Linguistic ‘mudes’ and the de-ethnicization of language choice in Catalonia

Joan Pujolar ^[1] ; Isaac Gonzàlez ^[1]
1. [1] Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
  
  Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
  
  Barcelona, España
Localización: International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, ISSN 1367-0050, Vol. 16, Nº. 2, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: CATALAN IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY), págs. 138-152
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- Catalan speakers have traditionally constructed the Catalan language as the main emblem of their identity even as migration filled the country with substantial numbers of speakers of Castilian. Although Catalan speakers have been bilingual in Catalan and Castilian for generations, sociolinguistic research has shown how speakers' bilingual practices have always been sensitive to keeping a clear sense of the boundaries between the languages and between their communities of speakers. The norms of language choice in everyday life have reflected this as Catalans have tended to use Catalan basically between those considered to ‘be’ Catalan. This article shows that this situation is gradually changing due to new conditions of mobility and access to language, that is, because most native speakers of Castilian are now bilingual and speak Catalan often in everyday life. On the basis of a corpus of 25 interviews and 15 group discussions conducted in Catalonia with a sample of young people of different profiles, we show that young people in Catalonia increasingly rely on prima facie linguistic behavior rather than ethnolinguistic classification to decide which language to speak in specific contexts, so that language use loses its earlier function of ethnolinguistic boundary maintenance.