A collection of studies offering an up-to-date analysis of official policies to promote Catalan in a democratic framework in each of the main Spanish regions where it is spoken: Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.

This volume helps us to understand that the current political disorders in Catalonia have deep cultural roots. It focuses on the rise of Catalan cultural, national and linguistic identity in the 20th century. What is happening in Catalonia? What lies behind its political conflicts? Catalan identity has been evolving for centuries, starting in early medieval ages (11th and 12lve centuries). It is not a modern phenomenon. The emergence of imperial Spain in the 16 c. and the French Ancien Régime in the 17 c. correlates with a decline of Catalan culture, which was politically absorbed by the Spanish state after the conquest of Barcelona in 1714. However, Catalan language and culture flourished again under the stimulus of the European Romantic Nationalism movement (known as the Renaixença in Catalonia). During the first Dictatorship (Primo de Rivera, 1923-1930), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the long Francoist era (1939-1975), Catalan language and culture were repressed, yet refurbished and reconstructed at the same time. This rise of a plural, complex, and non-homogeneous Catalan identity constitutes the subject matter of this volume. National conflicts that emerged later in the Spanish democratic state leant heavily on the life engagement and vital commitment experienced by the entrenched intellectual movements of the twentieth century in Catalonia, Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands. This book reveals the cultural and literary grassroots of these conflicts.

This book presents the first ever comprehensive overview of national laws recognising sign languages, the impacts they have and the advocacy campaigns which led to their creation. It comprises 18 studies from communities across Europe, the US, South America, Asia and New Zealand. They set sign language legislation within the national context of language policies in each country and show patterns of intersection between language ideologies, public policy and deaf communities’ discourses. The chapters are grounded in a collaborative writing approach between deaf and hearing scholars and activists involved in legislative campaigns. Each one describes a deaf community’s expectations and hopes for legal recognition and the type of sign language legislation achieved. The chapters also discuss the strategies used in achieving the passage of the legislation, as well as an account of barriers confronted and surmounted (or not) in the legislative process. The book will be of interest to language activists in the fields of sign language and other minority languages, policymakers and researchers in deaf studies, sign linguistics, sociolinguistics, human rights law and applied linguistics.

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition.

This book examines medium-sized linguistic communities in urban contexts against the backdrop of the language policies which have been implemented in these respective areas. The authors provide new data and reflections on these linguistic communities which have languages somewhere in between the majority and minority, and re-evaluate the opposition between ‘majority’ and ‘minority’. The book focuses on seven European cities, providing detailed information on their current situation and on the corresponding evolution of their linguistic repertoire. The book aims to improve our understanding of how and why languages live and decay, and of how intercultural cities, where communities show interest in each other’s culture and language, can be better developed and encouraged.

L’objectiu de l’obra Catalan Sociolinguistics. State of the Art and Future Challenges és donar compte, de manera sumària, dels grans vèrtexs en què s’ha manifestat l’estudi de la relació entre llengua i societat en la comunitat lingüística catalana, la recepció que s’ha fet dels plantejaments internacionals i l’adaptació domèstica. Cada tradició sociolingüística ha interpretat la interacció esmentada amb plantejaments específics. La catalana, per exemple, ha apostat per una visió integradora de tot un seguit de treballs que arriben des d’àmbits temàtics diversos (economia, dret, ciència política, comunicació, ecologia, variació lingüística, antropologia, etc.). Així, en el llibre que el lector té a les mans, els autors dels diferents capítols, reconeguts especialistes en la matèria avaluada, ens han ofert mirades complementàries que ens permetran avançar cap a una anàlisi de conjunt, una tasca que es mostrava peremptòria en el marc d’un horitzó finalista de cohesionar internament la disciplina. The aim of the work Catalan Sociolinguistics. State of the Art and Future Challenges is to give an account, in a summary way, of the major topics dealt with by the study of the relation between language and society in the Catalan language community, and the extent to which international approaches have been received and how they have been adapted to the Catalan domain. Every tradition has interpreted this interaction with specific approaches. The Catalan tradition, for example, has opted for a vision that integrates a wide range of studies on different themes (economy, law, political science, communication, ecology, linguistic variation, anthropology, and so on). So, in the book you are holding, the authors of the various chapters, recognised specialists in their fields, have provided complementary views that will enable us to make an overall analysis, something that was urgently needed in the context of the ultimate aim of bringing internal consistency to the discipline.