Linguistic ideology in Spains ivory tower: (Not) Analyzing Catalan Spanish

Abstract

This paper examines the Spanish of Catalonia and the treatment it has received in the professional literature on linguistics written in Spain in the late 20th century. I argue that hegemonic linguistic ideologies relating to notions of linguistic correctness (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) within Spanish academia have led to a lack of recognition of the Spanish of Catalonia as a legitimate dialect of Spanish. Such language ideologies are revealed through discourse analysis of several influential academic texts in Spanish linguistics of the late 20th century. Works from the Spanish linguistics 'canon' (such as Zamora Vicente 1989) and the few investigations actually written in Spain about the Spanish of Catalonia (such as Badia 1980) are considered in light of the cultural, political, linguistic, and geographic contexts in which they were written. In the late 20th century, Spanish academics repeatedly analyzed the stereotypical Spanish of Catalonia in terms of linguistic interference and prescriptive errors. In addition to consideration of the ideologies guiding such research, my paper presents an alternative analysis in which the innovative linguistic forms that actually appear in an oral corpus of Spanish spoken in Barcelona are seen not as deviant but rather as potential carriers of sociolinguistic and cultural significance. I conclude that for contact dialects of Spanish associated with ethnic minorities to be scientifically investigated in Spain, they must first be recognized as legitimate in the academic literature. Such recognition depends on a reinterpretation of the body of doctrine that continues to guide academic discourse in Spain and the devices that maintain its operation. The professional 'overlooking' of the Spanish of Catalonia in descriptions of Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in Spain continues to be a matter of power relations and larger socioeconomic, sociohistoric, and sociopolitical processes.