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

PalmaThere 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 clear idea of the reasons for the change, but you modify it anyway, because there is a strange (but much more widespread than it seems) intuition that associates certain forms with an idea of more formal, more neutral, or simply more “correct” Catalan when the situation becomes 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 that somewhat diffuse but persistent idea of what “is correct”.

Without filters

During the Correllengua's 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 posted on social networks these days: 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 certain 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 at all: communication continues to flow naturally.

In this sense, one of the things that the Correllengua does is to highlight an idea that linguistics has considered absolutely normal for decades, but which still causes some discomfort socially. Catalan is an internally diverse language, exactly like any other language with a certain territorial extent. Spanish does not sound the same in Seville as in Bogotá, French does not sound the same in Marseille as in Montreal, and Italian, directly, lives installed in permanent variation. The difference is that Catalan continues to drag a rather insecure relationship with its own diversity.

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 hand, 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, coincidentally, tends to coincide 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 has given 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 particularly clear in the relationship between formality and the native variety. In everyday conversation, most speakers spontaneously use Balearic forms without thinking about it: ‘tenc’, ‘som’, ‘anam’, ‘pensàssim’. Doubt arises when the context changes slightly, 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 distancing themselves from their native variety. However, many of the forms that some speakers perceive as ‘too dialectal’ are fully part of the standard. ‘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 move away 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 does not sound the same as that of Tortosa, and that the Catalan of Montblanc does not sound the same as that of Xàtiva), nor even whether the norm collects 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 norm is rigid, but because social imaginaries tend to be much more so than grammars.