European linguistic policies in a changing cultural
environment
Miquel Strubell
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 2000
Contents
1. The role of language in identity
1.1 Language and communication
1.3 Research on language and identity: perceived status
1.4 Research on language and identity: perceived solidarity
2. Language policies in the European Union
2.2 Constraints on the free market economy
2.3 Building “national” economies
2.4 Language decisions in the European Union
3.1. The linguistic consequences of integration in the building of nation-States
Good morning. Up to now, the papers and discussion in this seminar have not centred on language as an issue. Language and linguistic policies will be the focus of the papers today. Naturally enough, we cannot talk about policies without first considering language and its role in society. Or, to be more exact since we are talking about multicultural environments, we have to consider languages and their role in society.
1. The role of language in identity
1.1 Language and communication
Some people - I have a suspicion that they are generally monolingual speakers of the larger languages - tend to look at language simply as a neutral tool of communication. No-one could deny that this is the primary function of language, to be true. It is a tautology. When we say the word "communication" we immediately think of language.
This is especially clear when we are not speaking our own language, but another. The story is told of a Catalan tourist who was hitch-hiking his way round Israel. He was picked up by someone driving an Israeli car, but their efforts to converse were thwarted by the fact that neither of them spoke much English and could hardly understand the other. After communicating as much as they could, the topics were really limited. The hitch-hiker asked what sort of car they were driving in, and the driver replied that he didn't know: it was a hire car. Eventually, as you can probably guess, they discovered that they were from neighbouring towns in Catalonia, and both were travelling around Israel on holiday. At that point, of course, they turned to Catalan and ceased to have communication problems!
The use of a second language is often, therefore, "neutral", in the sense of not being related to one's identity. But this is not always the case, of course. In the years after Franco won the Civil War in Spain in 1939, abolished the autonomy of Catalonia, and established Spanish as the only official language, the campaigns to eliminate Catalan were quite severe. "Don't bark like a dog!" some Catalans were told harshly if they were overheard speaking in their own language. "Speak the language of the Empire!" or even "Speak in Christian!" (sic) were other instructions. Even quite recently, Spanish was imposed on the grounds that "We are in Spain" as if Catalan were a foreign language from another planet, instead of having been spoken in Catalonia for nearly 1000 years longer than has Spanish.
In such conditions, of course, the use of Spanish as a second language can be described in many ways, but certainly not as being "neutral". We shall come back later to how to undo the damage inflicted by such policies.
Language can be imposed in more subtle ways, of course. If I were to come to live in Dubrovnik or Zagreb, say, I would realise that I have no choice other than to learn to speak and use the language of the people surrounding me. This would not be a deliberate imposition on their part, of course, but rather an unwritten rule that I would be expected to comply with. I would really have to learn the language in order to communicate. Simply to communicate.
I am sure that as I began to learn the language and to use it in short sentences to speak to my neighbours or the local shopkeepers, my interlocutors would appreciate this fact, not just as an interest of mine in the language, but especially as a mark of respect towards their identity.
1.2 Language and identity
So we come to the second important role of language: it helps define an identity. It helps distinguish "us" from "them" or, in more scientific terms, the "in-group" from the "out-group". There are thousands of languages in the world. Each of them is a highly complex structure, with its own grammatical structure, lexicon ... and history. Each language belongs to a group that has used it for centuries, or longer. The language not only helps others to localise its speakers, but helps to knit together the speakers themselves. What for one group is simply the natural means of communication, for another, seen from the outside, is a secret code. Catalan - even though it is a Romance language, and therefore shares a great deal with neighbouring languages such as Spanish, French, Italian and, above all, Provençal or Occitan - was regarded by the authorities, in the early days of the telephone and telegraph, as a secret code, and as such was banned for many years.
Such codes have on occasion been used to the advantage of the dominant language-speakers. In the Second World War, for instance, the United States Marine Corps was concerned because the enemy kept deciphering the codes they used to send secret messages. They eventually decided to use a network of Navajo Indians, who translated the messages into and from their own language, which was - as you may imagine! - unknown to the Japanese. This system apparently worked very well, and even today, toy Navajo Marines are on sale in shops as a tribute to their contribution to the war effort.
Let us talk no more of wars. Let us return to more rational pursuits, like scientific research on the way people regard speakers of other languages. Languages, and even accents, help people to identify to which group to speaker belongs. There are many other cues, of course, depending on the particular case: colour and race, clothing, habits, etc. (Let us not forget that people are not only classified by ethnic or ethnolinguistic group alone, but also as members of other kinds of social group: by the football club scarf that they wear, by the brand of car they drive, and so on.)
1.3 Research on language and identity: perceived status
An interesting method of discovering how people look at others on the basis of the way they speak was employed by a North American researcher, Kathryn (or Kit) Woolard, in the late 70s and mid-80s, in Barcelona. She used the so-called "matched guise" technique: taped recordings of various people reading a text in different languages or with different native or non-native accents. Groups of secondary school students listened to these recordings, and after each voice, were asked to described the speaker, using scales of paired opposite adjectives. To give you a simple example, if "1" means "sociable" and "7" means "unsociable", each voice would have to be scored with a value between 1 and 7.
After collecting all the data, Kit reached a number of fundamental and far-reaching conclusions. Firstly, the students, without discussing their scores, seemed to be consistent: they would all agree that one particular voice seemed more "intelligent", and another less "reliable". Secondly, each student seemed to be internally consistent, giving similar positive or negative scores for each of the variables to each voice, on two independent factors. To put it another way, the voices (or to be more exact, the perceived personality of each speaker) could be classified as indicating each listener's greater or smaller degree of "solidarity" with it (likeability, friendliness, empathy, similarity with the speaker) and, independently, how much "status" each listener attributed to the voice (reliability, hardworkingness, thriftiness, efficiency, leadership).
Now I have to let you into a secret that Kit did not tell her students, and which they themselves did not realise at the time: the 12 taped voices only belonged to six people. All six were bilingual, or bidialectal, and spoke using each of their two "guises". In six cases the text was in Catalan ,and in the other six it was in Spanish. This allowed Kit to compare the perceived character of both guises of each of the speakers, without any influence of objective personality differences: it was the same person speaking! Nevertheless, the subjective differences were indeed perceived, some very powerfully.
Interestingly enough, both the Spanish-speaking students and the Catalan-speaking students agreed when it came to the perceived "status" of each speaker. In a nutshell, (a) anyone speaking Catalan, whether as a first language or a second language, was perceived as having greater status than (what we know to be) the same person speaking Spanish, whether as a second language or as a first language; and (b) someone identified as a native Catalan was attributed a higher status than someone identified as a native Spaniard.
This finding certainly corroborates a more general statement: that stereotypes (for this is what we are talking about) tend to be shared by both the dominant and the oppressed groups in any society. To the extent that they truly reflect measurable differences between the two groups, they may be reasonable and understandable generalisations; but as often as not stereotypes are based more on prejudice and in-group bias than they are on any sizeable objective differences. There is usually much greater variation within each group than between them.
The way people speak can even influence other people's behaviour. In one memorable experiment, each night a voice asked theatre-goers to help the management to improve its services by filling in a questionnaire during the interval between acts. The voice alternated in its accent, one night speaking in standard English ("RP", or received pronunciation) and the next using local regional English. The experimenters found that far more people actually filled in the form when the speaker spoke in standard English.
1.4 Research on language and identity: perceived solidarity
Let us return to Kit Woolard's set of research. Up to now I have mentioned the results of the research pertaining only to the perceived "status" of the speakers, or voices. But a second factor is in fact even more important, that is, it is more powerful in predicting the answers of the students than is their score on the "status" dimension or factor. Let us look now at the other main factor: "solidarity".
Here the results were rather different. Firstly, there was a listener effect, that is, the Spanish-speaking students and the Catalan-speaking students did not answer in the same ways. Both attributed greater "solidarity" scores to members of their own group, speaking their own language. Secondly, they downgraded the solidarity scores when members of their own groups spoke the "other" language. It was as if they regarded such people as "betraying" the group. This effect diminished when Kit repeated the same experiment, using the same taped recordings, in 1987, that is, eight years later; this suggests that the out-group was perceived as less of a threat, and thus using the out-group's language had become regarded as legitimate.
A completely separate set of experiments, undertaken in Canada and replicated elsewhere, also involve identity issues. Here the subject was not on group stereotypes, but rather what the authors called "Subjective Ethnolinguistic Vitality", which can be defined as ....
The method has been applied especially on immigrant groups. Their success in learning the language of the host society was correlated with their perception of the vitality of their own ethnolinguistic group, which was a composite measure derived from scores on three separate factors: the institutional support their language and group are perceived as receiving; the demographic strength that their language and group are perceived as having; and ..........
In conclusion, a sense of confidence in the future of one's ethnolinguistic group, and the absence of perceived threats to it, seem to be essential conditions for people to be able to devote their energies to outward-looking activities.
Both these sets of studies suggest that here is nothing like a well-fed, healthy population which looks to the future confidently, for the seeds of creativity and prosperity to ripen.
A paper read at a conference in Vienna in November 1999 (?) comes to mind. The author, xxxxx, suggested that interethnic tension can probably not be overcome except in the long-term; but that in the short-term leaders should strive to create a situation in which the collective well-being of both or all communities has reached such a sufficiently high level that there is visibly more to lose than to gain by fostering these tensions. A state of equilibrium would thus be achieved.
2. Language policies in the European Union
Having looked at some aspects of multiculturality, from a social psychological perspective, let us now move to the second part of my paper, in which I shall discuss with you those parts of the general political and economic context in which we find ourselves, and which may be relevant to our discussion.
2.1 The neoliberal process
Since the interventionist years following the Second World War, the public health, education and social security systems were built up in most countries in western and northern Europe, including such important other aspects as unemployment benefits and pension schemes. In the past fifteen years, though, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, there has been a gradual move away from state interventionism. This process has been referred to as "deregulation", or as "rolling back the State". The privatisation of former State-owned companies and services is part of this process. People have been encouraged to solve their own problems wherever possible: the State has moved towards a role as a "facilitator" or an "enabler". The move towards this more liberal regime is based partly on the conviction that private initiative makes a society more competitive, whereas state control or patronage breeds habits, stagnation and even corruption. We could have a whole seminar on the degree to which such a claim holds true in practice and, if so, what its social costs may be. But I would rather refer to the other main motor of liberal change, a more directly economic one: the need to drastically cut back the public debt, the financial deficit that almost all Western States were accustomed to running up every year. This has meant sharp cutbacks in the financial resources available to the public administration. Where have such cuts been made? In reducing manpower, in reducing investment, in reducing social services.
In this context of economic freedom, goods, people and capital can move around with rather fewer restrictions than before. Economic restructuring takes place as a result.
2.2 Constraints on the free market economy
The freedom of movement is not however, without limitations or, in some cases, compensations. Some of the policies of the European Union are designed to avoid the perverse effect of a liberal economic structure. Let me give you several examples.
One is the Common Agricultural Policy, often known in its abbreviated form as CAP. In principle its main aim, it seems to me, is to ensure that Europe is, as far as is possible, self-sufficient in foodstuffs. However, the open market value of some foods is too low to allow a European farmer to earn sufficient income and a decent living. The CAP instituted subsidies to farmers, of different values for different foodstuffs, to ensure that their overall production would meet the internal demand. This has led to self-sufficiency in many products, but has also led to surpluses in some, particuarly, dairy products. Thus you may have heard of the "butter mountain" or the "milk pond". My general point is, however, that the European Commission intervenes in the free market in order to encourage farmers, firstly to continue farming, and secondly, to produce sufficient amounts of particular food products.
Let us look at a second example of public intervention to restrict the free market. At the insistence of the French authorities, the international free trade agreement achieved in the GAT talks about five years ago excluded cultural products from the list of restriction-free goods. The arguments are twofold: firstly the invasion of North American films and programmes on televisions stations throughout Europe is having a considerable (and I might add not always positive) cultural impact on people's habits and preferences. And secondly, Europe's audiovisual industry cannot hope to survive unless it receives some kind of protection.
The linguistic effect of the dominance of films and programmes from the USA is clear, though many countries dub such programmes into the national language on the television. What isn't as clear is the linguistic effect of other aspects of European policy. Thus, for example, the laudable aim of the European Commission, of excluding advertising from State television channels, would seriously damage the present high standards of the public channels in Catalonia, which cannot possibly compete in the open market with five State-wide channels which are almost totally in Spanish (two public and three private ones). Thr two Catalan channels, TV3 and Canal 33, survive thanks to a mixed revenue, from advertising and from the budget voted in the Parliament of Catalonia; and even then only occasionally reach more than 30% of the TV audience in Catalonia.
A final consideration is related to the control –and elimination- of industrial and commercial monopolies. In Spain, untill recently the telephone service was run by a single state monopoly. The same could be said of petrol stations. The national airline could have competition on any given route banned.
These examples have all been chosen because they help us to understand that policies which avoid new language monopolies being formed or maintained are perfectly legitimate.
2.3 Building “national” economies
Returning to economic restructuring, this phenomenon has in fact been taking place for many decades, even centuries, in the interior of some industrially developed countries. In the years after the Second World War, many hundreds of thousands of Italians moved from the poor south to the wealthy north. In the 1960s, as many factories, coal mines and shipyards began to close down in the north of England and Scotland, a similar migration took place towards the prosperous south-east, the area in and around London.
In Wales, massive movements of population from neighbouring counties in the West Midlands of England into the coal mining and steel working south of Wales led to the anglicisation of virtually the whole area from about 1850 onwards.
The same kinds of ecomonic restrusturing phenomena took place in Spain, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, with a massive movement of millions of people away from the backward, rural areas in the centre and south of the Iberian peninsula, into the industrial cities. But in the latter case, the move crossed cultural and linguistic borders within the State: nearly all those who moved were Spanish-speakers, and a large proportion of them (other than those who moved to Madrid) went to live in the Basque-speaking northern provinces of Biskaia and Gipuskoa, or to the Catalan-speaking provinces in Catalonia and Valencia and, in the past 15 years especially, to the Balearic Islands (principally Majorca and Ibiza). Even now, about 25,000 Spanish-speakers move to Catalonia every year, many of whom probably on a short-term basis: and Catalonia is clearly incapable of linguistically neutralising this constant effect.
This has meant a great dilution, if you will allow me to put it this way, of the Catalan-speaking cities, mostly during a period (the Franco dictatorship) when there could be no structures in operation to facilitate the cultural and linguistic integration of the new arrivals in the host region. I shall come back to language policies in Catalonia in a few minutes. First, though, let me very briefly place the linguistic policies of the European Union into context. I shall do so only schematically, as dr. Bojan Brezigar is much more authorised than I to do so in detail, and he will be speaking later on today.
2.4 Language decisions in the European Union
The European Union started its days, thanks to the 1955 Treaty of Rome, as the "European Economic Community". At that time the organisation was a step forward in a slightly earlier agreement covering iron, steel and coal, between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. An early decision was obviously necessary as regards the official and working languages of this new structure. At that time German was official in Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium; Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium; French in France, Luxembourg and Belgium; and Italian in Italy. Instead of adopting the Council of Europe's model of just having two workinig languages, the EEC decided to work in all the official languages of its member States, on an equal basis. At that time these were Dutch, French, German and Italian. This model has continued to function over the years as the EEC expanded. However, it has reached breaking point: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish are all official and working languages of the European Union and its institutions (Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice). The "changing cultural environment" in the Union has meant, principally, this steady increase in the amount of language contact inside it.
The intention is obviously multicultural in nature. "I'll respect your language if you respect mine" is the unwritten law. It leads to absurdities such as the insistence of French on the virtues of bilingualism, on the part of a Republican regime that has for several centuries actively (and, sadly, successfully) repressed bilingualism at home, among the Bretons, Catalans, Flemings, Alsatians, Occitans, Catalans, Basques and Corsicans. But at the very least the monolingual ideologies prevalent in some of the major European capitals have been brought into question by the need to run Europe with other people, perhaps sharing the same ideology, but with regard to a different language.
If everyone speaks their own language in European institutions (and people like the Welsh, the Sards and the Catalans cannot), the strain on interpreters and translators is very great. But of course people tend to converge on a common language for interethnic (let us call it international) contacts. The European Union could simply have taken a back seat and allow society to reach its own conclusion on the international language it would choose. In such a case, the French would have continued to see their language decline in its fortunes, while the Germans (and Austrians!) would have seen their language gradually replaced by English in central Europe. Maybe these trends will continue in any case, but what is certain is that formerly monolingual State structures (in Portugal, Greece and Holland, to be sure, but also in the larger States such as France, Italy or Germany, for instance) have seen how the role of English in both pan-European and more general international communications is growingly rapidly. It dominates the Internet quite clearly. Three simple examples, using the Yahoo! Search engine, and comparing the presence of English and French, illustrate this latter point.
English word
|
Number of occurrences[1] |
French word |
Number of occurrences[2] |
Ratio E/F |
|
frequency |
537 |
fréquence |
135 |
3·98 : 1 |
|
blue |
6,554 |
bleu |
328 |
19·98 : 1 |
|
community |
24,949 |
communauté |
427 |
58·43 : 1 |
Whereas the smaller linguistic communities that have a presence in the European Union, such as the Portuguese, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch seem quite happy with the spread of English as the lingua franca, the same cannot be said for the governments of the larger countries, and particularly France, Germany and Spain. France, for instance, introduced an amendment in its Constitution to make French the official language (it had been the de facto official language for over 300 years!), and passed a law (the Loi Toubon) to make it compulsory for French to be the language in a number of functions, some of which were later declared to interfere illegitimately in private relations, especially between companies.
The French also began to seek ways of ensuring that a high proportion of Europeans would learn their language at school, as a foreign language. The President spearheaded a move to make it an aim of the European Union that all schoolchildren study at least two foreign languages: English would be the first nearly everywhere, and their hope was that French would take the lion’s share of the teaching of the second language. As a result the Union began to react, to try and promote the teaching of the smaller or "lesser-taught" official languages, which basically means all but English. This is done, as I'm sure you know, through the "Lingua" action of the Socrates (and to some extent the Leonardo da Vinci) programmes, which promote educational and training exchanges, respectively, between schools and colleges in different member States.
As you may well imagine, the formal equality between the official and working languages is certainly not visible in statistical terms: in the internal bureaucracy of the Commission, English is far and away the most used language; French takes second place; and the use of German, whilst trailing behind French, means that the use of the other eight working languages is little more than sporadic.
Curiously enough, the European Union has as yet made no overall statement of language policy. Several reports have been commissioned by the European Parliament (including the Reding Resolution of December 1990, which in responding to requests by the Parliaments of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, and a popular initiative, that Catalan become an official language of the Union, gave an overall view of the situation at the time). But the Council of Ministers has never to my knowledge discussed the issue of official languages, or of the other autochthonous languages spoken within the member States of the Union. I expect that dr. Brezigar will address at least the second of these two points: how to support the autochthonous languages that are not official languages of the Union.
There is, as you can see, a multilingual discourse behind the development of the Union. The "changing cultural environment" to which the title of this paper refers is most evidently the gradually increasing size and therefore diversity within the Union itself as the number of members grows. With Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia queueing up to join in the first tranche, and more countries behind them, the growing linguistic and cultural complexity of the Union will be harder and harder to manage unless the linguistic regime of the institutions changes fairly soon.
I referred before to the "lesser-taught" official languages. Let me come back to this point briefly. Living as I do in a country, Catalonia, where virtually everyone can speak a wider language, Spanish, the objective "need" for products in Catalan, from the individual's point of view, is hardly existent. But there is logically a demand for such products which, I may add, increases as people become aware of their existence, though this may seem contradictory. Simple market economics shows that the cost per unit of producing and marketing a product is higher the smaller the intended market. This in the Catalan market we may well find, for instance, an international best-selling book in the shops in both Catalan and Spanish versions. If the Catalan version is more expensive than the Spanish one, this fact will probably penalise its sales, and gives the impression of Catalan products being a "luxury". Products in Spanish occupy the centre stage, as if they are the "normal" products; and Catalan products seem to be accessory. Over thirty years ago the Catalan writer Joan Triadú (Albert Manent?) described Catalan as a "toll" culture, something we have to pay twice for...
We can therefore put forward a model which relates the unit-cost of producing different sorts of products, and the amount of support required to ensure that such products are available for demographically weaker language groups on equal terms with equivalent products made for larger markets.
In this first example, product A may be a book, for instance. The difference in unit cost d, between the smaller market (a1) and the larger market (a2), is the differential which subsidies or other mechanisms have to find in order for the two products to be able to compete on equal terms.
In the second example we are dealing with a much more expensive product: for instance, a radio station. In such a case the size of even the smaller market (b1) has to be much larger than in the earlier case, which was a low cost product. Nevertheless, the same principle applies: the difference between the product of the two examples (b1 and b2) makes the product for the larger market much less expensive in per unit (per potential listener) cost.
It is usually the case that a linguistic minority (such as those for which products a1 and b1 were made) is also offered products (such as a2 and b2) in the language of the majority. Once the members of the minority become bilingualised, it is likely that they will be attracted by the higher quality of the products made for the majority. This will reduce the real market for the products made specifically for the minority, thus creating a declining spiral which can easily wipe out the existence of products in the minority’s language.
Such a process, as you can see, is not the result of a deliberate, repressive language policy on the part of the State. However, the State will of necessity have a policy in this regard, be it on the one hand a laissez faire, neoliberal or “pragmatic” approach, or on the other one of support for products made for the minority market. In many cases, what is more, the language of the minority group is one which has a kin-state, often just across the international border. In such a case, we all know that many States have done little to facilitate the transfrontier movement of cultural goods. When I say “movement”, of course I include other aspects such as facilities to be able to pick up radio and television programmes, the training of school teachers, etc. For some years the French government effectively blocked requests by French Catalans to instal relay stations in order to be able to pick up Catalunya Ràdio FM programmes from across the Pyrenees mountains. Eventually this policy – which was clearly contrary to European Union legislation – was shortcircuited by the granting of a European Commission subsidy to a cultural association in French Catalonia, precisely to build a relay station.
Another official policy which can radically cut the size of a linguistic market comes of fragmenting the language. We have the example of Romanian, which on one side of the border is written in Latin script, and on the other in Cyrilic script. This has led to the latter form being called “Moldavian”, but the Romanian-speakers are effectively denied access to many products in Romanian, execpt perhaps to the audiovisual mass media which only (in the case of radio) or basically (in the case o TV) use oral language for communication.
3. Language and globalisation
Dr. Monica Heller, who works at the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne of the famous "OISE" (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Toronto, has published an interesting paper on the ways that globalisation is affecting modern ideologies of language and nation-state. In their stead, she writes, we sees the following phenomena developing:
"1. the commodification of language;
"2. pressures towards standardisation for international communication; and
"3. the opposite, the valuing of local characteristics in order to legitimate local control over local markets, and in order to attach a value of distinction to linguistic commodities in worlld markets of culture and tourism. (Heller 1999: 336)
By commodification, Heller means that language becomes regarded as an economic resource, as something of value in the labour market. This is especially clear given that the new service economies associated with high modernity (Giddens 1990) or the information society require linguistic competencies "to an extent and of a kind not relevant to the primary- and secondary-resource economies of the modern world" (Heller op. cit.: 337)
A striking example of the new value of bi- or multi-lingual proficiency was offered about ten years ago, when I visited Brussels and saw large advertisements in the streets and on the metro, encouraging people to learn Dutch. This in itself doesn't seem surprising. What I found interesting was that the whole campaign was organised and paid for by the French Community of Belgium. Why? The answer is very simple. The growing number of jobs, primarily in Brussels, being offered to people proficient in both official languages, were being filled by Flemings, because relatively fewer Walloons (French-speakers) were becoming bilingual.
3.1. The linguistic consequences of integration in the building of nation-States.
It is to be hoped that globalisation will not apply the same pressure towards monolingualism as that exerted by the nationalist ideology behind the construction of most western-type nation-States. What makes the acquisition of a second (or third) language an additive, rather than a subtractive, process?
"Two social outcomes of competence in a second language seem possible: either members of a community will participate in two cultures (integrate) or lose their first language and culture and join exclusively the other group (assimilate). Previous research suggests that the occurrence of either outcome is dependent upon structural characteristics of the community". Clément (1980: 152).
The Catalan experience may help to give insight into this issue. South of Catalonia proper is another region, Valencia, which became Catalan-speaking as a result of the military conquests of the Catalan-Aragonese king, Jaume el Conqueridor (literally, James the Conqueror), in the 13th century. In the past century the Catalan language has been gradually replaced by Spanish, at first in the larger cities (Valencia, Alacant, Elx) and more recently in smaller cities such as Castelló de la Plana. In many families the process of language shift can be clearly outlined over a period of three generations: the elder one, whose knowledge of the wider language was fragmentary; a second generation of bilinguals, who choose to pass on the acquired, wider language to their offspring, the third generation, which is monolingual in the wider language. Often the entry into a family by marriage of a monolingual outsider, especially if it is a woman, can be seen to have had a dramatic accelerating effect on the rate of language shift (Montoya 1996).
There are many cases in which the third generation rebels against the trend, and relearns the family's original language. This marked university circles in Valencia in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, for many of the leading Catalan-speaking intellectuals in Valencia today were brought up as Spanish-speakers; but it can only be regarded as an elitist, almost marginal process which has not extended widely throughout Valencian society, particularly since control of most of the regional media are in the hands of a largely hispanified urban class.
Further north, in Catalonia proper, the three-generation shift from one monolingualism to another has been limited and, in fact, partly two-way. The quasi-aristocratic haut bourgeoisie in the wealthier districts of Barcelona moved over to Spanish fairly massively in the Franco era. Mixed marriages were probably already taking their linguistic toll before then. But the move was towards bilingualism: few of their descendents living in Catalonia are monolingual Spanish speakers today, though they largely frequent monolingual circles such as the Royal Polo Club, the Royal Barcelona Tennis Club, the Real Círculo Ecuestre club, etc. At the same time, however, nearly all the descendents of the Spanish-speaking immigrants of the period up to 1940 have become balanced bilinguals, a lot of them have Catalan as their first language, and not a few are staunch Catalan antionalists.
It has been one of the main tasks of the democratic regional government of Catalonia[3] since its restoration in 1977, to re-create a linguistic environment in which the linguistic rights of the native Catalans can be exercised without impediment, and in which the integration of other people, and especially the offspring of the first generation of in-migrants, is facilitated. These are the main aims of the linguistic policy of the Catalan government.
The 1983 Language Act that the Catalan Parliament endorsed with the support of all the parliamentary groups, regulated language use in the three areas closest to the administration: the public education system, the administration's own mass media (radio and television) and the administration itself. But when the limitations of the law, and the changes in the social and economic situation, made it necessary to improve the legislation, in 1997, ...
4. Conclusion
The obvious task of policy makers (not just language planners) is to achieve a sufficiently balanced Europe so that languages continue to be predominant within their traditional territory, thus guaranteeing their reproduction, and that people learn other languages in an additive and positive fashion, without rejecting or losing their own, original language. Positive measures will undoubtedly be needed in some places. The question remains as to whether some of the member States will be willing to make the profound changes to their own language policies that are called for. (Strubell 2000)
Bibliography
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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