Introduction
In many parts of the world, traditional communities of minority language speakers are being eroded as a consequence of increased urbanization and economic modernization. Language endangerment is frequently indexed by a declining number of native speakers and a break in intergenerational transmission of the language in the home and community. At the same time, however, new speakers of minority languages are emerging as a result of community efforts and favorable language policies, prompting some individuals whose families stopped speaking the language in previous generations to (re)learn and use it (Costa Reference Costa2010; Grinevald & Bert Reference Grinevald, Bert, Austin and Sallabank2011). This has led to the emergence of a profile of speakers that falls outside that of the so-called traditional heartland areas, frequently in terms of their urban middle-class status and use of a standardized variety of the language (O'Rourke & Ramallo Reference O'Rourke and Ramallo2011; Pusch & Kabatek Reference Pusch, Kabatek, Kortmann and van der Auwera2011). In minority-language contexts the emergence of new speakers can generate tensions over ownership and legitimate rights to the language. These tensions can sometimes lead to unintended consequences on the part of revitalization agendas and can alienate speakers in different ways. This article brings these issues into focus in the case of Galician, in the northwestern part of Spain where language policy changes since the 1980s have extended its use into new social spaces and generated new profiles of speakers.
A variety of terms can be found in the literature to describe the new speaker phenomenon including nonnative speaker, neospeaker, second language speaker, L2, second language learner, and adult learner. Robert (Reference Robert2009) makes explicit uses of the label “New speaker” to refer to second-language speakers of Welsh produced through Welsh-medium education. Woolard (Reference Woolard2011:62) talks about “New Catalans” in reference to second language speakers of Catalan who actively use the language albeit through a “bilingual interactional personae.” “Neo-Breton” is used to describe a similar type of profile (Hornsby Reference Hornsby2008; Timm Reference Timm, Ball and Müller2010). The idea of new speakerness in minority-language contexts can include a continuum of speaker types, ranging from second language learners with limited competence in and use of the language (which Grinevald & Bert (Reference Grinevald, Bert, Austin and Sallabank2011) classify specifically as “learners of endangered languages”), right up to expert L2 users, whose level of proficiency in the language is such that they can “pass” (Piller Reference Piller2002) as so-called native speakers.
In the particular case of Galician, neofalante ‘new speaker’ is used both as a folk and academic concept to describe speakers who are brought up speaking Spanish, but who at some stage in their lives (usually adolescence or early adulthood) “become” Galician speakers. Neofalantes tend to share a number of sociodemographic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural characteristics that correspond to a younger, middle-class and urban-based profile. This profile of speaker is very much the product of language revitalization policies in place since the 1980s following Spain's transition to democracy and the inclusion of Galician in domains of use from which it was previously absent including education and public administration. New speaker profiles are in clear contrast to the social characteristics of traditional native speakers of Galician who make up an aging rural population with little or no formal training in the language. New speakers tend to be strongly committed to the revitalization of the language and decisions to become a Galician speaker can sometimes be politically motivated (Ramallo Reference Ramallo, Valdivia, Rodríguez and Quintela2010). In some cases this can lead neofalantes to “abandon” Spanish altogether, adopting somewhat similar linguistic practices to the “Catalan converts” described by Woolard (Reference Woolard1989, Reference Woolard2011) in the context of one of Spain's other minority languages. This process, of what can be termed majority-language displacement, is made possible by the closeness in linguistic terms between Galician and its contact language, Spanish, where a high level of mutual intelligibility exists between the two. At the same time, however, linguistic proximity heightens tensions around the need to maintain difference, driven by fears about crossing too far over the language divide and the blurring of linguistic boundaries. These fears can be set against a background in which such blurring has in the past justified the sociopolitically motivated process of “dialectalization” (Kloss Reference Kloss1967), which at various moments in its sociolinguistic history relegated Galician to the status of a substandard variety of Spanish (Monteagudo Reference Monteagudo1999). The tensions surrounding authenticity and identity that this can create, resonate with similar scenarios in other parts of the world, and represent what Jaffe refers to as:
a fundamental epistemological quandary: how to assert the value of mixed or plural identities in “minority” societies in which the attempt to escape relations of dominance places a high premium on declarations of absolute difference and clear-cut boundaries. (Jaffe Reference Jaffe1993:101)
This of course also fits with a larger epistemological quandary about discourses of language endangerment and the ways in which languages more generally are constructed as autonomous wholes and as countable and separable entities (Duchêne & Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2007). The questioning of these broader assumptions in turn prompts the disinvention and reconstruction of the way we think about language and languages (Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007). It thus involves a critique of many of the concepts in our field and the generation of a new metadiscourse that prioritizes communities of practices over language (see Pennycook Reference Pennycook1994, Reference Pennycook2007; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010; Martin-Jones, Blackledge, & Creese Reference Martin-Jones, Blackledge, Creese, Martin-Jones, Blackledge and Creese2012). This prompts us to turn our attention to the in-between spaces that such practices generate but that have often been ignored in linguistic and sociolinguistic discussion. This explains why new speaker profiles have not received the same attention as native speakers who are often seen to represent users of real and authentic language and as such making them in some way more worthy of investigation. While in more recent years its centrality has been challenged (see e.g. Rampton Reference Rampton1990; Phillipson Reference Phillipson1992; Firth & Wagner Reference Firth and Wagner1997; Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah1999; Cook Reference Cook1999; Davies Reference Davies2003; Jenkins Reference Jenkins2006; Doerr Reference Doerr2009; Bonfiglio Reference Bonfiglio2010), the ideal of the native speaker has remained remarkably consistent within the discipline (Coulmas Reference Coulmas1981), including the related fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In these latter subfields, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists working on minority language groups have often tended to focus on those communicative practices believed to be the most traditional and authentic, thus designating them (albeit implicitly perhaps) as legitimate representatives of a given community (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2003:400).
As Fishman (Reference Fishman1972:69) points out, the image of the noble and uncontaminated peasant, who had kept the language pure and intact, tended to provide an important source of nationalist language planning in European ethnocultural movements. This imagery is in turn tied up with anthropologically romantic notions around the ideal of the native speaker whose origins can be traced to a bounded, homogenous speech community within a particular territory and historic past. As Makoni & Pennycook (Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007) emphasize, the very concept of language itself, and “metadiscursive regimes” used to describe languages, are firmly located in these Western linguistic and cultural suppositions in which the notions of linguistic territorialization are embedded, linking language to geographical space. These deeply engrained ideologies frequently became the core of revitalization agendas in minority-language contexts, linking the native speaker to authenticity and nonnative forms with artificiality and hybridity. Thus as Woolard (Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998:62) points out, the very movements that set out to save minority languages are ironically structured around the same received notions of languages that led to their oppression and/or suppression in the first place.
As an ideological construct, authenticity, along with its opposite value, anonymity, often arise in discussions of the value of language in modern western societies (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Woolard1995). According to Woolard (Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008:304):
The ideology of Authenticity locates the value of a language in its relationship to a particular community. To be considered authentic, a speech variety must be very much “from somewhere” in speakers' consciousness, and thus its meaning is profoundly local. If such social and territorial roots are not discernable, a linguistic variety lacks value in this system.
Buchotlz (Reference Bucholtz2003) and Bucholtz & Hall (Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Duranti2004) distinguish between an ideology of authenticity and what they term authentication, emphasizing the idea that authenticity is not a given in social life but is instead achieved and instantiated through the assertion of one's own or another's identity as genuine or credible (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2003:408). Authenticity and the link to identity can in turn constrain the acquisition and use of a minority language as a second language by a larger population (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008:315), who may see themselves at risk of not sounding sufficiently natural or real compared with native speakers. Traditional native speakers may thus establish a social closure that functions as an identity control mechanism, demarcating their privileged position as authentic speakers. This mechanism can, according to McEwan-Fujita (Reference McEwan-Fujita2010:29), often lead to frustration on the part of newcomers to the language, sometimes deterring them from using it altogether (O'Rourke Reference O'Rourke2011a). Insofar as languages are connected to symbolic power (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1982), as Pujolar (Reference Pujolar, Duchêne and Heller2007:121) suggests, the lack of “nativeness” associated with new types of speakers can also be used to deny them access to certain linguistic markets, which in turn can have important consequences for their social and economic prospects.
If the value of authenticity is a marker of being “from somewhere,” then the value of anonymity represents a “view from nowhere” (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008:308). In other words, a language has the value of being socially neutral, universally available and natural, making it essentially anonymous. In language revitalization contexts, the inclusion of a minority language in domains and spaces from which it was previously absent can be seen as an attempt to give it the same value of anonymity as a public language. The development of a standardized form also builds on such an attempt. Galician, like Spain's other minority languages including Basque and Catalan, has benefited from major policy changes coinciding with Spain's transition to democracy in the 1970s. The development of galego normativo ‘Standard Galician’ was driven by its newly ascribed role since 1981 as a national and co-official language (with Spanish) in Galicia (Beswick Reference Beswick2007). Standard Galician is described as polydialectal in that it is not seen to derive from any one single variety (Monteagudo Reference Monteagudo, Álvarez and Monteagudo2004:415). Arguably, therefore, its anonymity stems from the absence of traces of any recognizable local variety.
The standard variety also represents a powerful filter for social mobility, presenting a challenge to the authority of traditional native speakers whose language variety is doubly stigmatized—first, by its historically subordinate position in socioeconomic and political terms alongside Spanish, and second, by its contemporary status alongside Standard Galician. New speakers of Galician have access to the forms of language that have come to be valued in a postrevitalization linguistic market, linked to formal domains of use such as education, the public administration, and media. As such, they cannot be described as minority speakers per se, where social class becomes more important in determining linguistic authority than nativeness (Frekko Reference Frekko and Doerr2009).
Failure to penetrate all spheres of public activity, however, can prevent a minority language such as Galician from gaining what Woolard (Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008) describes as the anonymous invisibility of “just talk” that characterizes a public language. Instead, it can in fact become highly visible and represent marked linguistic behavior used to index a particular stance, ideological or otherwise (Jaffe Reference Jaffe2009). In urban contexts, despite more favorable support for Galician at an institutional level, opportunities to use the language continue to be limited. New speakers' use of Galician in urban spaces is often seen as breaking long established social norms. While not explicitly negative, certain social representations exist that link the use of the language, and therefore new speakers, with the political ideology of Galician nationalism (Iglesias & Ramallo Reference Iglesias and Ramallo2003; O'Rourke Reference O'Rourke2011b). Although as Milroy (Reference Milroy2001:535) highlights, “an extremely important effect of standardization has been the development of consciousness among speakers of a ‘correct’, or canonical, form of language,” the quest for authenticity, however, can downplay the value of linguistic correctness. Despite thirty years of institutional standardization, half of all Galicians see the standard variety as artificial, including a younger generation with highest levels of exposure through the education system (Observatorio da Cultura Galega 2011).
The spread of Galician outside of traditional Galician-speaking strongholds and into spaces previously dominated by Spanish can complicate the traditional ideology about sociolinguistic authenticity and ownership. It also raises questions about who become the legitimate speakers, who is given linguistic authority, and the potential tensions this can lead to between different speakers of Galician, new and old, in attempts to control the production and distribution of a new set of linguistic resources. Questions of legitimacy, access, and ownership therefore become pertinent in struggles to control and derive profit from a new set of linguistic resources on emerging language markets (Heller Reference Heller2011). In the remainder of the article, we examine some of these tensions, focusing specifically on how they are perceived and constructed by a younger generation of Galician speakers. The focus of our account is to explore the tensions surrounding authenticity and identity that emerge in this new sociolinguistic context.
Methodology
To begin to explore these tensions, we analyzed data emerging from three discussion groups involving sixteen young Galician speakers. Participants ranged in age between eighteen and twenty-five years old and were either currently students at the university or recent graduates. Four of the participants were native speakers (Group 1) and the remaining twelve had new speaker profiles (Groups 2 and 3). Both new-speaker and native-speaker groups were exposed to an officially bilingual educational system, in place since the 1980s, in which at least one third of the curriculum was through the medium of Galician. Their sociolinguistic histories, however, differ in a number of important ways. Native speaker participants, for example, reported active use of Galician in the home from early childhood. New speakers, in comparison, reported using Spanish with family and friends for at least the first fifteen years of their lives. Although more than half reported passive exposure to Galician in the home and community and came from homes in which parents or grandparents spoke Galician amongst themselves, Spanish was the language used when speaking to their children, thus displaying sociolinguistic behavior that is often characteristic of a prelanguage revitalization generation in Galicia and for whom Spanish continues to be seen as a more valued linguistic resource.
For half of the new speakers in the study, early adolescence constituted a critical social juncture, which led them to change their sociolinguistic behaviour as Spanish speakers and to become predominantly Galician speakers. For the other half, that turning point was more recent and was marked by entrance to higher education. Similar to what Woolard (Reference Woolard2011:262) found in the case of Catalan, for new speakers of Galician in the study, these key life-stages seemed to constitute critical points in time, which “led them to mobilize linguistic resources that had been at least theoretically available to them earlier” (ibid.) through their exposure to the language in the education system and, in the majority of cases also, through passive exposure to the language in the home or community. However, as our discussion shows, this transition did not seem to be a smooth one. The linguistic resources available to these new speakers were not always the right ones, and the contexts in which they used the language were frequently contested (at least in the eyes of new speakers themselves) and needed to be negotiated with native speakers, Spanish speakers, and even with other fellow new speakers. The process of sociolinguistic transformation was often seen as a difficult process and one that required a heightened sense of awareness about their own sociolinguistic realities as well a strong ideological commitment to becoming Galician speakers. Similar to what Trosset (Reference Trosset1986) talks about in the case of Welsh, new speakers are forced to engage in what can sometimes be a painful process of breaking down an old social identity and establishing a new one.
The three discussion groups were convened by one of the researchers (identified as ‘F’ in the transcribed data), and a series of prompt questions were prepared in advance and used to stimulate the discussion. Participants were told that we were interested in finding out about their experiences as Galician speakers, their use of the language, what other people thought about their linguistic behavior, and their views on the Galician language more generally. The discussion groups were conducted through the medium of Galician and each lasted between sixty and ninety minutes. These were recorded with prior consent of participants and later transcribed. The discourses from the transcriptions were analyzed and the salient themes explored. We were particularly interested in understanding how these new speakers perceived themselves as a social and linguistic group and whether or not they were constructing a collective narrative about what it means to be a new speaker of Galician. We were, however, also interested in how new speakers were perceived and constructed from the optic of native speakers and to what extent a native-nonnative dichotomy was maintained (if at all), through references to each other as different sociolinguistic groups. In the following sections, we present extracts that highlight some of these tensions, focusing specifically on how ideologies of authenticity and anonymity are represented in the data.
The excerpts represented below are a literal transcription of each speaker's language variety. No attempt was made to “improve” the linguistic quality of their interventions. In some cases, the Galician used by the speaker shows a high degree of interference from Spanish, indicated with the use of italics in the examples.
Analysis of the data
Who is the authentic speaker?
Linguistic authenticity and the subsequent linguistic insecurity experienced by new speakers was a reoccurring theme in the data. In example (1), new speakers describe their own Galician as ‘imperfect’ (defectuosa) and despite efforts to improve it and to ‘speak better’ (falar mellor) by adapting to a more local dialectal variety, their Galician remains ‘inauthentic’ (inauténtico). In this example, Manuel uses rather specialized linguistic terminology (perhaps reflecting his academic training as a student of Galician Philology) to describe what he perceives as his variety-free and nonlocalized way of speaking. His Galician is neither diatópica ‘diatopic’ (referring to variation according to place or geographical location), nor diafásica ‘diaphasic’ (referring to stylistic variation), he says. The perceived lack of authenticity ascribed to new speakers' Galician also stems from the fact that, in difference to ‘people who have always spoken it’ (que o falou sempre), who have ‘their own variety’ (a súa variedade propia) and who use ‘vernacular Galician’ (galego vernáculo), new speakers acquired it at school. This, in their eyes, lessens its value. They describe their Galician as ‘school Galician’ (galego da escola) and ‘book Galician’ (galego de libro), characteristics that new speakers wish to hide in an effort to disguise their new-speaker identity.
(1) Group 2: New speakersFootnote 1
Paradoxically, however, as can be seen in (2), new speakers get a sense that their Galician is in fact highly valued by traditional native speakers and therefore the very group of speakers they wish to emulate. In this extract, Andrea recalls his grandmother's reluctance to have him record her speaking as part of a sociolinguistic project he was doing for class. This reluctance was based on her claim that ‘I don't know how to speak’ (non sei falar), so replicating similar feelings of linguistic insecurity experienced by new speakers in example (1). Such feelings reflect prejudicial beliefs among an older generation of Galician speakers about the inadequacies of their own way of speaking compared with Standard Galician. As Andrea points out, people like his grandmother listen to the ‘news’ (telexornal) on Galician television, leading them to downgrade their way of speaking in comparison with this new institutional model. This in turn can be seen to alienate older speakers (Roseman Reference Roseman1995), prompting them to give up ownership of the language and to pass it over to those who speak Standard Galician, which in their eyes is “better” Galician. In our example here, ownership is transferred to Andrea, who as a student of Galician Philology and therefore, a highly educated speaker of Standard Galician, is likely to be seen in his grandmother's eyes as the authoritative speaker. So here, social class becomes more important in determining linguistic authority than nativeness. Andrea, however, rejects this status, insisting that it is his grandmother who speaks ‘better Galician’ (mellor galego), not he. The authentication of his grandmother's way of speaking may also reflect a broader ideology of authenticity acquired through his formal training as a Galician philologist. Indeed, the very fact that he decided to focus his project on his grandmother, and therefore on a traditional native speaker, may in itself be significant and reflect the more widely held discourse in the field about who counts as a real speaker.
(2) Group 2: New speakers
The blurring of language boundaries
While Standard Galician (and therefore new-speaker varieties), are seen to be idealized by older speakers, a younger generation of native speakers show a somewhat different trend and instead take on a policing role. In example (3), Xabier explicitly states that the Galician spoken by new speakers is of low quality. He criticizes it for being too close to Spanish, both in terms of structure and lexicon. He talks about the ‘weight’ (lastre) of Spanish on the way new speakers use Galician, rendering it unnatural and making it easy to tell whether or not someone is a new speaker, that is, someone for whom ‘it is perfectly noticeable’ (que lle note perfectamente) that he or she is a new speaker. The blurring of linguistic boundaries causes some tension as new speakers are seen to take on an identity that is not seen to be really theirs, despite, as we saw in example (1), their attempts to adopt what they perceive as more authentic forms of language. Therefore, establishing boundaries between Galician and Spanish becomes a key point of contention, and the more hybridized forms of language characteristic of many new speakers are delegitimized.
(3) Group 1: Native speakers
New speakers, however, were not unaware of the criticisms levied on them by their native-speaking peers and reject the linguistic policing in which they are perceived to engage through their ‘continuous correcting’ (corrección continua) and ‘big brother’ (gran hermano) surveillance of new speakers' use of Galician. While new speakers were criticized for their use of Spanish-sounding words when speaking Galician in example (3), in example (4) they question apparent concessions that are made for native speakers in terms of linguistic correctness. In this example, Sandra feels sanctioned for using Spanish-sounding words, such as jueves ‘Thursday,’ a popular Galician form borrowed from Spanish. This is a word that nonetheless continues to be used by many older native speakers. This linguistic practice, according to new speakers, goes unnoticed. New speakers, by contrast, are expected to use the standardized equivalent of the word xoves. Attempts by Galician speakers to adopt the standard form for words like jueves and the anxieties and tensions this seems to cause, is a feature of what Álvarez-Cáccamo (Reference Álvarez-Cáccamo1993:9) defines as “other-language (or other-style) repair.” The standardization of Galician since the 1980s has attempted to remove such popular Galician forms in an attempt to demarcate linguistic boundaries with Spanish. The implication therefore in this example is that the authority awarded to the traditional native speaker is a given, while that of the new speaker is not.
(4) Group 2: New speakers
Who owns Galician?
The qualities of nativeness are therefore seen to be inherent in the traditional Galician speaker, thus making it difficult, if not impossible for the new speaker to achieve such authenticity. In Xabier's eyes (example (5)) only people who have spoken Galician ‘all their lives’ (o de toda a vida) can be considered good speakers. The implication here is that to speak good Galician is not something that can be learned. It can only be acquired biologically. This is in turn linked to place of origin, being from the ‘village’ (aldea), associating linguistic authenticity with a very localized geographical space. Here the language ‘was never lost’ (non se perdeu) and can thus be traced historically through an unbroken lineage. There is thus a clear reification of the traditional native speaker, where the language is seen to have survived in its purest and most uncontaminated form, built around the nostalgia for the past and the mythification of rural Galicia. These ideologies produce what Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2010:140) refers to as a vision of the local as static, traditional, and immobile as opposed to dynamic, about movement, and fluid. New speakers are seen to lack this sense of historicity. They are described as having no ‘real point of reference’ (un referente real), thus denying them the authenticity attributed to traditional native speakers, whose way of speaking is anchored in a specific place, making it essentially local. While there was a sense, as we saw in example (2), that traditional native speakers have partly given up claims to ownership of the language to the new speaker, Xabier's comments in (5) suggest that a younger generation of native speakers may be less willing to do so. According to Xabier, ‘Galician belongs more to Galicians who have always spoken it’ (o galego é máis dos galegos que falan de sempre), which includes Xabier himself as someone who, unlike his new-speaker peers, was brought up speaking the language in the home.
(5) Group 1: Native speakers
New speakers express the view that their native-speaking peers do not appreciate the efforts required to become speakers of a language in which they were not brought up speaking. Sandra, for example, in example (6) talks about ‘a certain intolerance’ (un certo rexeitamento) among mother-tongue speakers of Galician, leading them to use what are seen as derogatory and disauthenticating labels such as ‘urban Galician’ (falante urbano) and ‘speaker of book Galician’ (falante de libro) to describe new speakers' Galician. These are labels that, of course, as we saw in (1) would also seem to have been internalized by new speakers themselves and are used in self-descriptions of their own Galician. In conversational interaction with native speakers, new speakers (example (6)) are made to feel that their Galician is not good enough. Based on such criticisms, new speakers claim that they are sometimes more at ease using Galician with Spanish speakers with a passive competence in Galician than with Galician speakers. In the presence of non(active) speakers, new speakers position themselves as language experts and the fear of error and linguistic insecurity is reduced.
(6) Group 2: New speakers
New speakers and marked behavior
While closeness in linguistic terms between Galician and Spanish can lead to tensions between new and native speakers around questions of authenticity and identity, such closeness allows new speakers to adopt the bilingual norm and to continue to speak Galician even if their interlocutor uses Spanish. However, similar to what Jaffe (Reference Jaffe1999) found in the case of Corsican, by not adapting to the language of their Spanish-speaking interlocutors, new speakers' linguistic behavior can be interpreted negatively under the accommodation norm. This can sometimes mark new speakers' behavior as deviant or out of place.
Institutional support for Galician since the 1980s, promoting its inclusion in key public domains, means that the language now has a greater public presence. However, in spite of this, urban contexts continue to be predominantly Spanish-speaking spaces and Spanish is often perceived as the more acceptable and unmarked linguistic and social norm. New speakers' use of Galician in urban spaces can thus be seen to break this long established social norm. In the discussion groups, new speakers talked about the difficulties either they or their friends had experienced in changing their linguistic behavior and in becoming Galician speakers. In (7), Mónica talks about what she rather dramatically describes as the ‘absolutely poisonous’ (absolutamente virulenta) reaction experienced by other new-speaker friends of hers and the need they felt to justify their linguistic behavior. This took the form of accusing questions and remarks such as ‘what the hell are you doing?’ (¿ahora de qué vas?) and ‘you are showing off’ (te haces la interesante). Even when reactions are not explicitly negative, Mónica is critical of the condescending undertones inherent in comments such as ‘how nice, you have started speaking Galician’ (ai que ben, empezache a falar galego), which serves to single out her use of Galician as in some way “cute.” This singling out creates a ‘feeling of abnormality’ (sensación de anormalidade) about her use of Galician, marking it as ‘special’ (especial) and in doing so denying it the invisibility and anonymity of “just talk” (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008).
(7) Group 3: New speakers
In a context in which many of their peers speak Spanish, new speakers' use of Galician is thus rendered highly visible and their use of standard Galician fails to compete with the values of anonymity awarded to the other public language—Spanish. Use of Galician in urban contexts also indexes a certain political position and support for Galician nationalism, leading to what Jaffe (Reference Jaffe1999:246), in her discussion of Corsican, describes as an “overdramatization and overpolitization of communicative expressive activity.” Thus, new speakers can find themselves being labelled left wing Galician nationalist and supporters of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG). This perception has of course been fed by left-wing nationalists themselves, with an essentialist discourse, specifically centered on language as a symbol of national identity, thus making Galician a central component to their political ideology. While all new speakers in the study pointed to a strong ideological commitment to the language, they were careful, however, to distance themselves from the politics of Galician nationalism. Only one person in the study said that changes in his linguistic behavior were politically motivated. However, even in his case, he made is clear that his use of Galician was no longer linked to an expression of Galician nationalism. Nevertheless, the stereotype exists and for urban Spanish-speaking groups, new speakers' switches to Galician can have a very clear meaning—they are language activists and supporters of Galician nationalism (O'Rourke Reference O'Rourke2011b:141). As example (8) illustrates, this is a stereotype of which new speakers are acutely aware.
(8) Group 3: New speakers
New-speaker demands for recognition
While new speakers are aware that the Galician they speak is contested and marked, as we can see in (9), they nonetheless demand recognition as a social and linguistic group. Although they aspire to the model of the traditional native speaker, they are acutely aware that this generation of speakers is dying out. In this context, new speakers see themselves as playing an important role in ensuring the future survival of the language. Such a role thus acts as a type of self-justification on their part, as a raison d'être and as a means of legitimizing their existence as Galician speakers. Marcelo describes new speakers as ‘fundamental’ (fundamentais) to the future of the language, emphasizing the ‘commitment’ (compromiso) involved in becoming a Galician speaker and the ‘desire to want to speak it’ (un desexo de querer falar). This can be seen to be something that differentiates them from traditional native speakers who are speakers “by necessity” (Bouzada-Fernández Reference Bouzada-Fernández2003) and not because of any ideological positioning, as is the case of new speakers. Without new speakers and support for them, Marcelo claims that languages will die out, something that in his view is even more relevant to a language like Galician.
(9) Group 3: New speakers
New speakers as linguistic adjudicators
As well as mediating their linguistic space between native speakers of Galician and Spanish speakers, new speakers also identified certain underlying tensions within new speaker groups (see example (10)). In fact, new speakers claimed that most linguistic sanctioning did not come from native speakers per se but instead from other new speakers who demand a very high quality and level of linguistic correctness. This would seem to suggest a new phase in the process of linguistic revitalization in the Galician sociolinguistic context. As a result of three decades of supportive language policy developments for Galician, linguistic competence across the population has increased, particularly among the younger generation through their exposure to the language in the education system. The older stigmas, which were traditionally associated with the language such as poverty and rurality, have by and large disappeared, although, as we have seen, these are at the same time being replaced by newer ones linked to Galician nationalism. In this new context, there is a suggestion that the need to control the linguistic quality of urban Galician (characteristic of new speakers) may be emerging (Sanmartín Rei Reference Sanmartín Rei2009; Freixeiro Mato Reference Freixeiro Mato2010) and certain varieties of an emerging urban variety of Galician are being given more legitimacy than others. There is therefore a move away from a simple native-nonnative dichotomy or a Galician versus Spanish speaker struggle to a more complex spectrum of speaker types with a new set of tensions. New speakers' sanctioning and policing of each other through purist linguistic attitudes also point to a strongly essentialist bias about language, where clear linguistic boundaries need to be adhered to.
(10) Group 2: New speakers
Conclusions
While in many indigenous minority-language situations similar to that of Galician where traditional native-speaker communities are in decline, a new profile of speaker is emerging in the context of revitalization policies. The spread of Galician outside of traditional Galician-speaking strongholds and into spaces previously dominated by Spanish has complicated the traditional ideology about sociolinguistic authenticity and ownership. It has also raised questions about who are now the legitimate speakers of Galician, who are awarded most authority, and the tensions these changes have generated in a contemporary Galician context.
In our discussions with these young Galicians, an ideology of authenticity was produced by both new and native speakers alike. By idealizing the traditional native speaker, they can in many ways be seen to reconstruct an ethnocultural discourse in which the qualities of nativeness are highly valued. While new speakers demand recognition as a sociolinguistic group, they nonetheless show a sense of insecurity in demanding such claims, downgrading their own linguistic ability and thus shying away from existing as real or legitimate speakers. For most of them, their role model is the traditional native speaker, who is awarded legitimacy because of what is perceived as an innate ability to speak the language, characteristics associated with historical and biological links with the language. These are links that new speakers did not have and that were used to deny them access to this social world. Their native-speaking peers expressed a similar set of beliefs. For them, however, their authentication of the traditional native speaker allows them to claim certain ownership over the language and use this as a means of contesting new speakers' claim to linguistic space in a contemporary Galician context.
In the eyes of new speakers and younger native speakers alike, new speaker varieties (which are essentially equated to Standard Galician) are considered inauthentic because they are seen to be geographically and linguistically removed from what is an authentic way of speaking. In general, to be considered authentic, a speech variety needs to be “from somewhere” in speakers' consciousness, making its meaning profoundly local (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008). New speaker varieties are seen to be from nowhere, thus moving them closer to the value of anonymity in Galician's new guise as a public language and through its standardized form. However, this value is diluted by the fact that Spanish continues to be the more widely used language in urban contexts and continues to be the language of everyday interaction. Neither is the language socially neutral in that its use indexes a certain stance and positioning. New speakers' use of standard Galician in an urban context therefore fails to gain them the anonymity and invisibility that is associated with speaking a public language such as Spanish. Instead, their linguistic practices become highly visible and through their use of Galician are seen either as deviant or out of place. While on the one hand, new speakers reject this heightened visibility, at the same time, they want to position themselves as different. Through their use of Galician, they are making a statement about their ideological commitment to the language, something that they believe is commendable and that should be recognized. It may therefore be the case that while new speakers' way of speaking is devalued because it fails to comply with the values of an authentic (Galician) collectivity, in the context of late modernity it may symbolize an authentic individuality. Decisions to speak Galician by these new speakers may represent a distinctive way of expressing what Giddens (Reference Giddens1991) terms an individualized identity.
Appendix: Transcription conventions
- […]
material omitted
- …
perceivable pause
