Linguistic authority and authoritative texts: Comparing student perspectives of the politics of language and identity in Catalonia and the Valencian Community

This study explores the language ideological underpinnings of the politics of language and identity in the context of two complex socio-political and sociolinguistic settings: contemporary Catalonia and the Valencian Community. Specifically, it compares Catalan and Valencian student perspectives regarding shifting boundaries and hybrid forms of language and identity. Contemporary scholarship on the linguistic authority of the Catalan language in Catalonia has identified a partial shift from the construction of this language as the essential language of the Catalan people (ideology of authenticity) to that of everybody’s language and yet nobody’s language in particular (ideology of anonymity) (Woolard 2016; Soler-Carbonell 2013; Trenchs-Parera et al. 2013). However, this research is often concentrated in Barcelona and surrounding areas prior to the 1 October 2017 independence referendum. Therefore, this thesis explores this sociolinguistic phenomenon in the other provinces of Catalonia, as well as in other Catalan-speaking territories, especially from an inter-regional and comparative perspective.

Sixteen focus group interviews were conducted between March and December 2017 with Catalan and Valencian final year secondary school students (4º ESO), in which participants were asked to comment on sociolinguistic issues and engage in an exercise comparing Catalan and Valencian ‘Language and Literature’ textbooks. The study takes a qualitative and comparative-thematic approach as a means of examining the multifaceted and complex language ideological landscape and negotiations of the authority of Catalan in Catalonia and the Valencian Community. Students’ metalinguistic discourses and meta-textbook commentaries reveal competing constructions of linguistic authority in Catalan focus group discussions, while in Valencian groups the roles of the ‘anonymous’ and ‘authentic’ languages appear to be more rigidly defined. This thesis identifies in both Catalan and Valencian groups recurring constructions of language and identity as rooted in ethnolinguistic essentialism, thus as important markers of group difference and sameness. This thesis concludes that processes of linguistic ‘de-ethnicisation’ (Boix-Fuster and Woolard 2020: 712) may not be as pronounced as previously thought in Catalonia, while this transition appears to have not started in the Valencian Community.