Greater attention is paid to oral language by the new prescriptive grammar of Catalan recently issued by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, and several prescriptive or guiding texts on the same topic published by Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua have put under focus a territorial conflict on language authority and raised questions on the limits between external authority and personal competence in a field (spoken language) especially favorable for the persistence of diversity. This chapter offers a discussion on prescriptivism and standardization in contemporary Catalan, and the conflict experienced on two axes: horizontal or territorial and vertical or bottom-up/top-down options in prescriptivism.
TopIntroduction
Traditionally, standardization of a language has focused on its written form. In a time when long-distance communication was only available by writing, dialectal borders did not check oral language quality. Wherever normal oral communication has been a well-established fact, access to new (oral) mass-communication systems has been a straightforward process. However, in areas where a bilingual diglossic relation has occurred, other rules have been put in place. In recent years, the struggle to establish Catalan as a completely functional language has encountered the problems of dialectal dispersion in oral usages. In addition, Catalan dialects, as is usual in languages, are defined mainly on a phonetic basis. This paper deals with such problems and with strategies oriented towards the codification of the oral language in a community facing division caused by linguistic factors underpinned by, and reinforcing, cultural identities. The enormous ideological burden carried by any language reform in Catalan should not be neglected. Reasons for this are deeply rooted in the modern construction of Catalan cultural identity. Language shaping mirrors political prospects for the speaking community. Ideas on community size (either reduced to one of the Catalan-speaking territories or adjusted to their totality), and on the role of language authority (as leading modernization or as registering linguistic change), make the situation even more complex.
Two further circumstances should be taken into account: (a) The legal dispersion of the Catalan-speaking community, divided into four autonomous regions under Spanish administration (Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and Aragon), a French department (Northern Catalonia), an Italian town (l’Alghero), and Andorra. (b) Language prescription in Catalan is not a blank sheet of paper. The task of language modernization undertaken by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans during the first third of the 20th century, and the legacy of Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948) always occupy the center of the debate. Boix-Fuster & Woolard (2020) provide an accurate picture of the situation:
By the turn of the 20th century the main dynamic of Catalan culture affirmed modernity with a nationalist emphasis, still focusing on language as an icon of the nation (Prat de la Riba 1906). Catalanism enjoyed the support of sectors of the bourgeoisie. This allowed both language reform (Costa 2009) and some public, official use of Catalan (Galí 1979). The language reformer Pompeu Fabra saw Catalan as a symbol of the nation that needed decastilianization and purification. His ideology of the language paralleled nationalist values: a high degree of internal cohesion coupled with a sharp divergence from external groups and languages (Lamuela/Murgades 1984). Fabra’s reform succeeded more in Catalonia, but less so in Valencia and the Balearics (Boix-Fuster & Woolard, 2020, 710).
The debate on the need for a planned standard language or the feasibility of an unbound and widely accepted common variety of the oral language spontaneously arisen is highlighted below. The main point is to clarify the extent of political struggles and interferences in the functional evolution of a language. In order to reach a standpoint for a general comprehension of the competing strategies, we shall recall the main achievements of modern Catalan standardization. Tendencies and prospects will subsequently be analyzed according to territorial and methodological conflicts on the matter..
TopBackground
Veny (1985, pp. 30-38) compiles up to eleven different classifications of Catalan dialects, starting with Milà i Fontanals (1875) and ending with Veny (1978). The basis of comparison among dialects is basically phonological, complemented in some cases with morphological information arising from conjugation and the two series of definite articles existing in present-day Catalan (ipse, ipsa > es, sa; ille, illa > el, la). Milà i Fontanals classified Catalan dialects in Western and Eastern according to two features: the existence of a schwa and the substitution of [u] for /o/ in the unstressed vowel system: