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Is Catalan under threat? | ||
Tags: Catalan | Endangered Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| manish Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5537 days ago 88 posts - 136 votes  Speaks: Romanian*, English, German Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 51 17 March 2012 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Politics (in the sense of "political entities") is ruining the unity of a language. "Serbocroatian" (for want of a better name) is one language in my mind, with different dialects, but it has been split up into four different ones based on political boundaries. What does "Croatian" actually mean? Isn't Shtokavian closer to the dialects spoken in Bosnia and Serbia than to Kajkavian? The last straw was Montenegrin, apparently any new country which forms from the former Yugoslavia has to have its own language. What's even funnier is that all four "standard languages" are based on the same dialect... Croatian is not a dialect of Serbian, and Serbian is not a dialect of Croatian. It's all one big language with many dialects, and it should be recognized as such irrespective of political borders (just like Austro-Bavarian transcends the border between Germany and Austria, and there's no magical dialect break at the border: Central Bavarian is spoken in Germany as well as Austria). The same is happening with Catalan. Instead of saying it's one language with many dialects, we're saying it's Catalan OR Valencian OR Balear, based on political entities (Catalunya, Valencia, Balearic Islands). That doesn't make any sense (if you look at a map of "Catalan" dialects you'll see that they don't coincide with political borders, except in the case of the Balearic Islands, but that's because they're, well, islands). You call them macrolanguages, I think that goes a bit far, it reminds me of Chinese or Arabic. They are just normal languages with dialects... Maybe they have unfortunate names, and the Valencians don't feel themselves represented by the name "Catalan", or Montenegrins don't feel themselves represented by "Serbocroatian". I think the energy invested in superimposing (many times) artificial political boundaries on the extent of natural languages should rather be spent on coming up with better names :P Edited by manish on 17 March 2012 at 1:32pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4630 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 18 of 51 17 March 2012 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Linguistically speaking, Valencian, Balear and Catalan are very closely interrelated and would be considered dialects of the same language. However, many Valencians do not want to associate with Catalonia, therefore they claim Valencian as a proper language. That is the political element in this. It is a bit like the difference between the Dutch spoken in Netherlands and the Dutch spoken in Flemish Belgium. However, maybe because they are different countries, the Flemish normally don't mind refering to their language as "nederlands".
In many ways, the Spanish spoken in Argentina differs more from Spanish spoken in Spain than the difference between Catalan and Valencian. However, Argentinians do refer to their language as "castellano", and do not claim that it is another language than that of Spain or Mexico for that matter. The sociologist Max Weinreich said that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy". Maybe not totally true, but as a linguist one should keep this in mind. Finally, to return to the question of this discussion, I do not believe Catalan is under threat. It managed to stay alive during the Franco dictatorship when it was banned from the public sphere, and today all Catalan political parties pursue an active policy in support of the language. However, it is clear that many Catalans will still prefer to read books and see films in Spanish, but that may be because there is more on offer. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5137 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 19 of 51 06 April 2012 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I think Messi will help...
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5121 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 20 of 51 06 April 2012 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
The internet is proving to be a real growth area for Catalan too. Twitter has an incredibly active and vocal Catalan community, as one example. And it seems every day I see posts of another (usually open source) software project being localized into Catalan. It's exciting to see so much interest. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5822 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 21 of 51 06 April 2012 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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As politically incorrect as it may sound, Catalonia can't have it both ways.
If they wish to encourage mass immigration from South America and other parts of the world then they must accept that this will erode Catalan's position in society because many immigrants will have a hard enough time learning Spanish at it is, without learning Catalan, and I suspect even few South Americans would want to learn Catalan. Small, regional languages only remain the main language if there is little immigration into that region. Catalonia is the most industrialised part of Spain that has experienced the most consistent levels of immigration and the result is the erosion of Catalan's position in society. If they thought they could become a multicultural society, and STILL maintain a local language like Catalan then they were very naive. Edited by COF on 06 April 2012 at 3:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5823 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 22 of 51 07 April 2012 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||
With the current economic climate, I think it's the Spanish who will be emigrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5822 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 23 of 51 07 April 2012 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | ||
Indeed, but from the 1980s up until about the mid 2000s, Spain was pretty prosperous, and was encouraging immigrants to fill the rapidly expanding job market, the majority of whom settled in the most industrialised and wealthy region, Catalonia. Essentially, what I am saying is the uncertain status of the Catalan language is a situation entirely of their own making and it's a well documented fact that immigration communities don't tend to learn community languages, only national languages. While not to the same extent, a similar thing can be observed in Hong Kong with many workers from the Mainland speaking only Mandarin and not really bothing to learn Cantonese to any decent level of proficiency. I've also heard a similar thing happens in Switzerland, with immigrants only learning to speak High German, and not bothering with local dialects of Swiss German. Edited by COF on 07 April 2012 at 2:30pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4893 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 24 of 51 12 April 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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No.
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