Hypotheses

From a demolinguistics perspective, it has been postulated that the maintenance and future of a minority language, such as Catalan, in the new multilingual context resulting from immigration in the Catalan speaking regions depends, in a large part, on the linguistic integration of newcomers.
From a more psychological and social point of view, it is postulated that language use is determined by the speaker’s language attitudes, identity and social networks.
Since the official recognition and institutional support are critical to the future of a language, it is postulated that the relative weight attitudes, identity and social network have on the speaker's choice of language is not the same in the Catalan-speaking communities in the Peninsula that among Catalans immigrant communities.

General objectives

To create a methodological protocol aimed to discover the relative importance of the language attitudes, identity and social network of the speakers in bilingual communities in multilingual contexts.
To make demolinguistic projections considering the processes of intergenerational transmission of language, schooling and linguistic integration of immigrants, as well as speakers’ attitudes.

To design the methodological tools to investigate the relationship between attitudes, identity and social networks; that is, to record speech samples and prepare the reactions test for the matched-guise technique on the one hand and, on the other, to develop the questionnaire on the speaker’s language use, identity and social network.
To apply these tools in the three capitals of the Spanish regions where Catalan is official and among the Catalan-speakers of the Spanish community in New York.
To analyze the relationship of the factors that influence the use of Catalan (speaker‘s language attitudes, identity and social network) 'in situ' and 'exported' (Catalan as historical language and Catalan as the language of immigrants).
To verify the hypothesis, rarely confirmed, on which are based the works that use the matched-guise technique: the more prestige a language has, the more people speak it.