Ecological metaphors in debates over language and language politics in Catalonia (1999-2009)
Ecological metaphors in debates over language and language politics in Catalonia (1999-2009)
Authors
Sinner, Carsten
Authors
Date
Datos de publicación:
Cultura, Hombre, Sociedad (CUHSO), Vol. 30, N° 2, 270-298, 2020
Keywords
Ecología - Metáforas - Conflicto lingüístico - Castellano y catalán - Recontextualización
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Abstract
In the last decades, the ecological approach has attracted the inter-est of Spanish and Catalan linguists. This contribution analyses the language used both by professional linguists and laypeople in publications and in the public debate on the conflicts in Spanish and Catalan bilingualism in the de-cade before the constitutional and supreme courts ruled against the prevalence of the Catalan language in Catalonia (1999-2009). The analysed decade can be characterized by a sensation of growing linguistic conflicts that manifes-ted, for example, through heated debates over what Catalans perceived as life threatening for the Catalan language and reactions such as demands for the introduction of additional teaching hours to prevent the alleged extinction of Spanish in Catalonia. The Catalan society is reliving the ghost of extinction of their language—probably reinforced by publications which denounce a conti-nuous reduction of living space and the disappearance of more and more nichesof the Catalan language. On the other hand, Castilian activists (and among them some linguists) maintain there is a battle the Castilian language in Ca-talonia has to win in order to survive the said-to-be ferocious reduction of its vital space and the asserted institutionalized suffocation or extermination of the Spanish language. The texts analysed in this contribution belong to a text series which regarding its content and aims corresponds to a reduced number of triggering reference texts. The aim is to determine the importance of the language of ecology in this field and the usage of these elements by both sides, those denouncing the threat of the Castilian language and those fearing the risk of extinction of the Catalan language. It will be shown that in the debate over the struggle for life of Catalan and Spanish in the Catalan speaking areas, the language of ecology and evolution is heavily used and that the re-contex-tualization of Catalan metaphors in the analysed texts on Spanish is systematic.