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Catalan Sociolinguistics: State of the art and future challenges
Edited by Miquel Àngel Pradilla Cardona
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 32] 2022
► pp. 55–66

Chapter 5
Is there a social history of the Catalan language?

| University of Valencia
Over the last century, historical linguistics has produced notable studies on the formal evolution of the Catalan language. Moreover, in recent decades Catalan sociolinguistics has been developed, connecting theory and empirical description to language policy. However, a social history of the Catalan language has not been developed nor historical sociolinguistics, strictly speaking, bar a few random examples. The reasons for this deficit are both internal (the limitations of the subject matter, the inertia and the stagnation of philological studies…) and external (the socio-political and market constraints imposed on the Catalan language). We therefore propose to move towards a new paradigm in which the linguistic diachrony is integrated within social sciences, open to self-criticism and to overcoming ideological apriorism.
Keywords: history of Catalan language, linguistic historiography, historical sociolinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The (social) history of language as institutional knowledge
  • 3.The limitations of Catalan linguistic historiography
    • 3.1Theoretical and methodological limitations
    • 3.2The lack of social dimension
    • 3.3The ideological dependence of the principle of national identity
    • 3.4The lack of interdisciplinary relations
  • 4.Epilogue: For a social history of Catalan in the age of cyberspace
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.32.05nic
References (8)
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