Resplendent
Catalan: What Money can Buy?
Anthony Pym
(This is the original text of an article published as "Resplendent
Catalan" in The Linguist 38/3 (1999). 80-82.)
Of all Europe’s regional or ‘stateless’ languages, Catalan
is perhaps the one promoted with most success in recent decades.
Thanks to a vigorous language policy and hefty government funding,
the language’s medieval heritage has undergone a postmodern revival
to the point where it has recently combated the power of multinational
film distribution. Catalan is now a language to be taken seriously.
But to what extent might it provide models for Europe’s many other
stateless languages?
The history is important. A distinct language by the tenth century,
Catalan derived from Latin alongside Spanish, Provençal,
French and Italian. Its written texts date from at least the twelfth
century; in the thirteenth it attained a certain splendour in
the prose of the thinker and proselytizer Ramon Llull; into the
fourteenth an fifteenth it spread with the conquests of the Crown
of Aragon south to Valencia and Murcia, west to Majorca, Sicily,
Sardinia, Naples and even out to Athens. With this imperial range
came official use in the Royal Chancery and a ‘Golden Age’ of
Catalan literature. Then, when wars were lost and its institutions
stifled in the early eighteenth century, Catalan virtually ceased
to exist as a written language. Partial revival came only in the
nineteenth-century Renaixença and the early twentieth-century
Noucentisme, leading to new use as a language of written literature.
Significant standardization measures also date from the beginning
of the century: the Institute of Catalan Studies was founded in
1907; modern spelling norms were published in 1913, followed by
standard dictionaries and grammars. Catalan finally regained official
status under the Second Republic (1931-1939) yet lost that status
when the Republic lost the Spanish Civil War. There followed a
period of further repression under the 40 odd years of the Franco
regime, the end of which only really came in the Spanish Constitution
of 1978. The constitution accords Catalan co-official status in
Catalonia, alongside Spanish, just as Basque and Galician are
co-official in their respective regions. Spain’s multilingualism
is nevertheless profoundly asymmetrical, since Spanish remains
the only language with official status throughout the whole of
country.
Such might be the story of Catalan as it is felt by its speakers:
a glorified if distant past, repression from Spanish, a brief
period of modern revival, then further attempts from Madrid to
enact what some Catalan nationalists do not hesitate to call ‘linguistic
genocide’. The general scheme means that the political identity
of Catalan is often decidedly oppositional, defined in terms of
the imposition of Spanish and adopting the role of the unjustly
treated underdog.
For this very reason the current situation of Catalan is difficult
to assess. There is little linguistic doubt that the language
is spoken in Catalonia, in the region of Valencia, the Balearic
Islands, a stretch along the Aragonese border, Andorra, the Pyrénées
Orientales in France, and the Sardinian city of Alguer. This could
give a total area of some 68,000 km2 and a population of more
than eleven million people—a sizeable European country by any
standards. However, multilingualism means that not everyone in
this geographical area actually uses the language. Figures from
the early 1990s suggest that some 5,691,000 people speak Catalan
to one degree or another, although rather more say they understand
it and significantly less say they can write it.
Competence in the written language can nevertheless be expected
to grow with the passing of generations. Catalan is now present
in all secondary and tertiary education in Catalonia. Good knowledge
of the language is required of permanent staff in the various
public administrations, including teachers of foreign languages,
and a system of public exams remains unquestioned as the measure
of skills (there seems to have been no parallel to the 1989 Groener
hearings concerning the obligation to learn Irish in similar circumstances).
Catalan is the sole language of two government-run Catalonia-wide
television channels which have a marked influence on children’s
language and create a strong demand for the dubbing of films into
the language. Subtitling is used only occasionally for the more
specialized cultural products. Catalan has a significant presence
in the other media as well. One daily newspaper is written in
Spanish and machine-translated into Catalan, requiring almost
no revision for syntactic differences and only reduced postediting
for word length as it affects layout. An impressive array of computer
software is available in Catalan, thanks to subsidized translations.
Government subsidies similarly feed the official terminology service,
which supplies purist neologisms at a rate inevitably behind the
demands of front-line translators. There is a telephone service
to answer doubts about official Catalan usage, and considerable
indirect investment in university departments privileging terminology
and sociolinguistics. The standardization of the language—ambiguously
called ‘normalization’, in keeping with the jargon of similar
experiences in Quebec—is a reality in many fields of science and
technology. In all, the revival of Catalan must be considered
a success.
Yet the statistics and the technology certainly do not mean that
everyone who uses Catalan would name it as their first language.
This is where numbers and hype give way to politics; the ideal
revival descends into messy ideology. There are at least
two problems here: internal regional diversity, and historical
immigration patterns.
Catalan is not just one thing. The language has two main varieties,
East and West. There are also legitimate linguistic grounds for
called the Valencian language a further variety of Catalan, and
much the same might be said for Majorcan, although in both contexts
there are also heated political reasons for not putting all the
varieties under the one centralized umbrella. In more minor contexts,
especially on the fringes of the territory, local variations differ
so markedly from official or ‘television’ Catalan that some speakers
hesitate to identify their language as Catalan at all. This range
of varieties and attitudes quickly reveals the social ambiguities
of standardization. As the varieties of Barcelona tend to become
‘standard Catalan’—despite official claims to the contrary—, the
linguistic hegemony deemed typical of Spanish cannot help but
be repeated within Catalan itself. The role of the mistreated
underdog could then logically shift to the regional varieties
now threatened by the success of standardized Catalan.
The ideological purity of language revival is further perturbed
by the question of population movements within Spain. Economic
growth in Catalonia brought massive immigration from Spanish-speaking
areas, to the extent that some 40% of the current population would
have at least one parent born outside Catalonia. This means that
there is increasing use of Catalan as a second language, one that
has often been learned for economic or social purposes. Language
use thus need not correspond to any Romantic authenticity or deep
identity structure, and certainly not to underdog status. Catalan
is now the language of the dominant social class to which the
children of immigrants often aspire; money speaks Catalan.
Thsi fundamental change in status is reflected in a change in
the arguments used for the promotion of Catalan. In the initial
post-Franco period and into the 1980s, the future of Catalan tended
to be seen as a fight for survival. Any inroad into the
hegemonic dominance of Spanish was for the better; educational
immersion in Catalan could be considered superior to a functionally
bilingual school. The pro-Catalan movement thus targeted Spanish
as an imperialist imposition, pointing out that the co-official
status of Catalan could not be complete until the language was
uniformly present in all spheres of public life. According to
this reasoning, co-officiality meant an absolute right to use
Catalan in any situation. Only this could put an end to the functionally
asymmetric relation between the two languages. Everyone should
master Catalan.
The actual policies applied in the 1980s were thankfully more
subtle than this. They were based on a step-by-step negotiations
between the political elites of Barcelona and Madrid. If any ideal
equality between state and regional languages was at stake, it
was not presented as an outright demand. More important, this
strategic development increasingly benefited from two major factors
that are perhaps specific to the Spanish situation.
First, unlike the ETA movement which has long struggled for the
independence of the Basque Country on the other side of northern
Spain, violent campaigns in favour of Catalan independence died
fairly quickly. Calls for complete Catalan independence may have
lost their physical violence precisely because concessions were
made in the linguistic sphere—if people can use their language,
they’re less likely to kill for independence. In the case of Basque,
on the other hand, the reduced number of speakers and the intrinsic
difficulties of the language meant that linguistic policy was
less ueful as a bargaining chip.
The second factor has then been the main Catalan nationalist
party’s considerable weight within Spanish politics, where in
recent years it has participated in both left-wing and right-wing
ruling coalitions at State level. In such contexts, language policy
is just one item in lengthening lists of decentralizing measures
that have been moving Spain in the direction of a federation.
Due to this combination of factors, the public debates are no
longer those of the 1980s. Now it is the Spanish-speaking population
of Catalonia that tends to insist on the right to use Spanish
in all spheres of public life, as guaranteed by the constitution.
Perhaps paradoxically, arguments against the imposition of Catalan
are increasingly framed in terms of a right to a multilingual
society. The ideological shoe is now on the other foot.
The most recent occasions for such reversed modes of argument
have been furnished by the 1998 Catalan law that seeks to extend
further the status of the language, envisaging its presence throughout
the legal system and allowing the government to set language quotas
for cultural products. Although the battle for the courts has
yet to take place, several skirmishes have followed the attempt
to have 25% of all major films dubbed into Catalan, with a system
of fines for distributors and cinemas that do not conform. Public
debate of the issue took place in early 1999; the distribution
companies threatened simply to not screen their major films in
Catalonia; the quota-wielding decree was promptly put on ice,
and at the time of writing no one really knows what will happen.
In effect, this means that Catalan has challenged the politics
of mainstream international culture; the mouse has roared; but
the appeal of Hollywood may have more political clout than does
the defence of a language. What is more interesting is perhaps
the fact that the issue is not directly financial as far as the
distribution companies are concerned. Since the films will eventually
be dubbed for Catalan television anyway, the Catalan authorities
are quite prepared to subsidize the dubbing for first cinema releases.
The problem is that, if this is done for Catalan, then a precedent
may be set for all the other stateless languages across Europe.
And if that happens, cultural distribution could risk becoming
a detailed and time-consuming business, sacrificing international
efficiency to the politics of regional identity. Only in terms
of this logic could the distributors threaten not to screen their
films in Catalonia. After all, if one stateless nation could insist
on its language, all the rest might follow suite.
So is Catalan a really model for other stateless languages? More
exactly, can contemporary language revival be achieved by money
alone, or even money plus sharp political skill? The answer must
clearly depend on very specific combinations of factors. And the
model is not yet one of absolute success.
No matter what happens with the dispute over international films,
one can legitimately argue that Catalan is now at least on a par
with official European-Union languages such as Danish and Finnish,
and that more recognition is thus merited. Yet nothing can hide
the fact that, in the ‘Europe des patries’ such as we still have
it, the large nations states protect their sovereign cultures.
In part, they do so by insisting that the EU’s official languages
are those that have official status in the entire territory of
a member state. So when the governments of Catalonia and the Balearic
Islands requested enhanced status in Europe, the EU issued a 1990
report praising the language but insisting Catalan could not be
official within European institutions. Perhaps something similar
could be seen in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, where the fact
that Catalan was indeed an official language (alongside English,
French and Spanish) simply meant that the Catalan translators
operated in lieu of a Catalan sporting team. Linguistic representation
may buy cost-effective symbols at local level; it may stop politics
becoming violent; it may help oil the wheels of decentralization
and provide engaging public debate. But to gain greater status
and actually compete, it seems our languages still need a State.
Further information:
http://cultura.gencat.es/portic/index.htm
http://www.gencat.es/dgsi/rel/tipus.htm
http://www.gencat.es/lleicat/cindex.htm
http://www.fut.es/~apym/olympics.html
Last update: 8 July 1999
© Anthony
Pym 2014
URV. Av. Catalunya, 35
45002 Tarragona, Spain
Fax: + 34 977 299 488
