Containing Castilian in Catalan Talk Radio: Heteroglossia and the Projection of Monoglot Identities

This article describes a mechanism that permits speakers to draw on a heteroglossic repertoire of verbal forms while simultaneously reinforcing a boundary between their own language-based identity ("Catalan") and the state language (Castilian). In doing so, they opt for monoglot identities over heteroglossic ones, despite widespread heteroglossic practice. I show that Catalan speakers draw on "speech modeling" (Errington 1998) in ways that contain responsibility for their use of Castilian.