Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell

Yates, Alan

doi:10.1080/13520529809615518

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Rather, it is that, prior to the 2006 Statute of Autonomy, the promotion of Catalan did not extend to the active recognition of other minority languages and cultures within Catalonia, "where numbers warrant." In this respect, there have been long-settled communities of Roma in Catalonia and, more recent migrants from North Africa (Yates 1998;Hoffmann 1999;Pujolar 2007). These groups' languages and cultures were almost entirely ignored in the language debates of the 1980s and 1990s and attendant institutional support-for example, via first language education-remains extremely limited (Tarrow 1992).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Language Rights: The “Cinderella” Human Right

May

2011

Journal of Human Rights

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In the last 60 years, we have seen the growing development and articulation of human rights, particularly within international law and within and across supranational organizations. However, in that period, the right to maintain one's language(s), without discrimination, remains peculiarly underrepresented and/or problematized as a key human right. This is primarily because the recognition of language rights presupposes recognizing the importance of wider group memberships and social contexts; conceptions that ostensibly militate against the primacy of individual rights in the post-Second World War era. Drawing on theoretical debates in political theory and international law, as well as the substantive empirical example of Catalonia, this article argues that language rights can and should be recognized as an important human right.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Language Rights: The “Cinderella” Human Right

May

2011

Journal of Human Rights

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“…Catalonia, an autonomous region in North-Eastern Spain with more than seven million people, has two official languages, Catalan and Spanish. The choice of only Catalan as the LoLT came about after 1983 as a controversial way of integrating a large portion of the population which had arrived from other parts of Spain in successive immigration waves (Yates 1998). In the school system, the tensions between the two official languages in the country have mostly been represented by the symbolic distance between the Catalan 'native' people and those Catalan people whose parents are Spanish and were born outside Catalonia.…”

Section: The Political Role and Use Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Language identities in students’ writings about group work in their mathematics classroom

Planas

2011

Language and Education

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In this article, I explore language identities and processes of negotiation concerning parts of these identities as seen by a group of students from a bilingual mathematics classroom. A collection of 10 students' individual writings on the questions 'What language do you use during group work in your mathematics class and why?' is examined from a sociopolitical perspective. My data emphasize the importance of addressing the complexity of the identity work that goes on in the students' texts. Through their writings and despite the perception of limits, students negotiate complementary language identities that are contrary to the established monolingual ideologies in the research context. Students show distinct degrees of agency in their responses as they attempt to produce language identities that are much more complex than those politically ascribed to them.

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

Hoffmann¹

2000

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

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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.

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Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Language Rights: The “Cinderella” Human Right

Language Rights: The “Cinderella” Human Right

Language identities in students’ writings about group work in their mathematics classroom

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

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