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Discussion: Minority Language Rights in Northern Catalonia

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Language Attitudes and Minority Rights

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Abstract

Hawkey utilises the experimental findings of the project to benefit the community, through the proposal of language policy recommendations. In order to pinpoint the needs of Catalan speakers in Northern Catalonia, Hawkey compares the situation in the region against a number of language rights benchmarks, as advanced in the Girona Manifesto. Unsurprisingly, support for Catalan in France is shown to fall short of ambitious language rights suggestions. Comparatively modest revitalisation efforts are suggested, involving the increased presence of Catalan in the media and education sectors. He concludes that the most suitable vehicular language for such efforts is supralocal (and not local) Catalan. This decision is supported by the abundance of extant resources in supralocal Catalan, as well as the existing presence of supralocal varieties in the region, and the typological similarity between supralocal and local varieties.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With these concerns in mind, Peytaví Deixona (2016) also addresses the issue of how to adopt normative varieties in such a way that preserves Rossellonese Catalan usage as far as possible. He proposes a ‘complementary dialectal model’ (Peytaví Deixona 2016: 33), which is potentially inspired by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans Proposta per a un estàndard oral de la llengua catalana (1999) in its differentiation along the lines of register (IEC 1999: 11). In Peytaví Deixona’s model, more formal registers call for the usage of variants that are closer to the supralocal standard (or at the very least, use of markedly local variants is discouraged in such situations) (Peytaví Deixona 2016: 36–37). As such, there are clear parallels with my ‘middle ground’ proposal, although I do not draw such clear distinctions along the line of register, due to the inherently problematic nature of applying normativising criteria to informal speech styles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    James Hawkey

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Hawkey, J. (2018). Discussion: Minority Language Rights in Northern Catalonia. In: Language Attitudes and Minority Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74597-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74597-8_6

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