Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Critical LPP and the intersection of class, race and language policy and practice in twenty first century Catalonia

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Language Policy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

A Correction to this article was published on 16 July 2020

This article has been updated

Abstract

Language policy and planning (LPP) has always drawn on research and scholarship in education as well as the social sciences in general (in particular sociology). Social theory has also figured as an important source of ideas and concepts, and critical LPP has arisen as a distinct strand of inquiry since the 1980s (Tollefson, in Planning language, planning inequality: language policy in the community. Longman, London, 1991; Tollefson (ed) Language policies in education: critical issues. Routledge, London, 2013). More recently, critical LPP researchers have begun to turn to political economy, as a source discipline, and neoliberalism, as a baseline concept, in the study of LPP-related phenomena and practices in a range of contexts (Ricento 2015; Tollefson & Pérez-Milans 2018). This paper examines how a critical political economy-oriented approach may be applied in a specific context, that of Catalonia, where most would agree that there has been a relatively successful recovery of a minority language situated in a larger nation-state structure traditionally dominated by a monolingual (Spanish) polity. This critical approach explores, on the one hand, how political economy—which examines the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources and the class relations that emerge within these processes—may be brought to bear on issues arising in the ongoing development of LPP in Catalonia. In addition, this critical approach is attentive to issues around race and ethnicity which inevitably arise in societies experiencing high levels of immigration, as has been the case in Catalonia over the past 25 years. This paper aims to bring these two strands together, examining how two key matters of interest in political economy today– inequality and class—intersect with race and ethnicity in the ongoing development of language policy in Catalonia, focussing specifically on the Barcelona metropolitan area. And further to this, it aims to understand how this intersectionality is, at the same time, intersected by the nexus of a Catalan national, cultural and linguistic identity emerging from the aforementioned relatively successful recovery of Catalan over the past several decades.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

Notes

  1. The 1983 act was about the recovery of Catalan in institutional settings (e.g. education, politics, the media), business and work settings and social settings (among friends and family). Importantly, it established three options for pre-school and primary education—near total immersion in Catalan, Catalan Spanish balanced bilingualism and Spanish dominant instruction. The Catalan immersion option became the most popular, adopted in 90% of all pre-schools and primary schools, and in 1993, this state of affairs was formally consolidated when Catalan-medium instruction was strengthened in secondary school. The 1998 Linguistic Policy Act aimed to consolidate gains made since 1983 and to address deficiencies in the 1983 law, proposing quotas and greater vigilance to guarantee the presence of Catalan in those domains where it had not made much headway, such as in legal proceedings and in the world of cinema. In education, the 1998 act meant the definitive establishment of Catalan as the dominant medium of instruction in Catalan education at all levels. The new statute for Catalonia of 2006 continued in the same direction as the 1998 act and Catalan language policy in education was not affected by the Spanish Constitutional Court’s modification of the statute in their 2010 ruling.

  2. It is worth noting that the majority of the volume’s 35 chapters cover many long-standing interest areas in LPP research, such as the relationships between the nation-state, nationalism and education; language endangerment, language rights and revitalization; the impact of the increasingly diverse populations; bi/multilingualism in society in community and family environments; societal views of language; language choice and standardization; and sign language. In addition, there are chapters on concerns that have arisen more recently, such as language testing and citizenship, securitization and the impact of the social media.

  3. Even if, as Martínez-Celorrío (2017) notes, the condition of being a habitual Catalan speaker (as opposed to a habitual Spanish speaker) in Catalonia does not correlate strongly to upward mobility, that is movement from lower to higher class positions over a lifetime. More important are education and the acquisition of key skills and knowledge.

  4. This is, of course, something of an oversimplification of how matters stood at the time of the Woolard and Pujolar studies.

  5. See also Woolard (1989), who noted the same behavioural pattern.

  6. In addition, it should be noted that such practices exist despite efforts by the local government, the Generalitat de Catalunya, to overturn the unspoken rules of who speaks what language when, where and to whom, via a series of institutional campaigns (Generalitat de Catalunya 2018). The first campaign, ‘El Català és cosa de tots’ (‘Catalan is everyone’s responsibility’), featured the image of ‘Norma’, a young girl who symbolised the ‘normalization’ of Catalan as a language in public spaces and as a language in which users could do all of the things that they could do in Spanish. This was followed by ‘Depèn de vostè’ (‘It depends on you’) in 1985–1986; ‘Tu ets Mestre’ (‘You are a teacher’) in 2003; ‘Dóna corda al català‘(literally, ‘Wind up Catalan’, but meant to encourage people to speak Catalan) in 2005-2007; ‘Encomana el català’ (‘spread Catalan’) in 2009–2010; and a long list of more recent campaigns aimed at specific domains of activity, exhorting citizens and residents in Catalonia to use Catalan, for example, when doing sport, when using communication technologies, when doing business and when engaged in a wide range of service encounters. All of these campaigns embody the general goal of fomenting the use of Catalan when and where possible, and some, such as ‘Tu ets mestre‘, explicitly address and try to reverse the tendency of many Catalan speakers to deny Catalan to those who look different or who for any number of reasons are positioned as ‘foreign’.

  7. It is important to highlight that Author 2 of this paper participated in this study as a researcher in the field.

  8. One such plan was the Pla per a la Llengua i la Cohesió Social (Plan for Language and Social Cohesion) (Generalitat de Catalunya 2015), which was implemented from 2004 onwards in response to the growing number of immigrant children in Catalan primary and secondary education who had little or no exposure to Catalan outside of school. One key feature of this plan was the introduction of aules d’acollida (welcome classes) for children arriving in Catalonia at the age of eight or older. These classes, which segregated these newly arrived children from mainstream classes, were designed to immerse them in an accelerated way into Catalan language and education, the idea being that upon achieving a sufficient level of Catalan proficiency, they would be transferred into mainstream classes. Acceptance of these classes has been variable and many students have taken the view that they would have been better off in mainstem classes from the beginning (Corona et al. 2008).

  9. By ‘Latino’, we mean individuals whose parents are from the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America and Caribbean, and who engage in every-day, situated social practices associated with being Latino and la latinidad.

  10. For example, Corona recalls a time when Rony read a text written in Spanish aloud, doing so with a marked Latino accent. However, when he saw the notes that Rony had taken during the same class, he noticed that they had been written entirely in Catalan.

References

  • Alim, H. S. (2016a). Introducing Raciolinguistics: Racing language and language race in hyperracial times. In H. S. Alim, J. R. Rickford, & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race (pp. 1–30). New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alim, H. S. (2016b). Who’s afraid of the transracial subject? In H. S. Alim, J. R. Rickford, & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aracil, L. V. (1983). Dir la realitat. Barcelona: Països Catalans.

    Google Scholar 

  • Atkinson, W. (2015). Class. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Block, D. (2000). Problematizing interview data: Voices in the mind’s machine? TESOL Quarterly, 34(4), 757–763.

    Google Scholar 

  • Block, D. (2014). Social class in applied linguistics. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Block, D. (2018). Inequality and class in language policy and planning. In J. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 568–588). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Codó, E., & Patiño-Santos, A. (2014). Beyond language: Class, social categorisation and academic achievement in a Catalan high school. Linguistics and Education, 25(1), 51–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corona, V. (2012). Globalización, identidades y escuela: lo latino en Barcelona. Ph. D. thesis, Universitat Autoònoma de Barcelona.

  • Corona, V., Moore, E., & Unamuno, V. (2008). Linguistic reception in Catalonia: Challenges and contradictions. In G. Budach, J. Erfurt, & M. Kunkel (Eds.), Écoles plurilinigues—multilingual schools: Konxepte, Institutionen und Akture. Internationale Perspektiven. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corona, V., Nussbaum, L., & Unamuno, V. (2013). The emergence of new linguistic repertoires among Barcelona’s youth of Latin American origin. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(2), 182–194.

    Google Scholar 

  • Direcció General de Política Lingüística. (2015). Anàlisi de l’Enquesta d’usos lingüístics de la població 2013: Resum dels factors clau. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de Cultura. Direcció General de Política Lingüística.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fleras, A. (2016). Theorizing micro-aggressions as racism 3.0: Shifting the discourse. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 48(2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2016.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fraser, N. (1995). Redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “postsocialist” age. New Left Review, 212, 68–93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallego-Balsà, L. & Block, D. (in preparation). Minority ethnic students in higher education: Talking multilingualism and identity

  • Generalitat de Catalunya (2015). Language in catalan schools: A model for success. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament d’Ensenyament. http://ensenyament.gencat.cat/web/.content/home/departament/publicacions/monografies/llengua-catalana-model-exit/llengua-catalana-model-exit-ANG.pdf. Accessed 18 Sept 2018.

  • Generalitat de Catalunya (2018). Llengüa catalana—Campanyes. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament d’Ensenyament. http://llengua.gencat.cat/ca/serveis/informacio_i_difusio/campanyes/. Accessed 14 Sept 2018.

  • Gilroy, P. (2000). Between camps: Nations, culture and the allure of Race. London: Allen Lane.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosfogel, R. (2016). What is racism? Journal of World-Systems Research, 22(1), 9–15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hawkey, J. W. (2014). Meeting language-in-education policy aims: Catalonia in the twenty-first century. European Journal of Language Policy, 6(1), 5–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • IDESCAT (Institut d’estadística de Catalunya) (2017). Evolució de la población total i estrangera. 2000–2016. https://www.idescat.cat/poblacioestrangera/?b=0. Accessed 10 Sept 2017.

  • IDESCAT (Institut d’estadística de Catalunya) (2018). Population on 1 January. https://www.idescat.cat/pub/?id=aec&n=245&lang=en Accessed 15 Sept 2018.

  • Kvale, S. (1996). InterViews. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martinez Celorrio, X., & Marín Saldo, A. (2015). Trajectòries socials i integració dels joves nouvinguts a Catalunya. Barcelona: CRIT-Universitat de Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martínez-Celorrío, X. (2017). Llengua i mobilitat social a Catalunya. Llengua, Societat i Comunicació, 15, 62–70.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, K. (1990 [1867]). Capital 1. Hardmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

  • McCarty, T. L. (2013). Language planning and cultural continuance in native America. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 255–277). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milanovic, B. (2016). Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, H., & Miller, K. (1996). Language policy and identity: The case of Catalonia. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 6(1), 113–128.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, M., & Trenchs-Paerera, M. (2015a). Language policies, ideologies and attitudes in Catalonia. Part 1: Reversing language shift in the twentieth century. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(7), 285–294.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, M., & Trenchs-Paerera, M. (2015b). Language policies, ideologies and attitudes in Catalonia. Part 2: International immigration, globalization and the future of Catalan. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(12), 491–501.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, M., Trenchs-Parera, M., & Ng, S. (2008). Normalizing bilingualism: The effects of the Catalonian linguistic normalization policy one generation after. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(3), 306–333.

    Google Scholar 

  • OECD (2016). OECD inequality update. http://www.oecd.org/social/OECD2016-Income-Inequality-Update.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2017.

  • Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pujolar, J. (2001). Gender, heteroglossia and power: A sociolinguistic study of youth culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pujolar, J., Gonzàlez, I., Font, A., & Martínez, R. (2010). Llengua i joves; Usos i percepcions lingüístics de la joventut catalana [Language and young people: Linguistic uses and perceptions of Catalan youth]. Barcelona: Observatori Català de la Joventut (Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament d’Acció Social i Ciutadania, Secretaria de Joventut).

    Google Scholar 

  • Ricento, T. (Ed.) (2015). Language policy and political economy: English in a global context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Sánchez, C., Subirats, M., & López, P. (2010). Classes i grups socials a la Regió Metropolitana de Barcelona. Revista Papers, 52, 9–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Savage, M. (2015). Social class. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solomos, J. (1993). Race and racism in Britain. London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strubell, M. (2001). Catalan a decade later. In J. Fishman (Ed.), Can threatened languages be saved? (pp. 260–283). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

    Google Scholar 

  • Subirats, M. (2012). Barcelona: De la necesidad a la libertad. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tollefson, J. W. (1991). Planning language, planning inequality: Language policy in the community. London: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tollefson, J. W. (2013). Critical issues in language policy in education. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 1–13). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tollefson, J. W. & Pérez-Milans, M., (Eds.) (2018). Languege policy and planning: Directions for future research. In The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 1–17). New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Urla, J. (2012). Catalan in the twenty-first century. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(2), 177–181.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vila, F. X. (2008). Catalan in Spain. In G. Extra & D. Gorter (Eds.), Multilingual Europe: Facts and policies., Contributions to the sociology of language, 96 Berlin: De Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Webber, J., & Strubell, M. (1991). The Catalan language: Progress towards normalisation. Barcelona: The Anglo-Catalan Society.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, M. ([1922] 1968). Economy and society (Vol. 1, 2). Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Woolard, K. A. (1989). Double talk: Bilingualism and the politics of ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woolard, K. (2016). Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistic authority in 21st century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woolard, K., & Frekko, S. (2013). Catalan in the twenty-first century: romantic publics and cosmopolitan communities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(2), 129–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wright, E. O. (2015). Understanding class. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament d’Anglès i Lingüística, Universitat de Lleida, Plaça de Víctor Siurana, 1, 25003, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain

    David Block & Victor Corona

Authors
  1. David Block
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Victor Corona
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Block.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Foreign population in Catalonia, 2000–2016 (Idescat-Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya 2017)

 

Població

Població estrangera total

%

Var. abs.

Var %

2016

7,522,596

1,023,398

13.60

− 4671

− 0.45

2015

7,508,106

1,028,069

13.69

− 61,145

− 5.61

2014

7,518,903

1,089,214

14.49

− 69,258

− 5.98

2013

7,553,650

1,158,472

15.34

− 28,307

− 2.39

2012

7,570,908

1,186,779

15.68

927

0.08

2011

7,539,618

1,185,852

15.73

− 12,686

− 1.06

2010

7,512,381

1,198,538

15.95

9259

0.78

2009

7,475,420

1,189,279

15.91

85,489

7.75

2008

7,364,078

1,103,790

14.99

131,283

13.50

2007

7,210,508

972,507

13.49

58,750

6.43

2006

7,134,697

913,757

12.81

114.853

14.38

2005

6,995,206

798,904

11.42

156,058

24.28

2004

6,813,319

642,846

9.44

99,838

18.39

2003

6,704,146

543,008

8.10

160,988

42.14

2002

6,506,440

382,020

5.87

124,700

48.46

2001

6,361,365

257,320

4.05

75,730

41.70

2000

6,261,999

181,590

2.90

–

–

Appendix 2: Transcription conventions

  • /is used to mark natural pauses between semantic units

  • Italics are used to mark voicing

  • ? indicates rising intonation, as in a question

  • (.) indicates a longer than natural pause

  • = indicates latching

  • XX indicates an unidentifiable speaker

  • Xxxxx indicates incomprehensible speech

Appendix 3: Original transcriptions

  • Excerpt 1

  • quan vas a preguntar algu/dius/perdò una pregunta/això ho he d´entregar aquí?/{switching to Spanish to voice her interlocutor}sí sí por esta parte/no sé que/però tu saps que ell parla català/perquè abans ho ha parlat/llavors jo li contesto una altra vegada en català/i me torna a contestar en castellà/llavors a mi no (.) em fa una mica així saps/i veus a l´altre/i a l´altre no saps [què dir]/llavors jo dic/però per què?

  • Excerpt 2

  • VC: y a/aquí/en la escuela/en algún momento ustedes suelen hablar en catalán?=

  • Carlos: = no=

  • Rony: = no=

  • Jonathan: yo no/el otro día=

  • Álex: = yo mira/en mates/todo mundo habla catalán/menos yo/

  • Ignacio: sí/

  • Nestor: no es verdad?/ya me {noise in the background} en xxxxx casi nadie habla en catalán/

  • Roberto: es que no entiendo/me entiendes?/

  • XX: es que hablan en catalán/

  • Nestor: yo/hablan en catalán/le/le/xxxxx/y les hablo en castellano/y dice/dicen/me hablas en catalán/si no te suspendo en catalán y el curso/

  • VC: y/y/=

  • Nestor: = que se joda=

  • VC: = y ni así/hablan en catalán/no/

  • XX: no/no/no/

  • XX: sí {noise in the background}

  • Ignacio: solo/sólo a veces que=

  • XX: = cállate ya/si me pide todo esto_

  • VC: pero a ver/no entiendo una cosa/pero ustedes saben catalán/

  • Ignacio: sí/pero no me gusta a mi=

  • Raúl: = agrrr/a mi/mi/me aburre hablar en eso/prefiero hablar en castellano/

  • Excerpt 3

  • VC: ustedes qué/qué piensan del catalán?/en general=

  • RAÚL: = es una mierda=

  • ALEX: = que es una mierda/tío/no sé ni para qué vinieron/para qué vinieron los putos españoles allá a cogernos nuestro dinero/los odio tío/los odio a los españoles (1)

  • VC: por qué no quieres a los españoles?

  • ALEX: eh/

  • VC: por qué los odias?/

  • ALEX: porque vinieron allá a jodernos nomás/nomás para jodernos/hace mucho tiempo Colón/dicen que es español o algo así/Colón=

  • IGNACIO: = Colon sí=

  • OSCAR: un culón de mierda/{laughter}

  • ALEX: vino/se supone que fue a conquistar América/pero fue con toda/con toda su peña ahí/con sus barcos/con sus armas/a joder a América Latina/a robarnos nuestra plata y toda esa huevada/

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Block, D., Corona, V. Critical LPP and the intersection of class, race and language policy and practice in twenty first century Catalonia. Lang Policy 21, 1–21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-09508-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-09508-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation