Valencian sociolinguistics: Aracil, Ninyoles and the minority question

Abstract

AbstractThis text provides a review of the earlier and more influential works of Valencian sociolinguists Lluís Vicent Aracil and Rafael Lluís Ninyoles, which had a significant impact in the field from the 1960s to the 1980s, particularly in a number of European minoritized language communities and Latin America. I provide a summary account of their main theoretical innovations, embodied in concepts such as “language conflict,” “linguistic normalization,” “linguistic ideologies,” and “self‐hate”, and I follow up how these concepts were taken up by a number of social movements of linguistic revitalization. To do so, I begin with an account of the social and political conditions that the two authors confronted in their youth, namely the diglossia between Catalan and Spanish in their native Valencian Country, which at the time was under the rule of the dictator Francisco Franco in Spain. After the historical and theoretical appraisal, I follow up the trail of their ideas amongst sociolinguists and language activists in Occitania, Germany, Switzerland, Wales, Mexico, and the Andes, and I assess their impact in the ways in which linguistic minoritization has been constructed from an international perspective.