Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity

• Published in: International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism Vol. 16; no. 2; pp. 210 - 224
• Main Author: Woolard, Kathryn A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.03.2013; Routledge
• Subjects: Bakhtin, Mikhail M; Barcelona, Spain; bilingualism; Catalan; chronotope; Experience; Foreign Countries; High School Students; Hostility; Identity; Ideologies; Immigrants; language and identity; Language Attitudes; language ideology; Language Usage; Linguistics; Longitudinal Studies; Maturity (Individuals); Peer Relationship; Peers; Political Attitudes; Political Influences; Romance Languages; second language acquisition; Self Concept; Spain (Barcelona); Spanish; Working Class; Young Adults; Spain (Barcelona)
• ISSN: 1367-0050; 1747-7522
• DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2012.720670

During the early catalanization of schooling in the Barcelona area in the 1980s, Castilian-speaking teenagers of working-class immigrant descent often struggled against Catalan language and identity. This longitudinal study followed a group of high-school classmates and found that as young adults, some but not all of the resistant working-class Castilian speakers have incorporated Catalan into their lives and identity. This article draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the 'chronotope' or time-space frame to analyze the accounts of language and identity given by informants who adapted positively to Catalan and that of a peer whose hostility to Catalan increased over the years. Drawing on three contrasting chronotopes, informants give different meanings to personal experiences and linguistic practices. Those who adapted positively to Catalan present their linguistic development within biographical and cosmopolitan chronotopes that emphasize individual maturation and experience. They reject the politicization of language and an ideology of authenticity that links language choice to origins. The more anti-Catalan peer presents a socio-historical chronotope that frames his own experience as political and related to national and state debates, and he draws on an ideology of ethnolinguistic solidarity and linguistic authenticity.