The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration

Abstract

AbstractThe Valencian autonomous community is a bilingual Spanish region where, alongside Spanish, a second language is officially recognized. Yet in many areas of the Valencian administration the language law is not implemented. This article explores the presence of the two official languages in the electronic communications of this region’s city and town council agencies. It combines a variety of methods (use of secondary data, content analysis and a variation of the “mystery shopping” technique) with statistical analysis of data merged into a unit matrix of 397 municipalities. A comparison of present web page data with data from 2005 to 2010 reveals that there has been advancement on the implementation of legal provisions: Spanish monolingual web pages are being replaced by bilingual portals. Evidence also shows a greater presence of Valencian in the official social media accounts and in telephone and email interactions. However, the use of Spanish on public administration websites is still prevalent. Likewise, this study confirms the significant power of the social use of language, influenced in part by the political party in power.