Chapter 6 Social class, linguistic normativity and the authority of the “native Catalan speaker” in Barcelona

Minority language ownership and authority: perspectives of native speakers and new speakers

“…Hickey (2013) argued that this highlighted the vulnerability of native speaker authority and legitimacy when L2 learners are perceived to have higher status in certain contexts than native speakers. This has been found in other contexts also, for example Frekko (2009) Questions of authenticity are intertwined with origin, the view that authentic speakers are 'from somewhere', and are bound to both geographical roots and a defined community.…”

Castilian Takes Backstage in the Balearic Islands: The Activation of Catalan Standardization Recursions in Facebook

“…In Catalonia, ethnographic research has shown that people may perceive that Catalan overemphasizes its normativity, following “the model of the Western European national standard language” (Frekko , 180). As a result of the linguistic institutionalization of the last 30 years, “an ideology of standard—the notion that variability in writing and speaking should be minimized—IS prevalent in Catalonia” (Frekko , 74), an outcome “which is not the only solution to the problem of how to institutionalize a minority language” (Frekko , 180), as the Corsican case exemplifies (Jaffe ). Distinguishing between establishment and standardization also explains the higher salience of the recursions of standardization for minority languages.…”

“…The standardizing institution of the Catalan language is the Catalan Studies Institute (Institut d'Estudis Catalans, IEC), based in Barcelona. The IEC manages the normativa (“the standard as institutionally codified,” Frekko , 163), which in Catalan sociolinguistic literature is distinct from the estàndard (the standard as “the abstract notion of a shared, uniform code,” Frekko , 163). Both are interrelated, since “the goal of the normativa is to achieve an estàndard ” (Frekko , 164), and the latter refers to what here is meant by “standard.” The Catalan standard is based on the Central Catalonia varieties (Azevedo ; Costa ), but regional variation from Valencia and the BI is licensed.…”

Learning a minoritized language in a majority language context: student agency and the creation of micro-immersion contexts

“…Associated linguistic ideologies affording Spanish increased social status were exacerbated by repressive policies toward Galician and other minoritized languages in Spain (such as Catalan and Euskera) during the Franco dictatorship. While Catalan speakers tend to hold positions of economic and political power and to control language policy (Frekko 2009), Galician's lower social status and its diminishing social presence continue to be fueled in Galicia by a relative lack of quality Galician media (Lorenzo Suárez, Ramallo, and Berg Casares 2008) and educational policies that favor Spanish medium instruction in schools (DePalma and Teasley 2012). Similar associations with a largely rural past have been identified in the case of the Basque language, even in modern teaching materials (Echeverria 2010).…”

“…These popular (spoken) varieties of Galician now coexist in new situations of diglossia with the normative Galician that is employed in educational and administrative contexts, and the same people who have managed to keep the language alive may now be considered and consider themselves to speak impure varieties of the revitalized language (Roseman 1995). Frekko (2009) found a similar situation in her study involving a Catalan course for adults where native speakers of Catalan enjoyed less linguistic authority than their nonnative-speaking classmates; this authority seemed to be related to social class and, more specifically, to formal schooling in Catalan and the ability to recite linguistic rules.…”