Balancing Language Planning and Language Rights: Catalonia's Uneasy Juggling Act

Abstract

In the 1980s language planning in Catalonia was carried out against a background of general consensus that major language recovery measures were needed in order to improve the linguistic and sociolinguistic situation of Catalan. Within Spain's new democratic system of autonomous regions Catalonia was keen to promote its own identity, especially through the use of Catalan. Demographic and social conditions favoured language reforms aimed at making Catalan the official language of the administration, promoting its use in public and, above all, in the education system. NonCatalans, too, supported these language policies as they generally felt free to use Castilian whenever and wherever they chose to. The focus of this article will be on the debate about language planning measures resulting from the most recent legislation. As will be shown, Catalonia seems to have reached a point where language recovery and language promotion come up against an evolving sociolinguistic situation marked by changed demographic conditions and social attitudes. The debate about the 1998 Law of Catalan demonstrates that popular consensus can no longer be relied upon as previously. Instead, conflicting views about language and identity, and nationalism and autonomy, power and minority rights are being voiced as the promotion of Catalan above Castilian Spanish has come to be seen by some as an infringement of the language rights of nonCatalans. This time public discourse has been in a much more polemical, bi-partisan and politicised manner. The question arises as to how far a region within a multilingual member state of the EU can go in promoting monolingual language policies.

Implicit language attitudes in Catalonia (Spain): investigating preferences for Catalan or Spanish using the Implicit Association Test

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“…As described by Lapointe et al (2005), because of the significant influence schools have as agents of socialization, governments in different parts of the world have enlarged their legal mandate in order to provide official or 'original' minority-language students the support needed for the development of a healthy ethno-linguistic identity which, in turn, supports successful academic achievement. Documented examples of such schools can be found on almost all continents such as in Catalonian (Hoffmann, 2000) and Basque-speaking areas (Lasagabaster, 2001) of Spain; in Shipibo schools (Tacelosky, 2001) in Peru; in Xhosa schools (De Klerk, 2000) in South Africa; in Maoris schools (Bishop and Glynn, 1998) in New Zealand and in minority setting French-language (Lapointe, 2003) and Native schools (Burnaby and MacKenzie, 2001) in Canada.…”

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