Language, Ideology, and the Press in Catalonia

Abstract

This article, relying on Bakhtin's approach to canonization, demonstrates an empirical link between language and ideology. The authors employ content and discourse analysis to examine political discourse exemplified in editorial writing as a particular speech genre. They scrutinize editorials in four newspapers published in Catalonia, two of them in Castilian and two in Catalan. Despite political differences between the papers in each language, the authors discern a Catalan‐language discourse style that differs significantly from the Caslilian‐language discourse style. They conclude that the historically canonized discourse styles, different in Catalonia's Castilian and Catalan press, reflect the intimate relationship between language of use and ideology.

Standardizing opinion

“…6 In addition to performing participant observation and interviews at l'Avui and El Periódico, I also collected a set of original and published letters to the editor, which forms the focus of this article. Laitin and Rodríguez Gómez (1992) point out the usefulness of examining newspaper opinion pages for clues to language ideology in Catalonia. They analyze, following Bakhtin, the "canonization" of separate language-specific styles of political discourse for the Castilian and Catalan newspaper presses in Catalonia in 1985.…”