A comparison of pronominal forms of address in the Spanish and Catalan spoken by students in Barcelona

Abstract

While there have been several influential studies over the past few decades regarding university students' use of formal (V) and informal (T) forms of pronominal address, no studies to date have compared bilingual Catalan-Spanish university students' pronominal address usage when speaking Catalan vs. Castilian Spanish with interlocutors of specific ages and social positions. This pilot study aimed to address this research gap by distributing a questionnaire to 61 bilingual Catalan-Spanish students at the University of Barcelona. Results showed that, although the pronominal systems of Castilian Spanish and Catalan are different in theory, address pronoun choices were generally similar in percentages and in trends in both languages, even though several students did not use Castilian Spanish or Catalan with certain interlocutors. This suggests that a process of linguistic convergence between Catalan and Castilian Spanish is taking place, even though the languages do not always share the same speakers.

Keywords

• Forms of address
• linguistic convergence
• politeness
• youth