Catalan is a language spoken by seven million people as a first language in several parts of Spain, including the Autonomous Region of Catalonia, as well as in the regions of Valencia, Aragon, and the Balearic Islands. It is also spoken in the independent nation of Andorra, and in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France.
In Catalonia, Catalan is the medium of instruction in public schools and in Catalonian universities, such as Universitat Pompeu-Fabra in Barcelona, where courses are held in Catalan, not Spanish. Elsewhere in Barcelona, from the metro running underneath the city, to the announcements made over the loudspeakers in El Corte Inglés, a national department store chain, one hears Catalan first, Spanish second. In other words, after experiencing a significant decline over the past 500 years, Catalan is now holding its ground, if tenuously.
But the status of Catalan in Spain is not unproblematic. The conflict involving Catalan today pits independentistas, those in favor of an independent Catalonia, against federalistas, those in favor of a centralized Spain.
The independentistas often make arguments rooted in Spain’s language history. For example, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Catalan was a language of prestige in Western Europe, on par with Italian and French. It was widely used and had developed a strong literary tradition. However, the vagaries of history conspired in such a way that the centralization of the Spanish state took place in Castilian, which achieved a place of prominence not only in politics, but also within the Spanish Catholic Church.
Note: Two major events took place in the fifteenth century that propelled Castilian into dominance: 1) opposition to the Moors was organized largely by the Castilians, and 2) the Christian unification of the peninsula took place through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castile, situating the locus of power in the center of the country (Castile).
When Napoleon invaded Spain in the early nineteenth century, the conditions were already in place for a Spanish opposition rooted in national rather than regional identity. Here the story goes the direction of the rest of Europe at the time, namely, toward the vision of one language, one nation, one people. Spain was thus constituted as a state through Spanish (Castilian).
All regional languages, including Catalan, were therefore on the decline from the very end of the fifteenth century. The marginalization of the regional languages accelerated when the forces lead by General Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Franco’s ideological campaign targeted at regional languages was ingenious: his government called them dialects rather than languages, thus assigning them an inferior status, and he set up the government media in such a way that serious news stories were covered in Castilian, while frivolous stories were covered in Catalan. The ideological campaign was successful in casting Catalan as inferior to Spanish in the minds of many Spaniards.
Conditions begin to change with the decline of the Franco regime, and the tide begins to turn in favor of the regional languages.
The post-dictatorship Constitution of 1978 acknowledged Spain’s internal multilingualism and was printed in five versions: Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Valencian. Foreshadowing future language controversies in the region, the Valencian version is exactly identical to the Catalan one. The insistence by Valencians that the Constitution be printed in the so-called Valencian language was an indication that the region may seek regional autonomy for itself in the future. As we have seen before, the claims to linguistic difference do not always require linguistic differences to exist.
Returning to the contemporary conflict, we see that from the perspective of Catalan independentistas, the Catalan language – symbol of the Catalan culture – was marginalized through an unjust history that unjustly promoted Castilian. Catalan independence thus represents the righting of historical wrongs, the most recent of which being a brutal dictatorship despised by all Spaniards. Independentistas point out that Catalan culture is more oriented to Europe in general than to Spain in particular, as the Catalan-speaking community extends beyond Spanish borders.
Outside of Catalonia, there is little sympathy with the independentistas, including, ironically, in the Catalan-speaking regions of Aragon and Valencia, which are oriented to Madrid. In Aragon, for example, a bill was passed to rename the Catalan language there LAPAO, or, LenguaAragonesa Propia del Área Oriental ‘Eastern Aragonese Language’. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the Valencian community has referred to Catalan in its region as valenciano.Independentistas and Catalan language supporters understand these name changes as power moves intended to undermine the strength of Catalan as a language in Spain.
The federalistas think adequate concessions have already been made to Catalonia and that independence would undermine the overall national project. The geopolitical conflict has split Spaniards, both in and out of Catalonia. In 2013, Spain’s Prime Minister denied Catalonia’s request to vote on independence.
Today, an ongoing point of contention has to do with the vehicular language of education in the Catalan speaking regions. In Catalonia, the primary language of education is Catalan. Some people outside of the region suggest that students should receive equal education in Spanish.
As we saw in Chapter 6, education policy as it pertains to language is often a thorny issue. In 2015, Miami-Dade Public Schools announced that it would expand comprehensive bilingual education in certain of its schools, but would do so by canceling a longstanding 30 minute per day Spanish program in all the other schools. The community reacted strongly against this decision.
VIDEO:Watch Phillip discuss the issue of bilingual education in Miami with a television reporter.