Language Policies in Contemporary Catalonia: A History of Linguistic and Political Ideas

Abstract

During the contemporary political period, the Catalan language has been shaped by many language policies carried out by actors as diverse as political institutions, cultural and political elites and speakers. For ages Catalan had lived in a diglossia but by the end of the 19th century the Catalan cultural elites shared the same objective: Catalan had to become a modern and official language in a plurilingual society. For several decades Catalan regained its place in important areas, but from the beginning of the Franco regime Castilian became, de facto, its sole language. Many Republicans had to flee and for Catalan exiles, their language became a shelter, a sort of territory of the sacred. During the dictatorship, Catalan society as a whole also had to decide upon a ‘linguistic policy’ of their own in the private and family sphere. From the 1960s Catalan culture began a deep process of modernization while Catalonia started to gain a new identity, that of a host country. The population of Catalonia increased notably, thanks in large part to immigration from the rest of Spain. A significant number of the “other Catalans”, somehow went on to make Catalan their own, at least passively. During the Spanish transition, there was a broad consensus that the new democracy needed to be constructed with a rather different attitude toward languages than that which had prevailed in the Franco period.