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A B S T R A C TScholars have long noted that the imagination of a national public hinges on ideologies of standard language. This study uses ethnographic and media data from Catalonia to refl ect on this relationship, focusing on language professionals, the stewards of Catalan's standard register. The ideological portrait of Catalonia that emerges is one of a national public that is precarious because a standard register of the Catalan language is taken to be the whole language. It is argued that the imagined failings of a Catalan national public suggest conditions for the successful imagining of a national public more generally. In particular, the projection of a taken-for-granted national public appears to depend on a language imagined as standard and homogeneous when contrasted with other national languages but as internally variable when examined within the national context. At one taxonomic level, registers are erased in order for one register imagined as standard and homogeneous to count as the named language in contrast with other named national languages. At a lower recursive level, these registers must be imagined to exist in order for the language and its corresponding national public to be able to account for "everyone" in the projected national public. When these conditions are not met, as in the case of Catalonia, the national public is imagined as fragile. (Language ideology, standardization, publics, enregisterment) *

A B S T R A C TTransnational adoption is very difficult to talk about in Spain. For this reason, speakers use "communicative vigilance" to emphasize the appropriate ways to speak and particularly not to speak about it. Part of the difficulty, we demonstrate, is that adoption talk must mediate two contradictory understandings of talk and kinship: (1) a referentialist one in which adoption's undesirability must be first acknowledged and then masked and (2) a performative one in which talk can create a new world where transnational adoption is equivalent to and as valuable as traditional ways of creating families. Our findings have implications for both language-socialization studies and kinship studies.

We use the transnational adoption screening process as a lens for examining the co‐production of the home and the family in Spain. We propose the term ‘homework’ to describe the efforts of adoption applicants to perform an appropriate home and thus receive approval to adopt. The transnational adoption screening process is a key site of state‐individual interaction for communicating a set of classed, gendered norms. Through that process, participants ratify the authority of professionals to distinguish between adequate and inadequate ways to live. As such, our analysis demonstrates how moral authority is ascribed to material objects, as we document the strong link between ‘appropriate’ housing and growing families as an explanatory factor for the demographic effects of economic crises.

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This article describes a mechanism that permits speakers to draw on a heteroglossic repertoire of verbal forms while simultaneously reinforcing a boundary between their own language-based identity ("Catalan") and the state language (Castilian). In doing so, they opt for monoglot identities over heteroglossic ones, despite widespread heteroglossic practice. I show that Catalan speakers draw on "speech modeling" (Errington 1998) in ways that contain responsibility for their use of Castilian.

This article focuses on a protest banner campaign by a neighborhood association in an economically marginal neighborhood of Barcelona. Through the campaign, participants simultaneously coached neighborhood‐level addressees (including immigrants) in respectable behavior and projected an image of neighborhood respectability to the media and City Hall. Linguistic behaviors were central to this process, including code choice, linguistic normativity, and intertextuality. This article makes three theoretical points. First, while the literature on publics stresses a historical shift between embodied publicness and disembodied publicness, this article shows that embodied publicness and disembodied publicness are inextricably interrelated. Second, it demonstrates that neighborhoods are key sites for the articulation of these two forms of publicness, through the regimentation and projection of personal respectability. Third, it reveals the importance of a careful ethnography of writing, which allows the disambiguation of differently scaled sets of addressees. [neighborhoods, publics, respectability, immigration, Catalan]