Things about language: satire, code-switching, and irony
La Trinca already ridiculed the speech of social bilinguals, mocking it with the example of a man from Santa Coloma who, out of ignorance, translated literally from Castilian and said things like 'the car makes him look like a fig'
PalmDo you remember that song by La Trinca whose chorus went, "What a mess, I'm telling you! It's just how language works"? Released in 1979, the piece perfectly reflected the discursive structure characteristic of the group's compositions. La Trinca used satire as a stylistic device to question, denounce, and expose the attitudes, behaviors, and ideologies of late Francoist society.
As a privileged tool of social criticism, satire is often constructed from wordplay, shifts in register, linguistic borrowing, language mixing, or metaphorical uses that highlight inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions. Thus, in 1976, with the song The girdleThe group made a memorable play on words by referring to "those girdle makers, otherwise called fascists." Humor allowed them to express what, said directly, might have been censored or rejected. Language thingsThis resource took the form of language switching or code-switching to denounce the social bilingualism of Catalan speakers.
Social bilinguals
Code-switching involves the alternation between two languages—or linguistic varieties—by the same speaker within the same discourse or sentence. This switch can be intentional, when the speaker uses another language for a specific purpose, such as displaying a certain cultural capital through a Latinism or a foreign word. However, code-switching can also occur unintentionally. This second case is common among so-called social bilinguals: speakers who, for sociopolitical reasons, need two languages for everyday interaction. Looking around Europe, we find the case of Frisian speakers in the Netherlands, forced to use Dutch—the language of power and prestige—in numerous contexts. For centuries, Frisian was absent from the education system. And closer to home, Catalan speakers also had to study in Spanish until the last third of the 20th century. Even today, Catalan is a European language striving to survive in certain contexts.
It is precisely this social bilingualism that La Trinca satirically denounces in Language thingsSocial bilinguals use two languages not so much by individual choice as out of structural necessity: they belong to communities where their native language occupies a subordinate position, and it is the foreign language that guarantees access to the referential spheres of society (administration, education, the labor market, media, leisure). In these contexts, speakers often resort to unintentional code-switching. We often hear this in Catalan-language media discussions, when someone introduces a Spanish saying into their discourse—"as they say in Spanish, to bequeath and kiss the saintThe speaker has not used the Catalan proverbial phrase "llegar y moler" (to arrive and grind). The fact that both languages coexist in the speaker's linguistic competence and are activated simultaneously, coupled with the historical exclusion of the subordinate language from schools, universities, the justice system, and formal cultural production, facilitates this. code-switchingUnintentional code-switching thus becomes a symptom of the history of languages.
Cognitive Universe
To denounce this fact, the Trinca, in Language thingsIt employs satire, a stylistic device in which nothing is exactly what it seems: narrator and reader must share the same cognitive universe for communication to be effective. And so the song recounts the misadventures of a man from Santa Coloma who must travel to Madrid with the problem that "he has long since lost the habit of speaking Spanish." When he wants to explain that the car is acting up, he literally states that the car makes a figAnd, if he wants to spread the fog, he goes to spread the fogThroughout the song, idiomatic expressions impossible to translate literally are strung together, turning the language change into a constant source of absurdities.
But what are La Trinca denouncing? The ridicule of the speech of social bilinguals. It's worth remembering that, in satire, the meaning is often the opposite of what is literally expressed. If the man from Santa Coloma, out of ignorance, translated literally from Catalan to Spanish and claimed that the car He farts like an acorn, sir, that's it.The ultimate meaning of the mockery, however, is directed at those who copy Castilian structures when speaking Catalan. In other words, La Trinca ironically and mockingly points to speakers who "spend the house on the window"—a direct translation of to spare no expense—and they forget that it's not wise to stretch your arm beyond its reach. The song thus invites us to also consider those broadcasters who constantly 'listen' to things and forget to 'feel' them, under the direct influence of the semantic field of the Spanish verb. hear.