Presentation

The number of language revitalization programs that exist today are born to avoid as far as possible the slow disappearance of linguistic diversity related to an increasingly globalized world. Currently there are no monolingual societies. Language contact is inevitable, especially since population movements and displacements have generalized and because inequality between northern and southern countries has increased.

The economic and financial crisis has slowed down, if not stopped completely, the arrival of immigrants, and more migrants have returned to their countries of origin and highly qualified young people leave the country searching new opportunities. Catalan is the ideal case to study the different situations in which the languages ​​are in contact. In the Peninsula, Catalan coexists with the official state language, all those brought by immigrants in the last decade and obviously English. In the United States, it is the language of a community of fortunate immigrants and it coexists with two globalized and international languages: English and Spanish.

Our project has, mainly, two objectives:

1. To analyze the relationship and relative weight that attitudes, identity and social networks have in language choice, based on the case of Catalan spoken in the three regions where it is official; Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country.
2. To take into account the factors proposed in a), to initiate an unprecedented research devoted to analyze the use of ‘exported’ Catalan, specifically in New York, to discover whether the factors that determine language use in historical contexts are the same as in an immigration context.

Financing

The project “La previsión del futuro de las comunidades bilingües en contextos multilingües: el caso catalán aquende y allende nuestras fronteras” (FFI2010-16066/FILO) has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology (2010-2013).