Resumen de Catalan in the twenty-first century: romantic publics and cosmopolitan communities
Kathryn A. Woolard, Susan E. Frekko
The politics surrounding identity in Catalonia traditionally have been based in a monolingual Romantic ideal that pits Catalan and Castilian against each other as two mutually exclusive languages and corresponding identities. Public discourses and debates over language policy often still draw on these traditional assumptions about language. In contrast, in the language contact zones where actual speakers live, there has been a collective restructuring of language resources over recent decades. Not only autochthonous Catalan native speakers but also individuals of varying social, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds now routinely mobilize varying forms of Catalan in varying combinations and for varying purposes in daily life. New sociolinguistic solutions, problems, and possibilities have emerged, particularly around new immigration and polylingualism brought by globalization from both above and below since the millennium. In addition to the intrinsic interest of the apparent success of Catalan language policy, the historical transformations in linguistic practices and ideologies in Catalonia permit us to explore key phenomena in current theoretical debates, including: 1) cosmopolitanism; 2) the concept of scale; 3) shifting boundaries and hybrid forms of language and identity; and 4) the shifting ground of modern ideologies of authenticity and anonymity.
