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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1159

Part of Session 113: "Medium-sized" languages and the city (Other abstracts in this session)

The importance of the language-ideological component in 'medium-sized' language contexts. The cases of Estonian and Catalan compared.

Authors: Soler Carbonell, Josep
Submitted by: Soler Carbonell, Josep (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

Our present-day era of globalization has brought important changes in different spheres of our societies: technologically, economically, culturally, etc. These changes may provoke particular effects in communities in nation-states that may suffer from stress and insecurity, even though enjoying a significant amount of political autonomy, which provides them self-assurance and a strong cohesive feeling of unity. The languages in these nation-states have recently been theorized by the Sociolinguistics research group at the University of Barcelona and labeled “Medium-sized Language Communities”, a more suitable notion, descriptively and theoretically, to offer a picture of the current sociolinguistic and language-contact situation in the European continent.

Estonia and Catalonia, although two different polities with different organizational language regimes share several points that may let us look at them comparatively, most importantly the historical and socio-demographical evolution of each of the two cases.
The paper examines the possible comparative lines between the two study cases from the point of view of speakers’ linguistic ideologies (Woolard 1998; Kroskrity 2000). By presenting ethnographically collected data, the author tries to shed some light on speakers’ linguistic realities and the way they evaluate them. The theoretical background being used consists of Woolard’s (2008) typology of linguistic ideologies (the Anonymity-Authenticity divide).
The ethnographic analysis of these two particular cases shows us how “the world is a different place, depending from where you look at it” (Blommaert 2005), and therefore, points to the fact that we need to look at how speakers make their (linguistic) reality meaningful to them, thus placing the ideological and representational levels at a central point for our understanding of the evolution and future prospects of the studied cases.The results from this study suggest interesting insights for both realities compared. In that sense, the certain 'de-authentication' that Catalan has undergone in the last few years seems to have helped the language in winning the allegiance of non-native speakers. In contrast, the Estonian case has not (yet) taken that road, and while the 'Authenticity' ideology seems to be very alive among native speakers, there are some associations, among younger people in particular, that may point to that direction too.