The city’s historical language has been reintroduced into institutional spheres, although it still faces the challenges of reconquering the more everyday world. Spanish dominates the communication system and acts as a tool for relationships between Barcelonians by birth and those who have adopted the city as their own.
A banner written in Spanish heads a protest by secondary-school teachers in the Plaça de la Universitat in February 1977, at the beginning of the period of transition towards democracy.
Photo: Pérez de Rozas / AFB.
The history of multilingualism in Barcelona began with Barkeno, populated by Iberians, Greeks and Carthaginians; it continued with Barcino, which Latinised natives and colonists alike, and extended into Barchinona, where Vulgar Latin coexisted with Classical Latin and Greek, Hebrew, the languages of the Barbarians, Arabic and Tamazight. Catalan had become fully established by the Middle Ages, although medieval Barcelona also maintained Latin for administrative uses, and had contact with other nearby languages such as Occitan, Aragonese, Genoese, Sardinian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Tuscan, Spanish and Romany. Habsburg rule intensified the contact with Spanish, while the city also welcomed Italians, Occitans, French, Flemish, Walloons, Germans and Dutch.
The cover of one of the Decretos de Nueva Planta from 1715. The institutions created after the Catalan defeat at the end of the War of Spanish Succession decreed the dominance of Spanish.
The defeat of 1714 changed the city’s sociolinguistic reality. The new institutions established the supremacy of the language of the conquerors and spread a diglossic ideology aimed at pushing Catalan aside. In fact, between the 18th and the 20th centuries, many European states worked towards bringing their subjects together under a uniform national identity. This was when the United Kingdom and France launched their linguistic unification policies, soon followed by the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. The First World War was a watershed: the defeated powers were obliged to release their subjugated populations, while the victors stepped up their efforts in terms of standardisation. In just a few decades, the languages of the old powers became normalised, while the other minority languages began to become extinct.
And what about Catalonia? In the year 1900, government, schooling and writing were dominated by Spanish, although Barcelona was not demographically bilingual. Bilingualism was an asset of the elite. In a city with few foreigners, and where half of the population was illiterate, life went on almost exclusively in Catalan at home, in the street, in the factory, and in the taverns. However, this situation gradually changed as the growth of schooling and compulsory military service spread knowledge of Spanish. Moreover, in the 1920s, immigrants brought Spanish to the streets. Then, Franco’s dictatorship banished Catalan from public life, and the great waves of immigration spawned by economic desarrollismo [a Francoist policy aimed at promoting economic development] were deprived of the chance to learn it.
Nevertheless, not even in the times of fiercest repression did Catalans cease to use their language or cease to encourage newcomers to embrace it. Barcelona, proud of its roots and of its new transplanted residents, was already doing its utmost to heal the wounds inflicted by the previous regime, including those related to language, and it continued to do so in the subsequent decades.
Multi-lingualisation
A page from the Barcelona Haggadah, from the 14th century, kept in the British Library in London. The Haggadah is a Jewish book of prayers and readings for Passover.
In the 21st century, the city of Barcelona is immersed in a major transformation, which is also sociolinguistic, driven by its evolution towards late capitalism, the information society and the economic boom of the early 2000s. To begin with, the city opened up to the world, with a significant increase in visitors from abroad: 7,874,941 tourists passed through in 2014 (City Council statistics, 2015). Secondly, the number of foreign-language speakers in the city increased. According to the Enquesta d’Usos Lingüístics [Language Use Survey – EULP13], in 2013, 43% of the people in Barcelona stated that they spoke English, and 16% spoke French; these figures are even higher among young people. The city’s demographic composition is also changing: between the year 2000 and 2014, the population with Spanish nationality fell from 1,450,175 to 1,329,265 people, whereas the number of foreigners grew from 46,091 to 273,121 (Statistical Institute of Catalonia. Municipal census). This change has an impact on language. In 2013, more than two-thirds of the native inhabitants of Barcelona said that Catalan was the language they identify with: 57% exclusively as well as 10% who identified with both Catalan and Spanish. However, the failure of many in the successive waves of immigrants reduces this figure to 44% in the city’s total population (36% plus 8% bilingual). In fact, while 99% of the inhabitants of Barcelona say that they speak Spanish, only 80% know how to speak Catalan.
The Librería Española on La Rambla, owned by the bookseller and editor Antonio López, in an image taken between 1924 and 1934.
Photo: AFB.
The city also gains in terms of language diversity. The list of the nationalities of Barcelonians (data from the 2014 Municipal Registry) hints to the native languages of newcomers – in descending order: Italy, Pakistan, China, Morocco, France, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, the Philippines, Romania, Dominican Republic, Germany, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, Russia, India and others. However, two errors must be avoided. One is confusing foreigners with alloglots, because in fact, the most frequent native language among newcomers is Spanish. The other is equating nationality with language: in Pakistan, for example, Urdu is the official language, even though it is more in the minority demographically speaking; whereas in China, Mandarin is learnt as a common language, although most Chinese people who live in Europe speak different Chinese languages.
That said, according to the 2013 Population Language Use Survey, the percentage of alloglots in Barcelona in 2013 was 12.6%, and their most frequent languages were, in this order, Italian, Urdu, French, Arabic, English, Chinese languages (all together), Russian and Portuguese. No language accounted for more than 1.5% of Barcelona’s total population, which demonstrates the degree of fragmentation of newcomer groups.
So what about multilingualism policies?
A multilingual city calls for a specific policy that adequately caters to its reality. Barcelona unquestionably has a long way to go. Of all the languages spoken in the city, Spanish is the one known by most people, it dominates the communication system and acts as a tool for relationships between Barcelonians by birth and those who have adopted the city as their own, even on school playgrounds. Nothing suggests that Barcelonians do not learn it, as is shown by the fact that it is the first, and very often the only, language learnt by newcomers.
The situation of Catalan is quite different, though. Since the end of the dictatorship, the city’s historical language has been reintroduced into institutional spheres, although it still faces a formidable challenge: reconquering the more everyday world. Spanish will always have a value as a tool for communicating with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, but Catalan can only be maintained if it recovers its prominence as a street language, the language of interpersonal relationships. The routines imposed during Franco’s dictatorship restricted it to “lifelong” Catalans, and led switching to Spanish in the presence of “others” to become a question of good manners. The anecdote about the president of “La Caixa” (one of the most important banks in Catalonia and in Spain) Isidre Fainé asking the first deputy mayor Eduardo Pisarello if he spoke Catalan, illustrates that there was a real glass ceiling the language hits again and again, a mental barrier that generates a vicious circle, because no one learns a language that is never spoken to them. There is a risk of this leading to a disastrous racialisation of language behaviours, in which a mere non-European or Mediterranean appearance or even a foreign-sounding name ends up excluding large sectors of the population from having access to Catalan. To avoid this, we must ensure that knowing the language is taken for granted once again, a default feature of all Barcelonians, regardless of their colour, origin or social status, as the city’s definitive sign of integration.
Bolder practices and discourses need to be constructed for native languages alongside the two great languages of society. For some, it will be enough to argue that it is a question of social justice or solidarity. Reception, asylum and integration policies have linguistic dimensions that, if properly handled, facilitate formalities and humanise the host society. There are also economic arguments in favour of proactive policies for attention to diversity. In the new economy, having a workforce capable of connecting local expectations to foreign markets and foreign investors forms a competitive advantage that it would be irrational to allow to go to waste. Who better than young, foreign-born Catalans to collaborate in the internationalisation of companies from Barcelona? Relatively inexpensive policies, such as native language courses in schools or the recognition of these languages in the school curriculum are a policy of empowerment and an economic investment for the future.
Finally, the challenge of universalising access to foreign common languages must be addressed. There are many factors that encourage Barcelona to increase knowledge of these languages, particularly English, and numerous resources are being misinvested in this area. Well-informed policies are required, both to fully exploit existing efforts and to ensure that unequal access to this resource does not contribute to creating a social divide.