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Indexing political identity in the Catalonian procés: A sociophonetic approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2020

José Luis Blas-Arroyo Open the ORCID record for José Luis Blas-Arroyo [Opens in a new window]
José Luis Blas-Arroyo*
Affiliation:
University Jaume I, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: José Luis Blas-Arroyo, University Jaume I, Departamento de Filología y Culturas Europeas, Av Sos Baynat S/N Castellon de la Plana 12071, Spain[email protected]
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Abstract

This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 411 - 440
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

This study is part of the project ‘Structural, social and idiolectal dimensions of linguistic change’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. FFI2017-86194-P) and the University Jaume I (Ref. UJI-B2017-01). I would like to thank Javier Lara and Brittani Cortés for their collaboration in the Sociolinguistic Lab of the University Jaume I, with several tasks related to the project. I also thank three anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for their insightful and constructive comments. Any remaining errors are my sole responsibility.

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