El català, llengua mitjana d'Europa

[Catalan, a medium-sized language of Europe]

The authors propose the concept of medium-sized languages for those communities with large enough demographic dimensions (between 500,000 and 25 million speakers) to be able to have administrative, academic, communicative, and political resources, which are totally or not independent. From this categorization, Catalan is not a small language. For this reason, its situation is compared with other similar European languages (such as Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech, Lithuanian, Estonian, etc.).

The choice of languages at home, within families, is one of the keys to the linguistic socialization of the new generations, and this is the topic of five chapters of the book. The data collected indicate that in Catalonia, Catalan first language speakers have considerable subjective ethnolinguistic vitality, as evidenced by the fact that the majority maintain the use of Catalan in raising their children. There are even cases of L1 Spanish-speakers who adopt Catalan (they are new speakers) as the main language of the family, while Spanish is still used. On the other hand, research on intergenerational language transmission in other Catalan-speaking territories is more discouraging: Spanish predominates in bilingual families, a tendency that contributes to general use of Spanish both in the Valencian cities and in the Bay of Palma de Mallorca.

In this context, language policies are of major importance to continue or reverse the loss of the uses of minoritized languages. The question still becomes more complex with the current process of globalization, which affects societies and can bring into crisis the traditional ecosystems in which human language diversity exists. This book also studies language policy in depth in the academic field and highlights the importance of micro actions as a tool to promote interpersonal uses.