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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 273

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

National identity, language ideology, and contemporary discourses

Authors: martin-rubio, xavier
Submitted by: martin-rubio, xavier (Departament Educació Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain)

My proposal addresses the question: “How are ideological connections between language, place, and identity constructed in contemporary discourse?” An old but still hegemonic discourse in Western society is the nationalist discourse. Its ideological basis can be captured in the equation: a territory = a people = a language = a nation. Back in 2003 I started collecting ethnographic data from two high schools, one in Vitoria-Gasteiz and another one in Lleida with the intention of identifying how nationalist discourse perpetuated itself. I interviewed some students and some teachers (individually and in groups) about their feelings of allegiance, their relationship to the languages they knew, and about their beliefs in relation to language learning. I adopted Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytical framework and used Membership Categorisation Analysis as the main analytical tool. This helped me to see how people reproduce our identities and ideologies in the social practices in which we participate, and how this in turn contributes to the reproduction or challenging of the discourses present in a given society.

Nationalist discourse was particularly relevant across the analysed data. One of the students in Lleida, that I will call Lluna, complained of the people arrived in Catalonia (PLACE) from elsewhere who refused to learn and use Catalan (LANGUAGE). If they did, they could be considered Catalan (PEOPLE), but by refusing the LANGUAGE, they were refusing the TERRITORY and the PEOPLE. A second powerful discourse nowadays is banal nationalist discourse. This is important in a world in which nationalism is so hegemonic. The ideological basis of this discourse is that one can feel, for instance, Spanish, and defend the idea that Spain is a single nation with a national language without being a nationalist; it is just being patriotic and applying common sense. Those in Catalonia or Euskadi who claim these two territories are nations, however, are nationalists. The people who reproduce this discourse would not label their discourse “banal nationalism”, and in fact, most of them will argue that they are not interested in nationalism. This is why it is sometimes hard to distinguish it from the anti-nationalist discourse. This last discourse uses the argument that we are all citizens of the world; that flags and borders are a thing of the past; and that languages should be used to unite people rather than to divide them.

The analyses of the data show the complexity of the process of ideology and identity construction in a given language practice. In one of the group sessions in Lleida, Lluna has to confront a student who is a living example of the behaviour she so strongly criticises: a girl (Lidia), arrived in Lleida aged 2, and who refuses to use Catalan. Lidia’s argument, however, is that she has no problem being addressed in Catalan, but sees no reason why she should use Catalan when her entire family and most people in her neighbourhood use Spanish. Ultimately, deciding whether Lidia is contributing to reproducing a banal nationalist discourse or not depends on who does the analysis.