Abstract
Amid the tensions created by the secession push in Catalonia (Spain), an important conflicting issue has been the “immersion linguistic educational system”, in which the Catalan language has precedence throughout all of the primary and secondary school curricula. Here, we present an analysis of a survey (n = 1002) addressing features of linguistic and political opinion profiles with reference to the mother language and feelings of national identity. The results show that the mother language is a factor that differentiated the participants in terms of common linguistic uses and opinions about the “immersion educational system”. These results were confirmed when segmenting respondents via their feelings of national self-identification. The most distinctive political opinions consisted of either asserting or denying the damage to social harmony produced by the secession campaign. Overall, the findings show that a major fraction of the Catalonian citizenry is subjected to an education system that does not meet their linguistic preferences. We discuss these findings, connecting them to an ethnolinguistic divide based mainly on mother language (Catalan vs. Spanish) and family origin—a complex frontier that has become the main factor determining alignment during the ongoing political conflict.
Highlights
Political tensions became unsettled in Catalonia (Spain) following the failed proclamation of independence on 27 October 2017
The sample was representative of all people over 18 years old living in Catalonia; the population here slightly differed from that found in ordinary political surveys, which are more focused on citizens with the right to vote
After obtaining distributions for the entire sample, we focused first on the variable “mother language” (Q3.02 of the survey, see the SI Appendix), as this allowed division of the population into four groups that were determined by the answers given: “Spanish”, “Catalan”, “Both”, and “Other”
Summary
Political tensions became unsettled in Catalonia (Spain) following the failed proclamation of independence on 27 October 2017. By applying multilevel regression analyses to the entire sample, Calero and Choi (2019) confirmed that “The students who use Spanish at home, being educated in a linguistic immersion regime in Catalan language, achieved inferior performances in the competencies evaluated by PISA than their classmates whose family language was Catalan, once controlled the rest of personal, socio-cultural and economic characteristics”. These antecedents explain why educational policies have recently become the focus of political debates both within the region and in the rest of Spain. As the secession campaign failed to achieve its ultimate goals while creating a political deadlock that has expanded the distance between secessionists and unionists, re-examining the differences concerning one of the most divisive points— preferences about the linguistic educational system and governance policies linked to it—might offer a potentially useful insight into the ongoing social division
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