Parochial Linguistic Education: Patterns of an Enduring Friction within a Divided Catalonia

Abstract

Amid the tensions created by the secession push in Catalonia (Spain), an important conflicting issue has been the “immersion linguistic educational system”, in which the Catalan language has precedence throughout all of the primary and secondary school curricula. Here, we present an analysis of a survey (n = 1002) addressing features of linguistic and political opinion profiles with reference to the mother language and feelings of national identity. The results show that the mother language is a factor that differentiated the participants in terms of common linguistic uses and opinions about the “immersion educational system”. These results were confirmed when segmenting respondents via their feelings of national self-identification. The most distinctive political opinions consisted of either asserting or denying the damage to social harmony produced by the secession campaign. Overall, the findings show that a major fraction of the Catalonian citizenry is subjected to an education system that does not meet their linguistic preferences. We discuss these findings, connecting them to an ethnolinguistic divide based mainly on mother language (Catalan vs. Spanish) and family origin—a complex frontier that has become the main factor determining alignment during the ongoing political conflict.

Keywords

• secessionism
• Catalonia
• immersion linguistic education
• bilingualism
• ethno-linguistic cultures
• political conflict