The future of Catalan: language endangerment and nationalist discourses in Catalonia

Abstract

In this chapter, I undertake a critical analysis of a recent public debate on the future of the Catalan language on the basis of a corpus of newspaper articles. Catalan is, together with Spanish, the official language of Catalonia and is spoken by over half of the country¿s population of 7 million. However, Spanish is the language most widely used in large urban centers such as Barcelona, which leads to recurrent debates on whether Catalan will eventually die out as a result of continuous immigration and the internationalization of the economy, politics and the media. My analysis does not address these concerns as such, but the social and political grounds of the debate analysed, as well as its implications for different sectors of Catalan society. I will show that the debate was not politically neutral, but constituted a site of struggle for power and resources.