Abstract for “Discourse on the Language at the Valencian Congress —the Propagation of the Dichotomous Distortion”

Diamar Ferrer García, University Jaume I

During the 20^th century, a wave of migration from monolingual Spanish-speaking territories into the Valencian area brought about an increase of the Spanish influence in the latter area due to migrants not integrating linguistically. Nowadays, Catalan is a minorized language within the Valencian region which is further minorized by other international languages in the academic field, such as the English language, as an additional motivation to disregard the use of Catalan within those fields which are symbolically important for the promotion of linguistic policies. From 1995 until the 8^th Spanish Legislature, the Valencian Court was dominated by parliamentary groups which boosted the monolingual view of the central administration and caused Catalan to become minorized in some social fields such as politics and education. Against the background of these policies, opposition parliamentary groups argued in favour of enhancing the use of Catalan as a co-official language of the administration. They also positioned themselves in favour of bilingualism and multilingualism.

In this contribution the discourse of parliamentary groups with representation in the Valencian Congress on the situation of the Catalan language will be analyzed. The aim is to see which arguments have been advanced from the different regulatory positions —including as to communication with the citizenship and operating policies. The analysis of these arguments will be conducted in two phases. Firstly, topoi will be identified and analysied using a content analysis of parliamentary discourses and interviews conducted by the author. Secondly, possible cognitive distortions will be categorized to explain the propagation of certain populist tendencies in our society.

Semi-structured interviews with a member of each parliamentary group with representation in the Valencian Congress were conducted containing two specific questions related to the role of the Catalan language within the Valencian region. Further, a corpus was built with the inaugural discourses from the 1^st to the 8^th Legislatures (1983 to 2015). The analysis of the discourses and the interviews is based on critical discourse analysis. In addition, the cognitive distortion known as ‘dichotomous thinking’ is used in order to provide insights as to how the sociolinguistic panorama in the Valencian Country is structured by the different members of the political groups.