By Christopher A.
Despite the loss of formal constitutional independence of the Crown of
Aragon from the one of Castile in 1716 and official ban of using the
Catalan language in administration and education by the Castilan
monarch (Nuevo Planta decrees), the Catalan language resisted strongly
against the Castilanization in Catalonia throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries as well as the first third of the 20th century, largely
assisted by a cultural renaissance (La Renaixença), brief restoration
of autonomy, and modern nationalist movement across the social sphere,
including the bourgeois.
After becoming one of the first regions in Spain to undergo an
industrial revolution, Spanish only pierced into a minority of civil
servants and segments of the elite. The advanced economic progress in
Catalonia long demanded unemployed Spanish workers from the poorer
regions and they came in numbers that did not overwhelm the native
population. So, within a generation or so, the newcomers were
catalanized and this norm continued until the capture of Barcelona by
the Spanish nationalist forces in 1939 during the Spanish Civil War.
During the four decades of repressive dictatorship under Franco, the
policies strictly banned the public use of minority languages in the
country, thus striking Catalan hard. Then during the economic miracle
between the 1950s to the 1970s, unskilled immigrants came to Catalonia
in waves, stressing its absorptive capacity to the seams. They settled
in cities surrounding Barcelona (the Vallès, Maresme, and Llobregat
comarcas), creating Spanish-speaking belts isolated from the native
population. Combining the huge number of immigrants with anti-Catalan
policies of Franco, the convention of effortless and rapid linguistic
assimilation to Catalan was shattered as there was no easy mean of
introducing the language to the immigrants. As the result, the native
population found themselves in the minority in their own homeland.
Children of these newcomers, many of whom were born in Catalonia, were
little exposed to Catalan and the Spanish-only education produced a
generation with no opportunity to acquire or polish their Catalan
literacy skills. This limitation still plagues older Catalans today
and it adds to the complexity of linguistic normalization policies set
by the Generalitat to repair the devastating damages to the language
during Francoism and to restore the pre-civil war assimilation norm.
Upon the death of Franco in 1975, Spain underwent a peaceful
transition to democracy that allowed to restore the Generatitat and
pro-Catalan initiatives. Via Catalan-medium education, literacy has
improved considerably and the Spanish-speaking immigrants, while still
vocal and resistant, are slowly adapting to the new reality. Young
native Catalans with less than functional Spanish speaking skill are
appearing in the villages and towns out in the countryside, a sign of
further linguistic restoration.
Similar effects have been observed in other Catalan-speaking regions
in Spain (the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands, and the Franja
de Ponent), but the case of Northern Catalonia in France and Alghero
in Italy was different, mainly due to the long-term pro-French and
pro-Italian policies regardless of government. In Andorra, the world's
only independent Catalan-speaking nation, the language was mostly
untouched due to the relative isolation from the world that ended in
the 1990s.
Even after remarkable improvements, Catalan continues to be a
secondary language to Spanish, French, and Italian. In Spain, knowing
Spanish is a constitutional and civil duty and a primary language of
the state and autonomous communities, with an important exception of
the Catalan-medium education system in Catalonia that only provides
two hours of lessons in Spanish, whereas knowing Catalan is not
legally required and speakers do not have the right to use it in
federal institutions. Attempts to bring Catalan to an equal status as
Spanish have been struck down by courts and the central government.
Without major constitutional reforms, which requires consent of all
Spanish voters, it seem to be highly unlikely that Catalan will stand
at the same podium as Spanish while still being part of Spain and it
prevents the speakers from being at ease when the foreseeable future
is rather cloudy.
Although it may seem like an eternity when Franco died, the imprints
of Francoism still remain deeply embedded in Catalonia and the Catalan
memory and while it is still unthinkable that some form of Francoism
would return, the stable vitality of the language remains far from
assured due to the attempts to reduce its importance by the Spanish
nationalists in the name of the supremacy of the Spanish language and
nation.
http://linguisticshoebox.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/the-catalan-situation/
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