Spain’s Minoritized Languages in Brief Sociolinguistic Perspective

Since 1978, when Article 3 of the democratic Constitution officialized the “other languages of Spain in their respective Autonomous Communities” and guaranteed them “special respect and protection,” Basque, Galician, and Catalan have undergone a significant process of institutional expansion. Laws of linguistic normalization passed in the respective Autonomous Communities during the early 1980s thrust each of these languages into public life, concomitantly disconfiguring their diglossic relationship to Castilian, a vestige of Franco’s staunch one language-one nation ideology. Today one could affirm that the theoretical premise of bilingualism and diglossia (Fishman) – whereby one language serves public, formal functions and another is restricted to private, informal domains – no longer characterizes the sociolinguistic landscape of Spain. Linguistic normalization has been a bit of a double-edged sword, however. Growing literacy rates in Basque, Galician, and Catalan appear not to correlate with increased social use of these languages. In what follows, I will briefly consider the challenges of sociolinguistic continuity in each case.

In the Basque context, normalization has perhaps created the sort of diglossia that Ferguson originally described, involving two or more varieties of the “same” language,¹ because of the relative artificiality of Batua – the standardized variety of Euskera which is taught in schools and used in formal communication – and the dialectal differences found throughout Euskal Herria.² Indeed, the great diversity of Basque prompted the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party, Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), to argue for a different standard variety in each of six historical provinces that would conform a unified Basque Country: Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Araba, Nafarroa, Lapurdi, Zuberoa (Hualde & Zuazo 148).³ Serious debate about standardization did not begin until the founding of the Basque Academy, or Euskaltzaindia, in 1918. Interrupted by the Civil War in 1936 and Franco’s declaration of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa as “provincias traidoras” – backdrop for his prohibitive language policies to come, the debate would go unresolved for five more decades. Unlike Catalan or Galician, Basque had not hitherto functioned as a formal language or in any official capacity, and had been a language of very sparse literary production (Olaziregi). When Batua was finally agreed upon for normalization by the Basque Academy in 1968, it was “nobody’s spoken language,” as Hualde & Zuazo affirm (152).⁴

This apparently remains true today. A matched guise study carried out by Echeverria in eleven secondary schools in Donostia (San Sebastián) in 2005 documented more positive attitudes toward the local vernacular Basque (region of Goierri) than toward Batua or standard Castilian, a tendency that held true even for those students who came from Castilian-speaking homes and were enrolled in schools where Castilian was the language of instruction. Echeverria observed a strong correlation between exposure to vernacular Basque beyond the school setting and attitudes toward Basque and Castilian general. She concluded that if Basque is to prosper as a language of interaction among the general population, local varieties must be recognized in academic settings and more emphasis placed on the vernacular for purposes of instruction. After an official evaluation revealed inadequate levels of Basque proficiency among two-thirds of students graduating bilingual programs and one-third of those exiting all-Basque programs in 2005, the government called for language policy reform to make Basque the sole vehicular language of schooling (Azumendi). In sum, the normalization of Basque has produced, in educational terms, a bilingual majority who, for everyday social purposes, interact largely in Castilian and, to a lesser extent, in another variety of Basque. Data from Eustat for 2006 confirm this tendency: only 19% of the population of Euskadi claimed Euskera as a first language and 5% both Euskera and Castilian as first languages; only 31% claimed to be functionally bilingual; 45% claimed to speak principally Euskera at home; 47% claimed the same for interactions with friends; 48% with coworkers.

A similar situation is observed in Galicia. Loredo Gutiérrez et al. affirm that: “At the present moment, when the transmission of Galician to the next generation is falling . . . schools have to attain a higher importance as an environment in which to learn Galician” (44). The success...