Language Attitudes and Minority Rights by James Hawkey
Author:James Hawkey
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham
3.6 Discussion
A number of points for discussion have emerged from this quantitative examination of language attitudes in Northern Catalonia. Firstly, monoglossic language ideologies in France are shown to be of key importance. While this is nothing new, the extent of the pervasiveness of such ideologies merits discussion. Participant occupation frequently appears in this chapter as a significant predictor of attitudes, and indeed, ‘occupation ’ as a variable reveals far more than first expected. Initially, this social variable was intended merely as a useful proxy for social class (cf. Rose and Harrison 2010), since the centrality of occupation in determining class has been demonstrated to be just as applicable to France (Harrison 2013: 20–21; Lambert 2013: 27–28) as to other situations. However, participant occupation revealed more about the inculcation of ideologies than first expected, when we take into account the behaviour of university students. The fact that students in the sample consistently show tendencies towards low status and solidarity evaluations for Catalan—as well as giving high solidarity ratings for French despite coming from a relatively (for this sample) heterogeneous language background—is in line with the hegemonic monoglossic language ideology that stresses the primacy of French over all regional and minority language varieties. Students were seen to adhere to these views more consistently than other occupation groups in the sample. Moreover, it should be noted that the students in the sample were drawn from arts and linguistics degree programmes (lettres modernes and sciences du langage) at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia. These students are thus arguably more favourably predisposed to the benefits of foreign languages than, say, science students, and in the case of linguistics students may have a limited awareness of the degree to which language ideologies are constructed. Yet still, in spite of all these factors, this group shows a consistently strong anti-RML bias. Those in the education system are therefore strongly influenced by French nationalist ideologies concerning the use and status of RMLs . As such, in addition to providing information about the performance of different social classes, our occupation findings reveal the importance of the education system, which will undoubtedly prove of interest to education policymakers, whether they work in the field of language endangerment or not. The importance of occupation (and by proxy, social class) in predicting participants’ adherence to these received monoglossic French ideologies is a reflection of class-based theories of conformity (see Sect. 3.1) wherein we see a cleavage between working-class and middle-class (or at least their approximate French equivalents) attitudes, with working-class participants conforming more heavily to received ideas regarding the limited status and solidarity potential of RMLs . So received negative attitudes concerning minority languages such as Catalan are shown to be stronger among students and the working class, than among upper middle-class trained professionals. The value of French as the sole language of prestige in Northern Catalonia is reinforced by results which indicate that female participants are more likely to endorse the high-status potential of the French language; this is supported
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