Kim Schulte, University Jaume I
At first sight, Spain appears to be a country with a modern, open and progressive approach to the challenges of a postmonolingual society; crucially, article 3.2 of the 1978 Spanish constitution guarantees individual regions (‘comunidades autónomas’ in Spanish) the right to give their language co-official status. The use of the three existing co-official regional languages (Basque, Catalan and Galician) in formal and official contexts is gradually losing its social stigma due to their legal status and policies that proactively encourage their use. Other minority languages are, nevertheless, far less privileged.
On the one hand, several indigenous historically established Ibero-Romance languages such as Asturian and Aragonese, —the former with more than 100,000 native speakers— have comparatively limited protection and recognition. This raises pertinent questions about the criteria that have led to a distinction between first- and second-class regional languages.
On the other hand, migration in recent decades has led to the emergence of large linguistic communities whose languages have no official status or recognition at all. Thus, there are more native Arabic and Romanian speakers resident in Spain (around 1m in both cases) than native Basque speakers, and in some areas inhabitants of Romanian origin account for more than 20% of the population (cf. e.g. Viruela, 2008). These minorities are far more dependent on access to public services in their respective language, given that most of them have not passed through the Spanish education system and have, therefore, not had the opportunity to acquire a level of Castilian Spanish (or of one of the co-official languages) that would enable them to fully understand complex official or legal documents. Nevertheless, there appears to be little or no intention to provide them with an equitative linguistic acess.
This paper aims to offer an in-depth analysis of the underlying social and political factors that give rise to this prioritization of some minority languages over others, adopting a postmonolingual approach that combines concepts from postcolonial theory (hybridity, neocolonialism) with notions that are central to sociolinguistics, such as prestige, diglossia and language attitudes (cf. Garrett et al., 2003). Ultimately, it is argued that the status and recognition of a minority language is primarily the result of a complex combination of historical, political and economic factors, in which the speakers’ actual need to use their native language is of marginal importance.
References:
Cortes Generales. 1978. “Constitución Española”, Boletín Oficial del Estado: Gaceta de Madrid 311.1.
Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland and Angie Williams. 2003. Investigating Language Attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity, and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Viruela, Rafael. 2008. “De Este a Oeste: la inmigración desde los nuevos países comunitarios (Rumania y Bulgaria)”, Cuadernos de Geografía 84: 127-134.