And if the problem were not speaking Catalan, but which Catalan we believe we can speak?

PalmThere is a very specific situation that you may have experienced at some point: you write an email in Catalan, reread it just before sending it and, almost without thinking, you change a 'som' for a 'soc'. Or a 'pensàssim' for a 'penséssim'. Perhaps you don't even have a very clear idea of the reasons for the change, but you modify it anyway, because there is a strange intuition (but much more widespread than it seems) that associates certain forms with an idea of Catalan that is more formal, more neutral, or simply more "correct" when the situation gets a bit serious.

The problem is not strictly linguistic: in the exemplified cases, the change is not a matter of grammar or even of norms, but rather has much more to do with prestige, with linguistic imaginaries and with this somewhat diffuse but persistent idea of what "is correct".

No filters

During the Correllengua tour through the different Catalan-speaking territories, something very simple but very interesting happens: linguistic variation becomes visible and audible without filters. Just look at any video uploaded these days on social media: when the flame passes through Alicante, Perpignan, Reus, or Inca, the language changes slightly in each place. Pronouns change, open vowels, some verb tenses, the intonation of certain phrases, and specific everyday words. Thus, some say 'açò' and others, 'això'. Some 'berenen' in the morning, others 'esmorzen'. Some say 'canto', others 'cante', others 'cant', and others 'canti'. Some use 'idò' and others use 'doncs'. And nothing happens: communication continues to flow naturally.

canti’. Some use ‘idò’ and others use ‘doncs’. And nothing happens: communication continues to flow naturally.

And here appear two words that sound more difficult than they really are: compositionality and polymorphism. Said without philological technicalities, they mean something quite simple. On the one hand, that the Catalan standard is not built from a single model turned into a universal pattern, but incorporates forms from different territories (i.e., it is compositional). And, on the other, that the norm admits various correct forms depending on the geographical variety or context (i.e., it is polymorphic). In short: normative Catalan does not function exactly with the idea that there is only one good way to say things.

The problem is that socially we continue to imagine the standard as a kind of neutral, homogeneous, and rather abstract Catalan that, by chance, usually coincides with certain media or academic models. This ends up generating a rather curious situation: speakers who have no problem using their own forms in spontaneous conversation, but who become a kind of linguistic self-police when they have to write, speak in public, or simply sound 'formal'.

Sociolinguistics has been studying this mechanism for decades and gives it a very specific name: linguistic insecurity. William Labov, in the sixties of the 20th century, defined it as the distance between the forms that speakers habitually use and the forms they perceive as prestigious. Often, the forms that generate doubts are perfectly normative, which means that the conflict is not really normative, but symbolic.

In the Balearic Islands, this tension is especially clear in the relationship between formality and one's own variety. In everyday conversation, most speakers spontaneously use Balearic forms without even thinking about it: 'tenc', 'som', 'anam', 'pensàssim'. Doubt arises when the context changes a little, such as an oral presentation, an academic paper, a formal meeting, or simply an email sent to someone we don't know very well.

This happens because speakers often tend to identify formal register with a distancing from their own variety. However, many of the forms that some speakers perceive as 'too dialectal' are fully part of the norm. 'Som', 'pensàssim', and 'tenc' are normative forms, just as 'canto', 'cante', 'cant', and 'canti' are equally valid forms for the first person of 'cantar', depending on the speaker's place of origin.

The question, therefore, is not whether languages should have formal registers (they do and should have them), but why so many speakers feel that, in order to sound formal, they must distance themselves from the forms that come naturally to them.

Linguistic legitimacy

The core issue, then, is not whether Catalan is diverse (everyone knows that the Catalan of Maó doesn't sound the same as that of Tortosa, and that of Montblanc doesn't sound the same as that of Xàtiva), nor even whether the standardisation captures this diversity, because it does. The issue is whether speakers feel that this diversity continues to be compatible with the idea of linguistic legitimacy.

After all, insecurity continues to weigh much more than we often like to admit, not because the standardisation is rigid, but because social imaginaries tend to be much more so than grammars.