Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2009

Traditionally, Catalonia is seen as a successful example of language revitalization, through the achievement and maintenance of a fairly stable Castilian/Catalan bilingualism for the last thirty years or so. Recently, however, Catalonia has experienced significant immigration in the context of globalization. The autonomous government is now supporting an agenda in which Catalan alone is presented as the national language, the language of convergence, while Castilian, despite its long historical presence in the region, is portrayed as one of three hundred languages spoken there today. We examine how this policy interacts with everyday linguistic realities and with a preservationist agenda. Catalan speakers are divided between those who feel liberated from the imposition of Spanish identity and culture and those who fear an exclusivist nationalism which they feel would be anachronistic in the globalized world of today. Spanish speakers, in turn, feel threatened and targeted. New immigrants, coming from all corners of the world, are caught in a climate in which official language policies hardly reflect their own needs. Linguistic policies have to be re-thought to tend to the needs of immigrants while also ensuring the survival of Catalan.

Since the early 1990s, language policy and planning (LPP) has undergone significant theoretical shifts in how it understands policy, concurrent with corresponding shifts in understandings of language, and particularly language use, more broadly. This paper draws on recent developments within linguistics that understand language from the perspective of Vygotskian sociocultural theory, and the role of language and other sociocultural artefacts in the mediation of human activity and social practice. The purpose of this discussion is to consider the potential of sociocultural theory as the basis for a broader meta-theoretical framework to understand the interrelationship between macro and micro analyses of policy and practice within LPP. The paper concludes with a consideration of the issues this raises for methodology in the study of LPP, as well as the implications for the practice of LPP itself.

This survey discusses the motives and consequences of the 13 June 2005 decision to include Irish among the EU’s official and working languages, and the 15 July 2008 decision to upgrade the status of languages recognised by law in the UK, such as Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. It also looks at the current state of Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Irish’s new EU status coincides with increased support at the top political level in Ireland. A tentative conclusion is that this happy coincidence could enhance the practical role of Irish, which in turn could exercise a knock-on positive effect on Scottish Gaelic. The continuing decrease in the use of Irish by young people in the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking regions), due to the unrelenting pressure of English, is a matter for deep concern, as is the failure of the authorities over many years to appreciate that language use, and not just language learning, needs to be planned. This may now be changing: expanded use of Irish in the electronic media, the structures put in place by the Official Languages Act of 2003, and Irish Government work on a 20-year strategic plan for Irish, together with continuing progress at EU level, give grounds for hope. To sum up: much has been done, but much remains to be done.

Taking the impact of the Wikipedia on the Breton language as a case in point, whilst highlighting the huge potential benefits that new technologies have to offer to economically less viable languages as a whole, this article discusses the way internet-based systems can have an impact on the terminological pressure exerted on such languages in many specialised areas. The article goes on to analyse possible conflict resolution mechanisms for competing terminological strategies and the relative merits and shortcomings of each. While centred on the specific case of a European “minority” or “lesser used” language, the article shows the extent to which the discussion and findings can also be relevant to the way other equally economically challenged languages around the globe can evolve and develop unfettered, thanks to the use of free-access virtual resources such as Wikipedia.