Language Policies, Ideologies and Attitudes in Catalonia. Part 1: Reversing Language Shift in the Twentieth Century

This and a paired article to appear in a subsequent issue of this journal review the sociolinguistic and allied research on language attitudes, ideologies and practices in Catalonia in the context of two major sequential official language policies. The present article is devoted to the first policy called Normalització Lingüística ( Linguistic Normalization ), implemented in 1983 by the autonomous government of Catalonia. The policy was a language planning effort in a then bilingual society to reverse language shift from Catalan to Spanish in the aftermath of a dictatorship and linguistic repression. Our review of the research on that policy shows that language planners assumed modern constructions of languages as bounded units tied to distinct groups. Given the conflictive history of Spain, they explicitly set out to provide a supportive framework for Catalan that would not overly antagonize the large sector of Catalan society that was at the time mostly monolingual Spanish‐speaking. Normalization has been seen as largely successful, but a deeper look at the research shows much of the Catalonian population moving beyond those assumptions; for instance, a number of researchers point to a valuing of bilingualism as indexing a cosmopolitan identity. Even sectors that show more monolinguistic tendencies do so less out of pure ethnolinguistic loyalty than complex intersectionalities and personal ideological stances. The two stories behind each of these periods will be of interest to language planners as well as to researchers interested in the societal and individual challenges and changes emerging from the implementation of official language policies in bilingual and multilingual societies.