Papers presented at the "Coloquio Internacional Relaciones entre Lengua, Naciâon, Indentidad y Poder en Espaäna, Hispanoamâerica y Estados Unidos", held June 2-4, 2005, in Berlin.
Winner of the Ramon Llull International Prize Winner of the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize A vibrant and surprisingly powerful civic and political movement for an independent Catalonia has brought renewed urgency to questions about what it means, personally and politically, to speak or not to speak Catalan and to claim Catalan identity. In this book, Kathryn Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and uses it to illuminate the politics of language in Spain and Catalonia, where Catalan jostles with Castilian for legitimacy. Longitudinal research across decades of political autonomy contextualizes this ethnographic study of the social meaning of Catalan in the 21st century. Part I lays out the ideologies of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, and naturalism that typically underpin linguistic authority in the modern western world, and gives an overview of a shift in the ideological grounding of linguistic authority in contemporary Catalonia. Part II examines discourses in the media surrounding three public linguistic controversies: an immigrant president's linguistic competence, a municipal festival, and an international book fair. Part III explores individuals' linguistic practices and views, drawing on classroom ethnographies and interviews with two generations of young people from the same high school. The book argues that there is an ongoing shift at both public and personal levels away from the ethnolinguistic authenticity that powered relations in the early transition to political autonomy, and toward new discourses of anonymity, rooted cosmopolitanism, and authenticity understood as a project rather than a matter of origins and essence. This shift is reflected in the current sovereignty movement.
This book comprises various chapters which explore a variety of topics related to the manner in which ideological and epistemological changes in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries shaped the Spanish language, literature, and film, among other forms of expression, in both Spain and Latin America, and how these media served the purpose of spreading ideas and demands. There are articles on ideological representations of linguistic differences and sameness; linguistic changes associated with loan words and the ideas they bring in modifying our communicative landscape; the role of the Catholic religion on the construction of our dictionary; analysis of some political discourses, ideologies and social imaginaries; new visions of old literature (a return to the parody in the Middle Ages to analyze its moderness) and postmodern narrative; discussions on contemporary Spanish poetry and Central American literature; a new return to the liberation philosophy by analyzing Ellacuría´s work; and several studies about concepts such as capitalism, patriarchy, identity, masculinity, homosexuality, globalization, and the Resistence in several forms of expression.
This manual is intended to fill a gap in the area of Romance studies. There is no introduction available so far that broadly covers the field of Catalan linguistics, neither in Catalan nor in any other language. The work deals with the language spoken in Catalonia and Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the region of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and the town of l'Alguer in Sardinia. Besides introducing the ideologies of language and nation and the history of Catalan linguistics, the manual is divided into separate parts embracing the description – grammar, lexicon, variation and varieties – and the history of the language since the early medieval period to the present day. It also covers its current social and political situation in the new local and global contexts. The main emphasis is placed on modern Catalan. The manual is designed as a companion for students of Catalan, while also introducing specialists of other languages into this field, in particular scholars of Romance languages.
This book examines the transformation of the Catalan nation in socio-economic, political and historical terms, and offers an innovative interpretation of the determinants of its nationalist mobilisation. With Franco's and Spanish nationalism's victory in 1939, and the consolidation of a long-lasting dictatorship, it appeared certain that the Catalan national movement would be crushed. Yet, this did not happen and Catalan nationalism and identity re-emerged at the end of Franco's dictatorship in 1975 more firmly rooted than before. The core of this book traces the Francoist repression and the nationalist response to it, demonstrating how new political actors reconfigured Catalan nationalism over the course of the Franco regime (1939--1975). Post-Franco, Catalan cultural and political identity was consolidated and Catalonia became the most successful state-less nationalism in western Europe. The 21st century has been marked by an ever-growing independence movement, culminating in the vast demonstration in the city of Barcelona in July 2010. Andrew Dowling provides multi-faceted viewpoints in historic perspective, and reflects on possible steps and outcomes for this new pro-independence turn in Catalan nationalism. This study will appeal not only to students of Spain but also to those interested in nationalism as a separate issue of enquiry. The themes treated in the book -- Franco's Spain, nationalism, anarchism, Catholicism, communism and the Catalan role in Spain's transition to democracy -- make this work an essential point of reference for students and researchers in Hispanic studies, modern European history and political science. Published in association with the Catalan Observatory, London School of Economics.
The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The linguistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers a unique example. After the rise of the ideology from the 1750s onwards, the new discourse of one language–one nation was swiftly transformed into concrete top-down policies aimed at the dissemination of the newly devised standard language across the entire population of the newly established Dutch nation-state. Thus, the Dutch case offers an exciting perspective on the concomitant rise of cultural nationalism, national language planning and standard language ideology. This study offers a comprehensive yet detailed analysis of these phenomena by focussing on the ideology underpinning the new language policy, the institutionalisation of this ideology in metalinguistic discourse, the implementation of the policy in education, and the effects of the policy on actual language use.
This study explores the interaction of language, culture and identity in contemporary Catalonia and rejects the exclusion of Castilian as a language capable of expressing 'Catalan-ness'. This study, charting the construction of a Catalan identity from the nineteenth-century cultural renaissance until the present day, explores the interaction of language, culture and identity in contemporary Catalonia. Drawing on postcolonial and multicultural literary theories, it argues that Castilian- and Catalan-language narratives are expressions of the same culture. Through detailed analyses of texts by Terenci Moix, Francisco Candel, Ignasi Riera, Montserrat Roig, Juan Marsé, Ramon Pallicé, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, among others, the author demonstrates that such writers share similar preoccupations and points of view and also engage in a complex literary and cultural dialogue that cuts across the established linguistic divisions that characterise cultural politics in Catalonia. The Catalan literary establishment's exclusion of Castilian as a language capable of expressing 'Catalan-ness' ischallenged and the author proposes redefining traditional understandings of Catalan literature to take into account texts produced by all members of Catalan society. Stewart King is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Monash University, Australia.
For much of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, the per capita rate of suicide in Cuba was the highest in Latin America and among the highest in the world--a condition made all the more extraordinary in light of Cuba's historic ties to the Catholic church. In this richly illustrated social and cultural history of suicide in Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. explores the way suicide passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable in Cuban society. In a study that spans the experiences of enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese in the colony, nationalists of the twentieth-century republic, and emigrants from Cuba to Florida following the 1959 revolution, Perez finds that the act of suicide was loaded with meanings that changed over time. Analyzing the social context of suicide, he argues that in addition to confirming despair, suicide sometimes served as a way to consecrate patriotism, affirm personal agency, or protest injustice. The act was often seen by suicidal persons and their contemporaries as an entirely reasonable response to circumstances of affliction, whether economic, political, or social. Bringing an important historical perspective to the study of suicide, Perez offers a valuable new understanding of the strategies with which vast numbers of people made their way through life--if only to choose to end it. To Die in Cuba ultimately tells as much about Cubans' lives, culture, and society as it does about their self-inflicted deaths.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781138125124, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume addresses a crucial, yet largely unaddressed dimension of minority language standardization, namely how social actors engage with, support, negotiate, resist and even reject such processes. The focus is on social actors rather than language as a means for analysing the complexity and tensions inherent in contemporary standardization processes. By considering the perspectives and actions of people who participate in or are affected by minority language politics, the contributors aim to provide a comparative and nuanced analysis of the complexity and tensions inherent in minority language standardisation processes. Echoing Fasold (1984), this involves a shift in focus from a sociolinguistics of language to a sociolinguistics of people. The book addresses tensions that are born of the renewed or continued need to standardize ‘language’ in the early 21st century across the world. It proposes to go beyond the traditional macro/micro dichotomy by foregrounding the role of actors as they position themselves as users of standard forms of language, oral or written, across sociolinguistic scales. Language policy processes can be seen as practices and ideologies in action and this volume therefore investigates how social actors in a wide range of geographical settings embrace, contribute to, resist and also reject (aspects of) minority language standardization.
This book examines how German-speaking Jews living in Berlin make sense and make use of their multilingual repertoire. With a focus on lexical variation, the book demonstrates how speakers integrate Yiddish and Hebrew elements into German for indexing belonging and for positioning themselves within the Jewish community. Linguistic choices are shaped by language ideologies (e.g., authenticity, prescriptivism, nostalgia). Speakers translanguage when using their multilingual repertoire, but do so in a diglossic way, using elements from different languages for specific domains.