (see e.g. Blommaert Reference Blommaert1999) in the Catalan context. In order to do so I use data from an on-line comments thread to explore and theorise the language-ideological underpinnings of attitudes towards this crucial question.
Independence and officiality: The political context
Views in the party political arena on officiality in the event of independence are by no means uniform. While this dimension of the situation is not central to the focus of this article, it is important to make clear that there is no simple correlation between parties’ stances on independence and their views on language policy. Rather, the status of Spanish in the event of independence is a major issue about which there is significant divergence of opinion within the independence movement in Catalonia, and which is likely to constitute a source of internal friction were Catalonia to become an independent state. As things stand, the pro-independence party that won most votes in the December 2017 Catalan elections, Junts per Catalunya, supports Spanish maintaining some kind of officiality in a hypothetical independent Catalonia as do, as one would expect, all of the parties that did not campaign on an independence platform. However, the stances of the other two main pro-independence parties are less clear and there is much grassroots and ‘extra-parliamentary’ support for sole officiality of Catalan. In this respect a wide constellation of parties and groups take the view that official status for Spanish is incompatible with the task of halting and reversing a process of language shift in favour of Spanish, which they perceive as leading inexorably to the demise of Catalan unless the latter can achieve a position of sole officiality. ‘Single issue’ lobby groups not associated with specific political parties or other bodies have also emerged on this front, for example, Koiné or Grup de treball sobre la gestió del castellà en el marc d'una Catalunya independent ‘Working group on the management of Castilian [Spanish] within the framework of an independent Catalonia’,Footnote 1 consisting mainly of language activists, language professionals, and academics who advocate the position that Spanish should not be an official language of an independent Catalonia, although it should have some sort of (undefined) special status.
Linguistic authority: Authenticity and anonymity
The lack of consensus described above has generated a tendency whereby a wide gamut of different positions on officiality are defended by appeals to various types of ‘truth’ and ‘science’ (a type of appeal that has a long history in language-ideological debate in Catalonia; see e.g. DiGiacomo Reference DiGiacomo1999). In order to try to make sense of this ideological quagmire, and to theorise the views expressed, this article approaches the question of language officiality in a hypothetically independent Catalonia through the theoretical lens of linguistic authority. This construct has been divided by Woolard (Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998) and Gal & Woolard (Reference Gal, Woolard, Gal and Woolard2001) into the complementary concepts of authenticity and anonymity, which ‘are to a great extent co-constituted, meaning that they are defined in relation to each other as poles on an axis of linguistic differentiation’ (Gal Reference Gal, Duchêne and Heller2012, cited in Woolard Reference Woolard2016:21), and which have been extensively discussed in relation to Catalonia, most recently in Woolard (Reference Woolard2016). Essentially, a given language can accrue authority at the level of authenticity as a ‘voice from somewhere’, as a variety perceived to embody the ‘authentic self’ of a community. As such, as Woolard points out, it is often associated with ‘peasant folk purity’ (Reference Woolard2016:22) or ‘street’ urban varieties, or indeed, in the Catalan context, with notions such as llengua pròpia, a term not readily translatable into English, but for which Woolard Reference Woolard2016:41 suggests something like ‘own language’. Anonymity, by contrast, is about a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel Reference Nagel1986, cited in Woolard Reference Woolard2016:25), embodied in dominant, hegemonic varieties in which, ostensibly ‘it is what is said that matters, not who says it’ (Woolard Reference Woolard2016:26). As Woolard points out, a hegemonic compartmentalisation of languages into ‘authentic’ and ‘anonymous’ has tended to be much more successful, of course, in those European countries in which the nation-state project was most fully realised, for example, England and France. In Spain, however, Catalonia is a conspicuous example of an area in which the dominant state failed dramatically either to eradicate its main linguistic rival, Catalan, or inculcate a straightforward diglossic mentality among the autochthonous population.
Officiality and linguistic authority in Catalonia at present
A wealth of macro data is available regarding the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, the bulk of which consistently suggests a broadly positive diachronic trajectory for Catalan since the return to democracy in Spain in the late 1970s, but not the full ‘normalisation’ of Catalan that many had hoped at that time would come to fruition in the ensuing decades, let alone anything resembling the supposed ‘dominance’ of Catalan sometimes decried by Spanish nationalists (see e.g. DiGiacomo Reference DiGiacomo1999 and Woolard Reference Woolard2016 for discussions of the contradictions and inconsistencies in Spanish nationalist denunciations of the putative ‘threat’ posed by Catalan to Spanish in Catalonia). This mixed scenario is reflected, for example, in a major recent report (Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura 2015), which suggests, among many other indicators, that 80.4% of the population can speak Catalan (but therefore, of course, conversely 19.6% cannot), and that fewer than 1% of ‘Catalan origin’ residents of Catalonia use predominantly Spanish in their daily lives, but by contrast that only a third of the total population live their lives principally through Catalan.
In this context, one of the reasons why officiality is frequently at the forefront of debates about language policy in a hypothetically independent Catalonia is the controversial nature of the legislative situation at present, and concerns about its influence on the above type of data. As indicated above, at present Spanish and Catalan both have what is perhaps best termed ‘equal official’Footnote 2 status in Catalonia, but Catalan has no such status in most of the rest of the Spanish state. The term equal official is used in this article in an attempt to capture the fact that all relevant legislation, such as the Spanish Constitution, the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, and so on employs only the term official, rather than, for example, co-official (e.g. Woolard Reference Woolard2016:41), despite the fact that central Spanish authorities and the media sometimes use the term cooficial in Spanish in a manner that suggests different levels of status for Spanish (presumably oficial) and other languages (cooficiales).Footnote 3 This type of ‘equal official’ status, however it is described, means in practice that as things stand in Spain, Catalan enjoys neither the status of ‘territoriality’ (e.g. Spolsky Reference Spolsky2004) on, for example, the ‘Swiss’ model, that is, sole officiality in its own community, nor that of ‘national bilingualism’ as, for example, French has in Canada, that is, officiality throughout the nation state in question (for an overview of ‘officiality’ permutations, with particular reference to Catalonia, see Pons Reference Pons2015). Catalan activists have long complained about this state of affairs, arguing that, in effect, it means that overt, de jure language policy (Spolsky Reference Spolsky2004) operates in a way that reduces Catalan's anonymity potential in Catalonia and skews perceptions of its authenticity both within and beyond Catalonia. At the heart of this concern is the fact that within Catalonia (let alone the other territories of Valencia or the Balearics) Catalan does not have the status of a ‘queen’ in van Parijs’ (Reference van Parijs2011) term. That is to say, the nature of the language's status, as prescribed by the Spanish state, has in many ways prevented Catalonia's institutions from giving greater force to the process of ‘normalisation’ of Catalan, through their inability in crucial areas to move beyond ‘symbolic affirmation, rhetoric, or exhortation, namely by enforcing linguistic territoriality’ (van Parijs Reference van Parijs2011:133, italics in original). The sense that the status of Catalan within Catalonia is one of the greatest macro-impediments, if not the single most decisive one, to the ‘normalisation’ of the language is a longstanding cause of concern (and indeed pessimism, unless things change radically) in much of the literature in Catalan in this respect. Almost half of Albert Branchadell's work La normalitat improbable (Reference Branchadell1996), for example, is devoted to a discussion of the ‘judicial obstacle’ in Catalonia, and an influential 1995 volume (Prats, Rafanell, & Rossich) contains many statements along the lines of ‘The judicial status of Catalan is outrageous, seen from an international perspective’ (Reference Prats, Rafanell and Rossich1995:98, my translation).
In the context of Catalan's ‘non-normalised’ legislative status, qualitative research over several decades has documented issues around, for example, the politics of ethnicity and language (Woolard Reference Woolard1989), perceptions of diglossia (Atkinson Reference Atkinson2000), enregisterment (Frekko Reference Frekko2009), indexicality and iconisation (e.g. Pujolar Reference Pujolar2001), and linguistic ideologies (e.g. Woolard Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998, Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008) in which Catalan's lack of sole officiality in Catalonia arguably plays a problematic role for the language at the macro level (and, as I discuss below, this is certainly the perception of many of the contributors to the data discussed in this article). More recently, as Catalonia has rapidly become increasingly multicultural and multilingual, some recent research has focused on immigrants to the area and short-term residents such as exchange students. This is no doubt partly a reflection of major changes in the macro-sociolinguistic context, in which, for example, the report cited above (Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura 2015:7) emphasises that the ‘foreign-born’ proportion of the population doubled between 2003 and 2013, bringing the total population from 6.3 to 7.5 million, with the proportion born outside the Spanish state at 17.5%. In percentage terms, although obviously much less significantly than immigration in numerical terms, the same body's data show a 37% increase in Erasmus students in Catalonia over the period 2011–2015 (Generalitat de Catalunya 2016). At the same time, such research is also a means of engaging with the ways in which the experiences and perceptions of newcomers and ‘outsiders’ can provide illuminating insights into the sociolinguistic complexities of the new environments in which they find themselves, often quite precipitately. Much of this research has shown consistently that learning Spanish continues to be perceived by the overwhelming majority of new arrivals, and many long-term residents, as, in Fukuda's term (Reference Fukuda2017), ‘unconditional’. However, Fukuda's own research, for example, also showed that far lower levels of competence in Catalan than Spanish were reported among her Japanese respondents living in Catalonia, and she found no cases at all of significant competence in Catalan without at least a comparable level in Spanish. Among other striking results in the same study is the fact that virtually none (0.2%) of Fukuda's respondents felt that they did not need Spanish in order to live in Catalonia, whereas almost a third of respondents felt that Catalan was unnecessary for that purpose. Furthermore, Fukuda argues that dominance of Spanish exacerbates the potential for the behaviour of both Catalans and migrants to reflect a type of highly conspicuous ‘authenticity’, which she describes as one of the four main factors ‘preventing Catalan learning’ (Reference Fukuda2017:29). She argues that the lack of necessity for Catalan on the part of migrants, not least because of its shared rather than sole officiality, facilitates and fuels the perpetuation of a perception among both ‘native speakers’ and ‘new speakers’ (or nonspeakers) of the language as belonging exclusively to the in-group of ‘Catalans’. As Fukuda points out, migrants cannot avoid initial contact with Spanish given that, even prior to the implementation of ‘direct rule’ by the Spanish state in October Reference Fukuda2017,Footnote 4 due to a longstanding situation regarding Spanish state versus regional powers and language officiality, immigration already came under the aegis of the central Spanish government and the documentation pertaining to it can only be completed in Spanish (a situation that is markedly different from, for example, that of Quebec precisely because of the different types of language policy in place).
Other recent work (e.g. Atkinson & Moriarty Reference Atkinson and Moriarty2012; Garrett & Gallego Bals Reference Garrett and Bals2014), focusing on the experiences of short-term exchange student residents in Catalonia, reveals similar perceptions of linguistic authority, utility, and ownership in the current legislative context. The results of Garrett & Gallego Bals's (Reference Garrett and Bals2014) comparative study of ‘home’ and international students’ attitudes to the roles of respectively Welsh and Catalan in internationalisation of universities indicate far higher levels of negative attitudes towards Catalan among international students in Catalonia than negative attitudes towards Welsh among international students in Wales. Their research in Catalonia was conducted in Lleida (Lérida), which has much higher reported levels of knowledge and use of Catalan than, say, Barcelona (and thus an exceptionally high presence for a ‘minoritised’ language in a European state), yet one of the tropes reported from their qualitative data was the ‘unnecessary’ nature of Catalan. Although the authors do not discuss this as such, one question posed by their results is why a language with a much greater level of ethnolinguistic vitality at ‘street’ level (i.e. Catalan in Lleida, as opposed to Welsh in Cardiff) attracts many more critical comments, including accusations that it is incompatible with ‘internationalisation’. Their respondents are of course right that Catalan, despite its high level of presence and visibility in Lleida, is indeed strictly speaking ‘unnecessary’ due to its current ‘equal official’ rather than sole official status. It may be for such respondents that this combination of lack of ‘necessity’ and significant everyday presence simultaneously deprives the language of both anonymity and authenticity. Lack of exclusive officiality clearly means that there is no requirement to engage with Catalan, yet such a requirement is arguably part of the very doxa, in Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu1972) terms, of anonymity. Conversely, if a language is as omnipresent as Catalan is in Lleida, yet remains ‘unnecessary’, this may militate against outsiders being able to assign it a tokenistic role of folkloric ‘authenticity’, which can be simply admired in passing by temporary residents such as exchange students, with the result that it is perceived by at least some of the latter as a pervasive linguistic ‘irritant’ in their temporary environment.
It is perhaps unsurprising in the light of the problems and challenges described in this section, both historically and in the context of an increasingly multilingual, multicultural, and ‘international’ Catalonia, that a widespread perception exists among significant sections of the population that independence would provide an unprecedented opportunity to ‘solve’ the problem of linguistic authority in Catalonia, and that questions of officiality would be a key dimension of such a solution. I next discuss how the complexities around this type of perception manifest themselves in my data.
The data
The research question that I address in this article is that of views on the relationships between linguistic authority and officiality in actual language-ideological debate in the Catalan context. My intention is to complement the data elicited by research such as Fukuda's and that of Garrett & Gallego Bals’ with analysis of an example of ‘spontaneous’ contributions to sociolinguistic debate in the media. For this purpose, the data for this article are taken from an on-line discussion thread. This approach builds on previous recent work investigating language-ideological thematisation of multilingualism in print media, television, and web sites of various kinds, the utility of which has been demonstrated by, for example, the work of Kelly-Holmes (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011), in that instance in the context of Irish.
My specific data set is the discussion/comments thread that follows a short interview on ‘bilingualism’ (Palmer Reference Jordi2015) with a Catalan language professional, translator, and language activist, who is also a novelist and media personality, by the name of Pau Vidal. The interview focuses on a book published by Vidal in Reference Vidal2015 (in Catalan), the title of which translates as ‘Bilingualism Kills: From climate change to language change’. The interview appeared in an influential forum with a significant level of distribution in Catalonia, the on-line newspaper Naciódigital.cat, which has been in existence in its present form since 2005 and is, according to the Oficina de la Justificación de la Difusión Footnote 5 (the main body that monitors media consumption in Spain), one of the two or three most widely read on-line media products in Catalan, with high levels of use for a ‘minoritised language’ publication. For example, in May 2017 the paper was accessed 8,553,219 times, during the course of which 23,640,329 pages were visited.
The paper publishes its articles exclusively in Catalan but those who post comments are able to choose the language in which they write. In the thread under discussion more than 90% of the comments are in Catalan and the remainder in Spanish, apart from one (of a total of sixty-three posts), which is in a mixture of the two languages. This preponderance of Catalan is typical in the comment threads of Naciódigital.cat, no doubt largely because the publication itself uses only Catalan. However, as the data indicate, neither the choice of Catalan nor indeed support for independence are predictors of posters’ views on language officiality in a hypothetically independent Catalonia (as Woolard Reference Woolard2016 points out, relations between different types of language-ideological attitudes are rarely straightforward in Catalonia). The sixty-three posts in response to the interview with Vidal cover a wide variety of issues, ranging from, for example, exhortations to readers to use Catalan more, criticisms of the functional distribution of Catalan and Castilian in Catalonia, criticism of the historical repression of Catalan, support for individual bilingualism in Catalonia, denunciation of political corruption, and accusations of bias in current language policy in education. However, given the content of much of the interview with Vidal, it is unsurprising that approximately 50% of the comments focus entirely or partially on issues of linguistic authority and/or officiality. The sample is, of course, too small to make any claims to any type of representativity, particularly as a wide variety of perspectives on the complex relationships between linguistic authority and officiality are expressed in a relatively small number of posts. Thematic and key word qualitative analysis of the data (see e.g. O'Rourke & Ramallo Reference O'Rourke and Ramallo2013, Garrett & Gallego Bals Reference Garrett and Bals2014, and Fukuda Reference Fukuda2017 for discussions of this approach), however, indicate that in this small set of data almost every conceivable permutation of views (see Table 1 below) on the (potential) linguistic authority of each of the two languages is expressed in the posts, with officiality often, but not always, viewed as a key factor.
Linguistic authority of Catalan and Spanish.
In the interview Vidal makes clear that his book's premise, as reflected in its title, is that societal bilingualism is a transitory, unsustainable phenomenon that ineluctably resolves itself in favour of societal monolingualism. In this respect Vidal is reiterating here a longstanding fundamental tenet in much sociolinguistic work on Catalonia that has its origins in early work on the subject going back at least until the 1960s (e.g. Aracil Reference Aracil1966). This ‘conflict’ sociolinguistics repudiates ‘societal bilingualism’ in Catalonia as in effect code for the gradual replacement of Catalan by Spanish in all key domains, in contrast to individual multilingualism, which is seen as an indicator of a healthy diversity entirely compatible with Catalan territoriality in Catalonia (for two further recent iterations of this perspective see e.g. Vila Reference Vila2016 and Mollà Reference Mollà2017, and for a discussion in English, Woolard Reference Woolard2016). As I discuss below, many of the opinions in support of Vidal's views in the comments thread are strongly rooted in versions of this perspective.
In the case of Catalonia, according to Vidal, Catalan will only survive if Catalonia becomes independent and if Catalan achieves the status of what he describes as the ‘predominant’ language in such an independent state. Interestingly, Vidal refuses to be explicit on the specific point of sole officiality, despite being pressed on this by the interviewer. He acknowledges that his position is ‘approximately’ that Catalan should be the sole official language of an independent Catalonia but adds, perhaps rather coyly:
(1) I don't want to talk about labels, because they're reductive and they cause rashes.Footnote 6
My purpose here is not to critique the content of Vidal's book but rather to focus on the readers’ comments in response to the interview with him. As indicated above, many of these make the explicit link between debates about ‘bilingualism’ and the question of officiality, which Vidal himself sidesteps in the interview, offering insights into ‘on the ground’ attitudes towards a crucial aspect of language policy in the event of independence. In this respect, the interview acts as a relatively ‘natural’ prompt (compared with prompts used, for instance, in experimental approaches such as focus groups convened expressly for research purposes), which generates a series of reflections, which can be anonymous if the participant so wishes, on issues central to the theoretical and ideological issues that are the focus of this article.
Analysis and discussion
The content of the comments thread evokes a number of ideological tropes and issues in connection with the question of officiality, some of which are recurring themes in discussions among participants in debates about dominant and minoritised languages. These include a version of what Kelly-Holmes (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011) identified in her analysis of an on-line discussion of Irish as the discourse of truth. In the Irish context Kelly-Holmes defines the truth discourse as being ‘about Irish lacking both authority as a national language and authenticity as a minority language of a recognizable ethnic group’ (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:511). In the thread I focus on here the discourse of truth, as it relates to the question of officiality, plays out in both similar and different ways to those analysed by Kelly-Holmes in the Irish context, but ways in which the concepts of authority and authenticity also provide explanatory power. While most of the comments in the thread analysed by Kelly-Holmes focus on ‘outing’ (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:522) Irish as lacking linguistic authority despite its officiality in Ireland and the raft of language policies in place to support it, my own data show a greater variety of views on Catalan and Spanish in Catalonia. Many of them echo the notion described by Kelly-Holmes of ‘a real, modern state being monolingual and free of ‘mixed up’ language practices’ (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:520), but there is a significant diversity of views about the current and/or ideal distribution of linguistic authority in Catalonia, particularly as this relates to questions of officiality.
‘Truth’, and the ownership of it, is at the heart of Vidal's interview itself. Indeed in response to the interviewer's first question he rejects the interviewer's description of his book as containing an ‘argument’ at all, but asserts that it is rather ‘a scientific essay’, explaining that ‘ordinary people (la gent comuna in Catalan) don't know what lies behind language contact, and I, who have studied it, explain it’. This claim to a ‘higher’ knowledge about the politics of language, available only to those who have the status of ‘scholars’, is subsequently echoed in numerous appeals to concepts such as ‘science’ and ‘scientific fact’ in the comments thread. Most of these centre on the fundamental issues of officiality and societal bilingualism, in ways that assert and contest the extent to which either or both languages function, or could potentially function, as voices of linguistic authority in Catalonia.
Officiality, authority, and survival
A minority of posters imply that sole officiality is not a prerequisite of authority for either, or indeed any, language, suggesting that either anonymity or authenticity can be realised through, in principle, any language without such exclusive status. One says explicitly (original punctuation, orthography, etc. has been preserved in all of the examples quoted, both in the original versions in the appendix and also in the translations, to the extent that this is possible). Explanatory comments are added in square brackets.
(2) By the way, in Malta and in Ireland there are two official languages Maltese and English (since 2004), Irish Gaelic and English facts which don't prevent the officiality of Maltese and Irish (since January 2007).
Among the people who live in our country more than two hundred different languages are spoken. Research and studies have been done and languages have been found from Aymara to Zapoteca, as well as such well-known languages as Spanish, Chinese, French, English or Italian or languages which we may never have heard of, like Kannada (an indigenous language of India), Txol [sic] (indigenous to Mexico) or Senegalese sign language (indigenous to Senegal).
The conclusion is that we need our own state like Portugal, Denmark, Malta, Ireland… and to be able to decide whether Catalan should be the only official language, like in Andorra, or perhaps do like Malta and Ireland with two official languages, etc., etc.
This won't prevent the two hundred languages from continuing to be spoken, and so on.
This view of lack of sole officiality as compatible with linguistic authority is not shared, however, by many of the posters. In some cases quite explicit links are made between ‘scientific truth’ and claims that sole officiality for Catalan is not only essential for purposes of linguistic authority, but for the very survival of the language.
(3) I want to carry out for the nth time the true scientific analysis which uses the methodology of scientists…
This apparently leads to the conclusion that:
(4) Sole officiality of the language of the Violated Group is a NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT CONDITION for the communication protocol to become as it was before the attack of the Violent Group.
Such remarks, in which the ‘violated group’ presumably refers to the Catalans and the history of repression of their language, are representative of a discursive pattern in some of the thread that constructs inextricable links between science and logic, sole officiality, authority, and survival. Another example that illustrates this is given in (5).
(5) It's pure logic that Catalan should be the sole official language of the Catalan Republic. To make Spanish an official language would only bring us problems, as well as implying serious national weakness before Spanish imperialism and chauvinism… Catalan as official language in the Catalan state, and that's that. The others, subsidiary status. It's logical, obvious. When two or more languages have found themselves in one single state, with the passing of time we see how only one remains unendangered, the language which the state promotes, the official language. The rest disappear and can't come back. There are highly exemplary cases such as France and Germany, and even Spain.
A further poster makes a similar point more dramatically, shown in (6).
(6) If independence is organised by the current political parties…, we won't need it any more. They'll shove Spanish down our throats and they'll kill our language. And without a language we won't exist any longer. This type of independence wouldn't solve anything, quite the opposite: it would establish bilingualism for centuries and centuries. Well, not so many. Catalan would disappear immediately.
Some posters additionally link questions of officiality with authenticity specifically as well as survival, as in (7) below.
(7) What is logical and normal is that the llengua pròpiaFootnote 7 of a country should be its official language.
And another comments:
(8) I'm a visionary too because as if I was a Portuguese, English, Italian, French citizen… I want my future state, the Catalans [sic] Republic, to have ONE official language: our own one, the national language, Catalan.
The position of the above posters is clearly that Catalan has the potential to function as a voice of authority, explicitly or by implication at the levels of both anonymity and authenticity, in an independent state but will only be able to do so if it has exclusive access to official status, with that officiality functioning in part as a catalyst for societal monolingualism (which many posters expressly contrast with individual multilingualism, which they support). It is an argument that is vigorously propounded by further posters, as in (9) below, echoing Vidal in the anthropomorphic terms often found in discourses of endangerment (e.g. Duchêne & Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2007; Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011).
(9) Bilingualism is like smoking, it kills gradually.
Affirming and contesting linguistic authority
Although the pattern described above of asserting sole officiality for Catalan as a prerequisite not just of full linguistic authority, but of the very survival of the language, is a conspicuous trait of many posters’ comments, it is by no means a matter on which there is any kind of clear consensus. Another aspect of the data that is of interest from the point of view of elucidating the language-ideological ‘state of play’ in Catalonia (to the extent that it is possible to extrapolate from a small data set, of course), is that in fact the entire gamut of possible anonymity/authenticity permutations is invoked in the cases of both Spanish and Catalan, with the dimension of officiality adduced as a crucial consideration by many posters. That is to say, there are comments that view either or neither of Catalan and Spanish as possessing either actually or potentially:
• both anonymity and authenticity
• anonymity but not authenticity
• authenticity but not anonymity
• neither anonymity nor authenticity
This gives a total of eight permutations, which can be represented in tabular form in Table 1, with all of the boxes ticked.
Below are brief examples of comments that illustrate this diversity of views.
Catalan
Clearly, many of the comments discussed in the previous section assert that the main thing holding Catalan back from achieving full linguistic authority is the lack of an independent state, but with the proviso that such a development would require sole officiality for that language.
However, there are also posts that call into question the anonymity value of Catalan, at least in terms of its credibility on the international stage, such as the following:
(10) With Spanish and English you can fly to anywhere in the world. With Catalan only until take-off.
Other posts cast further doubt on the anonymity potential of Catalan, while contrasting this with a view of its authority at the level of authenticity as unproblematic, in effect arguing that in a globalised world only authenticity, but not anonymity, is a feasible preserve of historically minoritised languages.
(11) From my point of view the problem of Catalan will not be resolved with an independent state. We live in a globalised world and Catalans will need to interact beyond their borders in order to survive. This means that Catalan one way or another will be complemented (and in some domains supplanted) by Spanish, English or French. It's what happens in Luxembourg. There they have their own language, but the only people who speak it are the ‘through and through’Footnote 8 inhabitants! The preeminent language is French (and German to a lesser extent).
Still others argue, evoking another stereotypical trope in respect of minoritised languages, that such varieties cannot fulfil either anonymity or authenticity roles.
(12) Minority languages such as Galician, Gaelic, Catalan, etc… should be studied by their respective professors in universities, but at a practical level, they're useless.
Spanish
Some of the above comments obviously imply that Spanish, not least as a ‘global’ language, is much better placed than Catalan to act as a voice of credible anonymity. However, it is also the case that some posters vigorously assert the significance of Spanish as voice of authenticity in Catalonia. For example, one poster states:
(13) ImmersionFootnote 9 isn't good for Catalan… I live in an area [presumably of Catalonia] which is 99% Spanish speaking. I only speak Catalan with my children and very badly, and I can't write it. My children aren't learning Catalan in the schools, only to read and write [it]. I would prefer the Basque modelFootnote 10 with the children segregated and for those who choose the Catalan option to speak Catalan in the playground, supervised by teachers if necessary. I think it's the only way. My children will know Catalan, but the pressure is so strong that they're not going to use it in their social life. When I hear their friends joking about Catalan and pretending to speak it it's a joke to talk about the success of immersion. When they have children they'll have to choose, and unfortunately if their partner is Spanish speaking they'll have another pressure factor. For this reason I'm in favour of segregation, I know it sounds strange and awful, but it's the only option for Catalans who live in ‘super-Spanish’ areas.
This poster's point appears to be that for these children, and their friends, the only variety that is ‘real’ (e.g. Woolard Reference Woolard2016:24) for them, in the sense of functioning for them as a credible voice of authenticity is Spanish (indeed, there are echoes of some of Pujolar's Reference Pujolar2001 respondents’ comments in the references to ‘joking about Catalan’).
At the same time, still others contest any ascription of anonymity and/or authenticity to Spanish, in some cases going so far as to question the ‘global’ status of the language.
(14) Spanish is only spoken in the third world, it's useless. It has no place in international institutions. The world doesn't care about Spanish. What's important is to know English and Catalan at home, Spanish is only spoken as a majority language by the lower class.
(15) Why should we make Spanish official if it's useless for communicating at a global level…
As indicated above, the (potential) validity of each language is both asserted and contested in the comments thread, including, in the final permutation of the eight described in Table 1, doubt being cast on the capacity of Spanish to function as an ‘authentic’ voice in Catalonia.
(16) Apart from in Spanish-speaking areas of Valencia, does anyone know how to distinguish whether someone who expresses themselves in Spanish is from Tortosa, Torroella de Mongrí, Gandia, Manacor or Olot?Footnote 11 … The answer is no. For the simple reason that the Spanish of our country [presumably the Catalan-speaking areas of Spain] is based on the standard, and people follow the Spanish media, the audiovisual and written media, in their spoken Spanish, there are definitely no dialectal or local variants [i.e. presumably, of Spanish within the Catalan-speaking areas]. Apart from those who speak Spanish with an accent from Extremadura, León, Murcia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico… due to their origin.
Here the poster's assertion appears to be that other than in ‘Spanish-speaking areas of Valencia’, Spanish is not successfully enregistered (see e.g. Frekko Reference Frekko2009) as a voice of authenticity since it is spoken as, in effect, a foreign language, and according to the linguistic parameters embodied in the media. Clearly, like many of the other comments cited here, there are aspects of this comment that are unclear (not least, how this point is supposed to apply to first-language, non-first-generation Spanish speakers in Catalonia proper, of whom there are many), but what its author seems indeed to be suggesting is that only Catalan can function as a ‘voice from somewhere’ in Catalonia. This constitutes an impressionistic counterpoint to the research of authors such as Frekko (Reference Frekko2009), who convincingly argues that in fact Catalan faces a major difficulty in achieving full enregisterment as an authentic ‘voice from somewhere’, not least due to rigid standardisation policies as part of top-down language policies designed to ‘normalise’ the language. Frekko's position, based on interviews with and observations of language professionals such as teachers and ‘television linguistic assessors’ (Reference Frekko2009:77), is that ‘A national public seems to require a standard register (norm(1)) that is able to count as anonymous at the level of contrast between named languages and their corresponding national publics. At the same time, at a lower scale, it must stand in contrast to other positively-marked registers in order for the named language to count as normal(2), able to represent ‘everyone’.’ (Reference Frekko2009:89). In contrast, the above poster seems to be asserting that precisely the reverse is the case, that is, it is Spanish that has ‘norm’ status but does not count as ‘normal’.
Concluding remarks
As Woolard describes (Reference Woolard2016:7), issues of linguistic authority are asserted, negotiated, and contested through language ideologies, which are fundamentally about ‘socially, politically and morally loaded cultural assumptions about the way that language works in social life and about the role of particular forms in a given society’—hence their crucial significance, albeit often implicit, in debates about questions of officiality.
The data analysed here exemplify the diversity of ways in which ideologies of truth, authority, and survival are invoked in discussions of language policy in a hypothetically independent Catalonia, and the centrality of the question of officiality in such debates. What lies at the heart of this issue can be conceptualised as what Frekko (Reference Frekko2009) describes as ‘the imagination of a national public’ and the difficulties of such imagining in the case of Catalonia, in particular in a globalised world. The vexed nature of the question of whether (some variety of) Spanish should enjoy some sort of officiality in an independent Catalonia is clearly an attempt to come to terms with, or negotiate, the fact that both Frekko (Reference Frekko2009) and Woolard (Reference Woolard2016) describe (and which is centrally reflected in the data discussed in this article) that neither Catalan nor Spanish is currently able to fulfil unambiguously the functions of a ‘voice from somewhere’ or a ‘voice from nowhere’.
Anonymity
As already indicated, much of this dilemma can be traced back to the Spanish state's failure to realise fully its ‘nation-state’ project. As Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1972) describes, dominant languages often acquire hegemonic status and as such they are, in his terms, routinely misrecognised; that is to say, they are perceived as in fact having no roots (deracinated, as Bourdieu puts it), as literally ‘voices from nowhere’. As Bourdieu argues, the ideological project of establishing a particular variety as a standard, anonymous voice from nowhere has proved relatively successful over long periods of history not least in France, where ‘French’, as inculcated through the school system and other channels, has been widely ‘misrecognised’—a misrecognition fundamental to the establishment of a perception of French as ‘socially neutral, universally available’ and an untainted channel for the promulgation of ‘natural and objective truths’ (Woolard Reference Woolard2016:25).
The situation in Catalonia is of course very different. History (not least that of language policy), demography, and ethnolinguistic and other factors militate against either Spanish or Catalan achieving the anonymous status widely enjoyed still today by French in the French state. As some of the comments in my data illustrate, Spanish is widely perceived as a variety very much from somewhere. That somewhere is, in part, any or all of the following: the Spanish state and its history of repression of Catalonia and its language over centuries; the voice of the massive migration to Catalonia from the south of Spain that took place during the Franco period, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s; the nationally dominant (at state level) Spanish culture, vigorously exploited by some politicians in order to incite ‘catalanophobia’, not least during the Partido Popular’s most recent period in government in Spain, under Mariano Rajoy from 2011 until early June 2018, and beyond. Turns of phrase in the data such as the ‘violent group’ and references to ‘chauvinism’, ‘imperialism’, and social class indexicality in the data above certainly suggest that for such posters these, and perhaps other, factors have combined to ensure that the ideological project of Spanish centrist nationalism of promoting Spanish as a ‘neutral’, ‘post-national’ (see e.g. del Valle Reference del Valle, Wright and Ricketts2005; Woolard Reference Woolard2016) variety for the whole of the Spanish state—imbued with anonymity and set against the supposed ‘atavistic and reactionary particularism’ (del Valle Reference del Valle, Wright and Ricketts2005:411, quoted in Woolard Reference Woolard2016:54) of the other languages of Spain—has failed to prosper universally to date, at least in Catalonia (see Woolard Reference Woolard2016 for a discussion of the trajectory of claims of anonymity for Spanish in Catalonia since the transition to democracy in Spain). One conspicuous example of this among the pro-independence lobby groups not associated with specific political parties is perhaps the stance of the Grup de treball sobre la gestió del castellà en el marc d'una Catalunya independent ‘Working group on the management of Castilian within the framework of an independent Catalonia’ mentioned at the beginning of this article. This group, consisting mainly of academics, vigorously advocates the position that Spanish should not be an official language of an independent Catalonia, but that it should instead be promoted as una estructura de Estado de primer nivel ‘a first level state structure’ (the term is as vague in Spanish as it is in English). What is particularly striking about the group's position, however, from the point of view of Spanish and anonymity is their contention that the variety of Spanish that should principally fulfil this ‘first level’ function in an independent Catalonia should be Latin American rather than Peninsular Spanish. The rationale for their position is partly that Latin America is clearly the principal locus of Spanish in the contemporary world. However, it is also very much about privileging such a variety of Spanish (leaving aside the question of what might be meant by ‘Latin American Spanish’, which is clearly in no way an easily identifiable single variety of the language) that might be considered to be less ideologically loaded with connotations of conquest and empire, both in Latin America and in Catalonia, than Peninsular Spanish, and therefore (in theory at least) more able to function as a ‘voice from nowhere’ in Catalonia. Most of the posters in the data discussed here do not make reference to different varieties of Spanish, however. As I have illustrated, officiality of any variety of Spanish in an independent Catalonia would be seen by many of them as a sell-out to a noxious societal bilingualism that would be too much of a threat to Catalan's aspirations to authoritative anonymity. The feeling of many of the commentators seems to be that only officiality can guarantee ‘voice from nowhere’ status and that ‘nowhere’ is indivisible; to paraphrase Branchadell (Reference Branchadell2012:7), that there cannot be two nowheres, and therefore Catalan cannot achieve hegemonic dominance in the anonymity dimension if another language is vying for the same ‘equal official’ status. For them, such a situation, that is, the perpetuation of a version of the current ‘equal official’ status state of affairs in a new political context of independence, would imply, as one commentator in (5) above puts it, ‘serious national weakness’. Furthermore, the perception of many posters seems to be that ‘equal official’ status of Spanish would also risk highlighting Catalan's traditional status as a traditionally subjugated ‘voice from somewhere’, of foregrounding, but in a negative way, precisely the sort of ‘authentic’ legitimacy that at another level Catalan is striving for.
If anonymity is problematic for Spanish in Catalonia, few would deny that it is also a key challenge for Catalan. Arguably the single biggest challenge of the ‘normalisation’ process initiated after the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975 and the return to democracy has been the inability of this process and its myriad language policy initiatives to fully transform Catalan from an ethnic voice into a civic one; to remove its class, gender, and other indexicalities described by writers such as Pujolar (Reference Pujolar2001), Frekko (Reference Frekko2009), and Woolard (Reference Woolard2016) in order for it to be able to function as an anonymous ‘voice from nowhere’. Clearly, for some of the pro-independence posters in the data discussed here, anonymity is not just desirable but a prerequisite of survival of Catalan, and in turn they do not see independence as in itself guaranteeing such ‘normalisation’ and anonymity. Rather the key factor for them is sole officiality, as evinced in comments in (6) above such as ‘If independence is organised by the current political parties…,Footnote 12 we won't need it any more. They'll shove Spanish down our throats and they'll kill our language’.
Authenticity
Authenticity, as the data indicate, is no less of a fraught issue. When one of the posters quoted in (13) above states that ‘My children will know Catalan, but the pressure is so strong that they're not going to use it in their social life’, she/he echoes the point made by some researchers (e.g. Frekko Reference Frekko2009) that Spanish usurps to too great an extent Catalan's aspirations to authenticity, that for some language users in Catalonia Catalan is unable to provide sufficient variety of register ‘on the ground’ in order to embody full authenticity. The poster's comment exemplifies well the point that Woolard (Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008:317) makes when she states that ‘The work of researchers such as Joan Pujolar (Pujolar Reference Pujolar2001) suggests that institutional use in the case of Catalan may not have deracinated it so much as it obscured the human voice of the language, particularly for many who come to it only through the school. Playful and transgressive registers and resonances of lightness and humor that are repressed in formal school use were not replenished for Catalan through mass-mediated popular public culture’. Indeed the ‘authenticity dilemma’ in Catalonia is in a sense a mirror image of the anonymity conundrum, in that, just as in the case of anonymity, Catalan and Spanish are often perceived as vying for some kind of hegemonic authenticity. By contrast, the language policies designed to ‘normalise’ Catalan are seen as militating against full authenticity for that language, as discussed by Sinner & Wieland Reference Sinner, Wieland, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008 for example, just as Spanish's history in Catalonia and its putative lack of llengua pròpia status are viewed by some of the commentators in the data as being incompatible with any kind of unproblematic role of authenticity in Catalonia.
As discussed, the position of Vidal and others that ‘bilingualism kills’ has widespread, if minority, currency in Catalonia in the current postabortive independence referendum climate and the imposition of direct rule by Madrid in October 2017. In practice it seems that often this position embodies implacable opposition to ‘equal official’ status of languages in an independent state, rather than a belief that an independent Catalonia should actually be monolingual in the day-to-day practice of its inhabitants. However, the politico-ideological difficulties inherent in hypothetical nonofficial status for Spanish are by no means lost on many commentators. The former deputy director of the Catalan government's Department of Language Policy, for example, stated in a recent article that:
it must be taken into account that such an option [i.e. hypothetical nonofficial status for Spanish] could introduce a factor of uncertainty into the debate on independence among the sectors of the population for whom Spanish is an identity language. Obviously, such an option could be easily instrumentalised by sectors who are against independence. To open up this debate prior to the attainment of independence, in particular, could become a highly problematic cause of division. (Marí Reference Marí2015:248, my translation)
Clearly, the potential for an independent Catalan state in the foreseeable future looks much more remote in the light of recent events than it did when Marí was writing in Reference Marí2015, and, as my data suggest, the debate in question was already very much to the fore, at a micro if not a macro level. In any event, Marí is certainly right in arguing that should independence in fact come to pass, a major challenge for such a new state will be to find ways of navigating and reconciling the complex ideological panorama described in this article in order to foment a credible constellation of linguistic authority and the role of questions of officiality within it.
Appendix: Original versions of in-text examples
Comments in Spanish are italicised and the remainder are in Catalan.
(1) No vull parlar d'etiquetes, perquè són reductives i provoquen urticària.
(2) Per cert a Malta i a Irlanda hi ha dues llengües oficials maltès i l'anglès (des del 2004), gaèlic irlandès i l'anglès coses que no impedeixen l'oficialitat del maltès i de l'irlandès (des del gener del 2007).
Entre la gent que viu al nostre país es parlen més de dues-centes llengües diferents. S'han fet recerques i estudis i s'han trobat llengües que van des de l'aimarà fins al zapoteca, passant per llengües tan conegudes com el castellà, el xinès, francès, l'anglès o l'italià o llengües que potser no havíem sentit a anomenar mai, com el kannada (llengua originària de l’Índia), el txol (originària de Mèxic) o la llengua de signes senegalesa (originària del Senegal).
La conclusió és que ens fa falta un estat propi com a Portugal, Dinamarca, Malta, Irlanda… i poder decidir si el català ha d’ésser única llengua oficial, com a Andorra, o fer tal volta fer com Malta i Irlanda amb dues llengües oficials, etc., etc.
Això no impedirà que es continuïn parlant les dues-centes llengües i escaig.
(3) vull tornar a fer per enèssima volta l'anàlisi científica veritable que utilitza la metodologia dels científics…
(4) L'oficialitat única de la llengua del Grup Violentat és CONDICIÓ NECESSÀRIA PERÒ NO SUFICIENT per tal que el protocol de comunicació esdevingui com abans de l'atac del Grup Violent.
(5) ÉLs de pura lògica que el catalàsigui l’única llengua oficial de la República Catalana. Fer l'espanyol llengua oficial només ens comportaria problemes, a banda que implicaria una greu feblesa nacional davant de l'imperialisme I el xovinisme espanyols… Català al País Català com a llengua oficial, i prou. Les altres, subsidàries. És logic, és l'assenyat. Quan dues llengües o més s'han trobat en un mateix estat, amb el pas del temps veiem com només una es manté for a de peril, la llengua que promociona l'estat, la llengua oficial. La resta desapareixen per no tornar. Hi ha casos molt exemplaitzants a França i Alemanya, i a Espanya mateix.
(6) Si la independència la maneguen els actuals partits politics…, ja no cal. Ens fotran per barret l'espanyol oficial i ens mataran la llengua. I sense llengua ja no serem. Aquesta independència ja no solucionaria res, ben al contrari: consagraria el bilingüisme pels segles dels segles. Bé no tants. De seguida desapareixeria el català.
(7) El que és lògic i normal és que la llengua pròpia d'un país en sigui l'oficial.
(8) Jo tambésóc una il luminada perquè com si fos una ciutadana portuguesa, anglesa, italiana, francesa… vull que el meu futur estat, la República catalans tingui UNA llengua oficial: la pròpia, la llengua nacional, el català.
(9) Que el bilingüisme és com el tabac, que mata poc a poc.
(10) Con el español y el ingles se puede viajar en avión a cualquier parte de la tierra… Con el catalan solo hasta que despega.
(11) Des del meu punt de vista el problema del català tampoc es resol amb un Estat propi. Vivim en un mon globalitzat i els catalans hauràn de relacionar-se amb l'exterior per sobreviure. Aixo significa que el català ‘si o si’ serà complementat (i en alguns ambits suplantat) pel castellà, l'angles o el frances. Es el que passa al Luxemburg. Allà tenen la seva llengua propia pero nomes la parlen els habitants de soca-rel! La llengua preeminent és el frances (i l'alemany en menor grau).
(12) Los idiomas minoritarios como el Gallego, el Gaélico, el Catalán, etc… deberían estudiarse en sus respectivas cátedras en las universidades, pero a nivel práctico, no sirven para nada.
(13) la inmersion no es buena para el catalan… vivo en una zona castellanoparlante en un 99%. Solo hablo catalan con mis hijos y muy mal,y no lo escribo. Mis hijos no estan aprendiendo el catalan en la escuelas, solo a leer y escribir. Preferirira el modelo VAsco con ni<M;ños segregados y los que eligan opcion Catalana que hablen catalan en el patio, vigilados por los profesores si hace falta. Creo que es la unica manera. Mis hijos sabrán catalan, pero la presion es tan brutal que no lo van a utilizar nunca en su vida social. Cuando he oido a sus amigos bromear con el catalan y haciendo ver que lo hablan es de chiste hablar de exito de la inmersion. Cuando tengan hijos deberan elegir, y lamentablemente si su pareja es castellanoparlante tendran otro factor de presion. Por eso estoy a favor de la segregacion, se que suena raro y fatal pero es la unica opcion para los catalanes que viven en zonas super castellanas.
(14) Em [sic] castellà només es parla al tercer món, no serveix per a res. Dins les institucions internacionals no pinta res. El món passa del castellà. El que importa és saber angles i el català a casa, només parla majoritàriament el castellà la classe baixa.
(15) Perquè hauríem de fer oficial al castellà si no serveix per res no [sic] per comunicar-se a nivell global…
(16) Tret de les zones de parla castellana dins del País Valencià, algú sap distingir quan una persona que s'expressa en castellà és de Tortosa, Torroella de Mongrí, Gandia, Manacor o Olot?… La resposta és no. Per la senzilla raó que el castellà del nostre país és basa en l'estàndard i, la gent que segueix els mitjans, espanyols en el castellà oral des mitjants audivisuals i escrits, en definitiva no hi ha variants dialectals i locals. A banda dels que parlen en castellà amb accent extremeny, lleonès, murcià, peruà, bolivià, argentí, mexicà… per motius d'origen.
