Abstract
During the contemporary political period, the Catalan language has been shaped by many language policies carried out by actors as diverse as political institutions, cultural and political elites and speakers. For ages Catalan had lived in a diglossia but by the end of the 19th century the Catalan cultural elites shared the same objective: Catalan had to become a modern and official language in a plurilingual society. For several decades Catalan regained its place in important areas, but from the beginning of the Franco regime Castilian became, de facto, its sole language. Many Republicans had to flee and for Catalan exiles, their language became a shelter, a sort of territory of the sacred. During the dictatorship, Catalan society as a whole also had to decide upon a ‘linguistic policy ’ of their own in the private and family sphere. From the 1960s Catalan culture began a deep process of modernization while Catalonia started to gain a new identity, that of a host country. The population of Catalonia increased notably, thanks in large part to immigration from the rest of Spain. A significant number of the “other Catalans”, somehow went on to make Catalan their own, at least passively. During the Spanish transition, there was a broad consensus that the new democracy needed to be constructed with a rather different attitude toward languages than that which had prevailed in the Franco period.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that, from 1880 onwards, the Catalanists began to express the need for Catalan to be an official language; the first time this demand was made was at the first Catalanist Congress, organised by Valentí Almirall in 1881and the demand began to spread progressively (see Escribano 2015). For a general history of the diglossia in Catalonia, see Vallverdú (1970) and the various studies carried out in recent decades by Joan-Lluís Marfany, who focuses on the centuries of the Modern Era and the first half of the 19th century; see, i.e., Marfany (2008). On the notion of the ‘national language’ among Catalanists at the end of the 19th century, see Llorens i Vila (1992). On Almirall’s ideas on language, see Pich i Mitjana (2005).
- 2.
In their study, Sociolingüística de la llengua catalana, Boix and Vila (1998, 34–43) outlined the sociolinguistic history of Catalan and presented Fabra’s corpus planning as the beginning of the ‘pre-sociolinguistic period’. For the language policy carried out by Catalan institutions during the first two decades of the last century, see Grau (2006, 2015)
- 3.
In the last two decades, a number of studies have looked into the political and journalistic side of Rovira i Virgili. For an overall view of his thinking in relation to the language, see Ginebra (2006).
- 4.
Translator’s note: Rovira describes Castilian as a “hoste sobrevingut” which translates as a “newly-arrived guest”. However, ‘sobrevingut’ also describes new family members arising from marriage, i.e., the in-laws. In other words, Castilian is something of a “language-in-law”.
- 5.
See Rovira i Virgili (2009, 20). A similar approach can be seen in another of his works, Història dels moviments nacionalistes, (Rovira i Virgili 2008, 535) in which he is very confident about his political expectations precisely because of the great vitality of the language in oral usage. On the other hand, it should be noted that Castilian-speaking immigrants would assume significant proportions from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. The citations I use for this author refer to the modern re-editions of his work by Xavier Ferré i Trill.
- 6.
Ferré i Trill (2004, 205–206).
- 7.
Nevertheless, the term ‘official language’ had actually been used in Spanish legislation before. The first time concerned the education law of December 19, 1902: teachers were to teach students the “idioma patrio e idioma oficial.” In the constitutional legislation, the idea appeared in the provisional draft of the constitution of the monarchy, presented on July 6, 1929, in Article 8: “The official language of the Spanish Nation is Castilian” (González Ollé 1978; Escribano 2014, 2015).
- 8.
- 9.
According to the censor, Casas-Carbó’s book was “a crude panegyric of what Catalan is” expanded from information from an encyclopaedia and with too little information on Castilian (Gallofré 1991, 85–86). As for Franco himself, it seems the only time he expressed his linguistic ideology publicly was in a speech made during the war in which he declared: “The character of each region will be respected, but without detriment to national unity, which we want to be absolute, with only one language—Castilian—and only one personality—Spanish.” These declarations by Franco in January 1938, were published in a Brazilian newspaper and collected in 1939 in the book, Palabras del Caudillo, cited by authors such as Benet (1995, 98), Ballester (2006, 25).
- 10.
Various academics have investigated this issue, all of whom have noted the different points of view regarding Catalan that existed within the Francoist side during the war years; see Gallofré (1991), Benet (1995), Thomàs (1998), Clotet i Torra (2010). There are also several very relevant testimonies of the time to be found in a number of memoirs: see Serrano Suñer (1977, 186), Ridruejo (2007), head of the Propaganda service; and the memories of Martí de Riquer collected by Gatell i Soler (2008). With regard to the bilingual pamphlets printed for distribution in Barcelona, a reproduction can be found in Súñer’s memoirs (1977, 435–440); for the letter from Canon Montagut, see Gallofré (1991, 483–485); regarding the linguistic policy of the Franco regime in the Valencian Country, see Ballester (2006, 11–52).
- 11.
- 12.
From 1939 on, the censors established lists of prohibited authors to control the catalogues of publishers and purge those books that the new regime considered inconvenient or dangerous. The banned works by Fabra appear alongside many other Catalan books included in a 1939 list pertaining to the Barcino publishing house (Gallofré 1991, 23–24).
- 13.
There are plenty of witnesses to this feeling among pro-Franco Catalans. A number of them are, for example, mentioned by Gallofré (1991, 10).
- 14.
- 15.
For more on teachers and the field of education in general, see Marquès (1995).
- 16.
Various academics have calculated the number of titles published in Catalan during the harshest years of the Franco regime. Between 1939 and 1945 there was a total of 441, authorized in Spain or printed in exile Between 1945 and 1951, 200 titles were published in Catalan (see Clotet and Torra 2010).
- 17.
A great comprehensive study on the Francoist repression was carried out by Josep Benet. From this interpretative framework, numerous studies have been published as monographs: on censorship during the first decades (Gallofré 1991) and until the end of the Franco regime (Clotet and Torra 2010), on the underground Catalan culture (Samsó 1995) and on Francoism and the other Catalan-speaking countries (Massot i Muntaner 1978a, b). These academics have used the terms “cultural genocide ” (Benet 1995) and “ethnocide” (Clotet i Torra 2010).
- 18.
Tasis developed this reflection in a kind of chronicle on two conferences that took place at the Sorbonne, published in La Nostra Revista in Mexico in 1946. His surprise was so great that Tasis needed to confirm his perception with that of an authority on the subject, his fellow-exile, Pompeu Fabra. Rovira i Virgili also reflected on the balsamic effect of the vitality of the language in his memoirs. For a general account on this question, see Iglésias (2016a).
- 19.
“Carta de París” [Letter from Paris], La Nostra Revista, Nº 1, Mexico, 1946, p. 22; cf. Manent (1989, p. 24).
- 20.
Letter from Antoni Rovira i Virgili to Amadeu Hurtado, Perpinyà, 25.11.1947 (Capdevila 2002, c. 396, p. 673–676).
- 21.
In this debate, there were authors who argued that literary bilingualism was commonplace among Catalan writers and had been for decades—or even centuries, if one side was to be believed—while others advanced more refined arguments that Catalan was the language chosen by the vast majority of writers of literary fiction. For a critical analysis of this debate, see Vallverdú (1968, 73–88) and Cornellà-Deltrell (2011, 35–50).
- 22.
For more on the discontinuance of Catalan as the family language in North Catalonia, see the study by Montoya (2014). As we pointed out earlier, in the 1940s, the Catalan exiles had noted, and been surprised by, the vitality of Catalan in these areas. But it is worth noting that they also noted the differences between the more francophone capital, Perpignan, and the rest of the North-Catalan territory. In addition, a number of exiles recorded in their memoirs that North-Catalan speech was a slightly different variety, often ascribed, sometimes wrongly, to the influence of French. Among the exiles, intellectuals such as Pompeu Fabra or Rafael Tasis even discussed how the situation of the language in the city was improving as a result of the arrival of exiled Catalan Republicans. For an analysis of this issue, see Iglésias (2016b).
- 23.
We must not forget that, regardless of the family language, during the years of the Republic, there was already a cultured bourgeoisie in Barcelona that had Castilian as a language of social relationship. On the change of language among certain Barcelona families in 1939, see Boix and Moran (2014).
- 24.
The proportion of Catalan books censured ranged between 20 and 60% depending on the year. At the beginning of the 1960s, 26.5% of books were affected, towards the end of the decade, around 37%, from 1969 onwards, up to 61.5%. Then between 1974 and 1977, there were still 22.6% of publications affected, according to a study by Van den Hout cited by Clotet and Torra (2010, 12–13).
- 25.
Recently, Saurí (2015) defended a magnificent doctoral thesis on this subject. His anthropological and sociolinguistic approach, which eschews the classic approaches of cultural or political history , has uncovered new ways of interpreting and understanding the issues of language under the Franco regime. An earlier attempt to incorporate Castilian-speaking citizens into the history of the Catalan language under the Franco regime can also be found in Iglésias (2010).
- 26.
Cited by Lebensaft (1990) in his study of the debate on languages in this Madrid-based newspaper. It should be noted that the bilingual editorial criticized the “nationalist” aspirations of, among others, Catalan and Valencian collectives, with regard to the right to self-determination of what El Pais referred to as “nationalities” (https://elpais.com/diario/1976/09/03/portada/210549603_850215.html).
- 27.
See Sobrequés (2010), who reproduces this speech in the appendix.
- 28.
During the transition years, various steps were taken to keep anticatalanist feeling alive in Valencia. For example, in 1976, to prevent the great philologist Manuel Sanchis Guarner from becoming president of Lo Rat Penat [a Valencian cultural society], long-serving members of the Organización Civil Española joined the Valencian organization en masse. The great philologist’s candidacy was defeated and the society gravitated toward Spanish nationalism and became secessionist (i.e., they argued Valencian and Catalan were different languages): the Gramàtica valenciana by Carles Salvador was abandoned as a language teaching manual; the orthographic rules of Miquel Adlert were promoted; there was a blacklist of forbidden works and people; Castilian was adopted as the main language of the society. For Sanchis Guarner, 1978 was a terrible year: “He received death threats, his physical health was endangered, the entrance to his home came under attack, his lectures were interrupted, his work misrepresented and, worst of all, he was subjected to a relentless moral lynching.” Cortés (2002, 329) in his excellent book on the eminent linguist and philologist.
- 29.
Diari de sessions del Parlament de Catalunya [Official record of the parliament of Catalonia], n. 4, 1980, p. 22.
- 30.
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Iglésias, N. (2019). Language Policies in Contemporary Catalonia: A History of Linguistic and Political Ideas. In: Casanovas, P., Corretger, M., Salvador, V. (eds) The Rise of Catalan Identity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18144-4_5
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