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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 384

Part of Session 180: New Speakers in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Representations of New Speakers in Catalan Television Comedy

Authors: Ribot, Aida; Woolard, Kathryn
Submitted by: Ribot, Aida (UCSD, United States of America)

Media representations of “new speakers” of minority languages contribute in obvious ways to the enregisterment (Agha 2005) and social evaluation of new speaker speech styles (Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007). However, such media representations can also simultaneously, and in less obvious ways, provide evaluations of the minority language itself and of native speakers and non-speakers as well as new speakers (O’Rourke and Ramallo 2011). This paper examines these multiple facets of comic media representations of new speakers of Catalan in Catalonia, Spain. Data are drawn primarily from multiple episodes of two comedy programs televised on the Catalan government-supported channel, TV3; audience reception is considered.

The first program, Polònia, is a popular weekly political satire that regularly presented a hyperbolic parody of the Catalan speech of the immigrant-origin president of Catalonia, José Montilla, during his tenure 2006 – 2010. The second, Dues Dones Divines, is a 2011 situation comedy featuring a hypercorrect new Catalan speaker who is a domestic worker of Ecuadorian immigrant origin, and who insistently corrects the Catalan of her employer and other native Catalan speakers. Set in Barcelona, the comedy pits the proficient new speaker not only against the lax native speaker but also against a stereotype of a resolute upper-class urban non-speaker.

We analyze the contrasting linguistic characteristics and social placement of the new speaker personae in these two programs, and the explicit and implicit linguistic and social evaluations that the characterizations convey. The political satire broadly exaggerated the real President Montilla’s weak syntactic and lexical control of, and seeming disregard for, standard Catalan. In contrast, the Ecuadorian character in Dues Dones Divines not only produces but also vociferously advocates a more formal standard of correctness than the native Catalan-speaking characters in the program. These diametrically opposed images of new speakers share a focus on iconic linguistic forms such as the cliticizing “weak pronoun” system of Catalan (Frekko 2009). Both linguistic caricatures can be seen to suggest that such Catalan linguistic forms are themselves comic.

The success of catalanizing linguistic policies and the recruitment of new speakers over the last two decades have the unintended consequence of calling into question the ownership of the Catalan language. The comic representations analyzed here highlight emergent tensions over conflicting claims to linguistic authority based on native language acquisition versus formal language education, and over the relation of such linguistic authority to political authority and to social class relations in the urban context.

References cited:

Agha, Asif. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:38–59.

Frekko, Susan. 2009. "Normal" in Catalonia. Language in Society 38: 1-23.

Kelly-Holmes, H. and D. Atkinson. 2007. "When Hector met Tom Cruise": Attitudes to Irish in a radio satire. Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. S. Johnson and A. Ensslin. London, Continuum: 173-187.

O’Rourke, B. and Ramallo, F. 2011. The native-non-native dichotomy in minority language contexts: Comparisons between Irish and Galician. Language Problems and Language Planning. 35 (2): 139–159.