European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict 9783631802977, 9783631803080, 9783631803097, 9783631803103

Table of contents :
Preface
Table of co
List of contributors
European pluricentric languages in contact and conflict – An overview • Rudolf Muhr
Dutch national varieties in contact and in conflict • Reglindis De Ridder
Identity and use of a pluricentric language in conflict: Catalan in Spain • Josep-Àngel Mas Castells
Conflict between Valencian and Catalan: Is Valencian a language of its own or a variety of Catalan? • Gerhard Edelmann
Pluricentrism and unity: visions and management of dialectal variation in the process of codification and standardisation of Occitan • Aitor Carrera
Pluricentricity and Irish English • Raymond Hickey
The language situation in Scotland and the question of pluricentricity in British English • Andreas Weilinghoff
A case study in the termination of the pluricentricity of a language: the Serbo-Croatian linguonym • Tomislav Stojanov
Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian: Notes on contact and conflict • Mate Kapović
Linguistic errors or varieties? Albanian and other languages in contact • Albana Muco
Skolt Sami, the makings of a pluricentric language, where does it stand? • Jack Rueter/Mika Hämäläinen
Evidential forms as politeness strategies in Udmurt from a pluricentric point of view • Rebeka Kubitsch/Zoltán Németh
Belarusian Russian in a language continuum: contacts and conflicts • Olga Goritskaya
The pluricentricity of Russian in development: Russian in Estonia as an example • Éva Katona
Austrian German under pressure: age and media consumption as major influencing factors for linguistic change and shifting language attitudes regarding Austrian Standard German • Jutta Ransmayr
Austrian German in Austrian academic discourse • Elena Shirlina
List of figures
List of tables

Citation preview

European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict

ÖSTERREICHISCHES DEUTSCH SPRACHE DER GEGENWART Herausgegeben von Rudolf Muhr

BAND 21

Rudolf Muhr / Josep Àngel Mas Castells / Jack Rueter (eds.)

European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. This publication has been printed with the financial support of the following institution: below the LOGO of Steiermark

Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 1618-5714 ISBN 978-3-631-80297-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80308-0 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80309-7 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-80310-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b16182 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Preface This volume comprises 16 papers. Twelve of them were presented at the “6th World Conference of Pluricentric Languages and their non-dominant Varieties”. The overall theme of the conference was “Pluricentric Languages in Europe in Contact and Conflict”. It was held at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (Slovakia) on June 21–23 2018. Five additional papers of this volume come from authors who worked in the field of the main theme of the conference. In addition to the 16 papers of this volume another 19 papers presented at the conference will be published in a second volume under the title “The pluricentricity of Hungarian in Language and Literature” and for the first time give an overview about the complex situation of this language. The conference focused on pluricentric languages in Europe and pursued several objectives. At the centre of the conference was the objective “to get exhaustive reports of the situation in pluricentric languages and non-dominant varieties in Europe where there are conflicts of any kind.” Another important objective was “to get exhaustive reports of the situation of as many pluricentric languages and non-dominant varieties in Europe as possible and in particular of lesser known and researched ones”. The editors are happy to say that the objectives of the conference have been well achieved. The authors of the papers of this volume come from 10 countries and cover 30 European pluricentric languages or national varieties of pluricentric languages. The first section of the book comprises three papers that are directly related the overall theme “contact and conflict and human rights in pluricentric languages in Europe”. The paper by Rudolf Muhr gives an extensive overview about PLCLs in Europe. The study finds 27 pluricentric languages and 65 national varieties of PCLs in Europe. A total of 30 languages where there are some conflict related issues or special types of pluricentricity are covered and discussed in detail. The paper also presents an overview about all languages that presently are used on the European continent (283) and offers a new approach to define the term “language”. The paper of Miklós Kontra urges linguistic rights for speakers of non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages. In his case, this is related to varieties of Hungarian in neighbouring countries of Hungaria where Hungarian is denied linguistic rights in some countries. Reglindis de Ridder deals with the aspect of dominance in the codification of Dutch which is now moving away from an asymmetric to a more symmetric pluricentricity and shows that there are still obstacles to achieve this valuable goal.

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The second section of the book comprises three papers about pluricentric languages in contact and conflict at the Iberian Peninsula. Two papers concern Catalan. Josep Àngel Mas Castells profoundly describes the connection between language and identity in Catalan. The author gives insight into the political struggles that accompany the codification and language policy that surround Catalan in general and Valencian in particular. Quite in this vein is the paper about Valencian by Gerhard Edelman who reflects on the question whether Valencian can be considered a language of its own. Aitor Carrera deals with Occitan and shows a language where the fragmentation and opposing approaches have complicated the codification and even the survival of the language. The third section is about pluricentric languages on the British Isles that show some phenomena of conflict. Raymond Hickey deals with the pluricentricity of English in Ireland. The author gives an in depth overview about the development of English in Ireland and of the features of Irish English both in the Southern and in the Northern part of the Island. Andreas Weilinghoff goes into the particular linguistic situation of Scotland where Scottish Gaelic, Scots and Scottish English show a complex cohabitation. The author also argues that British English in itself is pluricentric. The fourth section of this book comprises papers about languages whose status as PCL is disputed. The papers by Tomislav Stojanov and Mate Kapović deal from different perspectives with the four languages - Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian - that developed out of Serbo-Croatian after the split of Yugoslavia. Albana Muco discusses the reluctance of the political and cultural elites to accept the pluricentric status of Albanian, who advocate a strong onenation-one language concept. In the fifth section, there are two papers that discuss the pluricentricity of Finno-Ugric languages, which is a novelty. Jack Rueter and Mika Hämäläinen go into the difficult situation of the highly fragmented Sami languages. Rebeka Kubitsch/Zoltán Németh find evidence for the pluricentricity in Udmurt by dealing with politeness strategies connected with the use of evidential forms. The sixth chapter comprises the papers of Olga Goritzka about Belarusian Russian and Vica Katona about Russian in Estonia. Both papers show that the pluricentricity of Russian is under development. In the final chapter Jutta Ransmayer and Elen Shirlina discuss the situation of Austrian German which is under pressure from the dominant variety German German. The editors would like to thank the reviewers for their effort and their valuable input that helped to improve the publication. Rudolf Muhr, Josep Àngel Mas Castells, Jack Rueter Graz, Valencia and Helsinki in May 2019

Table of contents List of contributors .................................................................................................

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Rudolf Muhr European pluricentric languages in contact and conflict – An overview .......  11 Reglindis De Ridder Dutch national varieties in contact and in conflict ............................................  65 Josep-Àngel Mas Castells Identity and use of a pluricentric language in conflict: Catalan in Spain .......  81 Gerhard Edelmann Conflict between Valencian and Catalan: Is Valencian a language of its own or a variety of Catalan? .................................................................................  97 Aitor Carrera Pluricentrism and unity: visions and management of dialectal variation in the process of codification and standardisation of Occitan .........................  111 Raymond Hickey Pluricentricity and Irish English ..........................................................................  133 Andreas Weilinghoff The language situation in Scotland and the question of pluricentricity in British English ....................................................................................................  147 Tomislav Stojanov A case study in the termination of the pluricentricity of a language: the Serbo-Croatian linguonym ...................................................................................  155 Mate Kapović Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian: Notes on contact and conflict .......  171 Albana Muco Linguistic errors or varieties? Albanian and other languages in contact ........  185

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Jack Rueter/Mika Hämäläinen Skolt Sami, the makings of a pluricentric language, where does it stand? ......  199 Rebeka Kubitsch/Zoltán Németh Evidential forms as politeness strategies in Udmurt from a pluricentric point of view ...........................................................................................................  207 Olga Goritskaya Belarusian Russian in a language continuum: contacts and conflicts .............  221 Éva Katona The pluricentricity of Russian in development: Russian in Estonia as an example ....................................................................................................................  235 Jutta Ransmayr Austrian German under pressure: age and media consumption as major influencing factors for linguistic change and shifting language attitudes regarding Austrian Standard German .................................................  247 Elena Shirlina Austrian German in Austrian academic discourse ............................................  261 List of figures ...........................................................................................................  275 List of tables ............................................................................................................  277

List of contributors Aitor Carrera (University of Lleida, Catalonia) [email protected] Reglindis De Ridder (Stockholm University, Sweden) reglindis.deridder@nederlandska. su.se Gerhard Edelmann (Universität Wien, Austria) [email protected] Olga Goritskaya (Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus) [email protected]

Josep-Àngel Mas Castells (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) [email protected] Rudolf Muhr (Universität Graz, Austria) [email protected] Albana Muco (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy) [email protected] Zoltán Németh (University of Szeged, Hungary) [email protected]

Mika Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki, Finland) [email protected]

Jutta Ransmayr (Universität Wien, Austria) [email protected]

Raymond Hickey University of Duisburg and Essen [email protected]

Jack Rueter (University of Helsinki, Finland) [email protected]

Mate Kapović (University of Zagreb, Croatia) [email protected]

Tomislav Stojanov (University of Zagreb, Croatia) [email protected]

Éva Katona (ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) [email protected]

Elena Shirlina (Belgorod National Research University, Russia) [email protected]

Rebeka Kubitsch (University of Szeged, Hungary) [email protected]

Andreas Weilinghoff (University of Münster, Germany) [email protected]

Rudolf Muhr

European pluricentric languages in contact and conflict – An overview Abstract: This paper intends to give an overview about (a) which languages there are in Europe, (b) which of them are to be considered pluricentric, and (c) where there are conflicts either about the status of pluricentricity and/or about the acknowledgment of their national varieties and their social visibility. The paper will also reflect on the possible reasons for conflicts about pluricentricity. In order to do this, it was necessary to define the borders of “Europe” and make a list of all European languages that exist within the borders of this continent. In the course of the elaboration of this task, it became apparent that neither a full list of all European languages existed, nor was there a consensus among linguists about the term “language”. Thus, one of the additional results of this work is that a definition of the term “language” and other terms derived from it are offered in this paper. The overview over pluricentric languages (PCLs) in contact and conflict found two types of special forms of pluricentricity and five types of conflicts in a total of 29 European languages and 19 national varieties. This overview yielded a large number of ongoing and past conflicts that mostly occur when nations and languages split or language communities have to fight for their linguistic and social rights to become or stay visible.1

Objectives of this paper The task of this paper is to describe European pluricentric languages where there is some sort of conflict or where there are contact induced issues either by other varieties of the “same” language or other languages. In a first step, I  will discuss the terms “Europe” and “European language” and then consider how many languages there are in the area that is called “Europe” and what status they have. In a further step, the languages that can be categorized as “pluricentric” will be selected. In a last step, an overview of the PCLs and national varieties (NV) is offered where there are conflicts and problems arising from contact between national varieties and other languages.

1 I would like to thank Dawn Marley, Josep Mas Castells, Jack Rueter and Juan A. Thomas for reviewing this paper and their suggestions to improve the text.

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Part I: Defining the boundaries and countries of Europe 1 What is the meaning of the term “Europe”? The continent called “Europe” is a geographical area of around 10 million square km. In the west, it is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, in the north by the Arctic Ocean and in the south (partly) by the Mediterranean Sea. The Ural Mountains are conventionally considered as the eastern boundary. Europe includes parts of the Russian Federation even though Uralic and Altaic languages are used on both sides of the mountains2. Moreover, it makes Western Kazakhstan (partly) a European country, which is contested by some authors and even the European Union3, while Cornell/Engvall (2017) clearly consider it to be a European country4 for different reasons than seem plausible. The country is therefore included in the list of European states. Some authors also delineate Europe at the Black Sea, the Kuma-Manych Depression in Russia5, and at the Caspian Sea6. This approach would exclude Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, which are all members of the Council of Europe. The latter is not a geographical but a political argument and settles the discussion about the eastern border of the European continent for the time being. In addition, it excludes any attempt to define Europe via so-called cultural-anthropological arguments, which would restrict Europe to the countries influenced by the Roman-Greek and Christian heritage7. There are also some issues concerning the countries at the western border of Europe. Although Greenland geographically is part of the American continent, all countries east of North America are usually considered European. Greenland belongs as an autonomous region constitutionally to Denmark and can therefore be included in the list of European territories too. The same is the case with Iceland due to its language and longstanding contacts with (Northern) Europe. 1. The result is the following list of 51 sovereign European countries8: 2 Haarman (2011). 3 See:  Euroactiv:  EU hesitates to recognise Kazakhstan as European [06.11.2017]. [https://www.euractiv.com/section/central-asia/news/europe-hesitates-to-recognisekazakhstan-as-european/] [acc. 17.11.2018]. 4 Cornell/Engvall (2017). 5 https://www.britannica.com/place/Kuma-Manych-Depression [acc. 06.01.2019]. 6 See: https://www.britannica.com/place/Europe [acc. 06.01.2019]. 7 See: Grzega (2006). 8 Salewski (2004) and Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_ states_and_dependent_territories_in_Europe [acc. 06.01.2019].

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Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo9, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City/Holy See.

2. In addition there are 8 dependant territories of European states with a special political (self-governing) status: 1.  Akrotiri and Dhekelia: British overseas territories on the island of Cyprus; 2.   Gibraltar: British overseas territory on the Iberian Peninsula; 3.   Island of Guernsey, Island of Jersey, Island of Man: British Crown territories; 4.   Faroe Islands and Greenland: Constituent countries of the Kingdom of Denmark; 5.   Åland: Self-governing area of Finland; 6.   Svalbard/Spitzbergen: Unincorporated area of Norway. 7/8.  Mellila and Ceuta: Spanish autonomous cities located on the north coast of Africa and Spanish speaking territories for centuries. Note:  (1) The French overseas regions and departments Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion, Mayotte and the French overseas collectivities French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis and Futuna, which have their own statutory laws are not included here in the list of dependant territories as they are all situated outside the European continent. To include them would mean to include many very different languages in the list of European languages, which would overstretch the term “European language”10. Note (2): The same approach is applied to the constituent parts of the Kingdom of Netherlands, which are all situated in the Caribbean Sea:  Bonaire, Saint Eustatius, Saba, Aruba, Curaçao, Saint Maarten. There is just one typologically non-European-language – Papiamento – (a Creole language), which is spoken in these territories (but not included either in the list of European languages.) 9 As of 12/2018 Kosovo is only recognised by 112 countries. 10 Just to give one example: The regional languages of French Guiana “include French Guianese Creole (not to be confused with Guyanese Creole), six Amerindian languages (Arawak, Palijur, Kali’na, Wayana, Wayampi, Emerillon), four Maroon Creole languages (Saramaka, Paramaccan, Aluku, Ndyuka), as well as Hmong Njua. Other languages spoken include Portuguese, Hakka, Haitian Creole, Spanish, Dutch, English, and Tamil, and Caribbean Hindustani” (Quoted from Wikepedia English edition: French Guiana).

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3. Finally, there are 10 disputed territories which are in some cases de facto independent states or in other cases incorporated areas in other polities with little or no international recognition11: 1.  Abkhazia and South Ossetia: Breakaway territories of Georgia which declared independence; 2.  Autonomous Republic of Crimea: Occupied area of Ukraine by Russia; 3.  Republic of Artsah/Nagorno-Karabakh Republic: Breakaway territory of Azerbaijan, formally independent republic only supported by Armenia; 4.  Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic: Breakaway territories of Ukraine, which are presently at war with Ukraine; 5.  Northern Cyprus: Breakaway territory of the Republic of Cyprus, occupied by Turkey; 6.  Transistria: Breakaway territory of the Republic of Moldova. In all, there are 82 European political entities that form the basis of the next step:  listing the languages used on European territory and then sorting out (a) those which can be considered pluricentric and (b) those that have some issues in respect to contact and conflict.

Part II: Defining the term “language”, setting up a complete list of European languages and a list of European pluricentric languages 1 Coping with problems in defining and listing the European languages 1.1  Existing lists denoting “European languages” The available literature dealing with the topic “European language” (EL) shows a confusing variety of names and yields numbers of languages used in Europe that differ significantly. In addition to this, there is a considerable lack of literature on the theme, illustrated by the fact that Encyclopaedia Britannica does not have such an entry (Wikipedia has a section called “Languages of Europe” with

11 As of 01.11.2019: Kosovo: Recognised by 112 out of 192 United Nations member states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia: 5, Republic of Artsah (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic): 1, Northern Cyprus: 1, South Ossetia: 5, Transistria: 0.

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differences between language editions). The search for relevant literature turned up six main sources: 1. The “Wieser Enzyklopädie: Lexikon der Sprachen des Europäischen Ostens und Westens. Drei Bände ” [Wieser Encyclopedia: Lexicon of the Languages of the European East and West] (Ammon et.al. 2002): This comprehensive work in three volumes, edited by different authors presents on 2.300 pages a total of 145 living European languages (and also a couple of extinct languages), many of them are unique to this encyclopaedia. It is surely the most extensive publication in the field with expert linguists as authors and editors: It comprises Vol. 1–2 (2008) “Sprachen des Europäischen Westens” [Western European Languages] and Vol. 3 (2002) “Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens” [Lexicon of the Languages of the European East]. 2. “Das Sprachenmosaik Europas” [The language mosaic of Europe] by Harald Haarman (2011) published on EGO “Europäische Geschichte Online”12 [European History Online]. This list comprises 97 languages and is comparatively short. 3. The list of “European Languages” published in three editions of Wikipedia13: The English, French and Spanish versions. 4. The list of languages protected by the European Charter of Minority Languages, which comprises 91 languages14. This list is included because of its reliability and in order to obtain a complete list of all European languages. Another reason is that many so called “minority languages” are sometimes more accurately described as regional languages (e.g. Hungarian) and therefore qualify as national varieties. 5. The list of official languages of the countries of the European Union and the other European states listed above. It must be noted at this point that the term “official language” is ambiguous and a source of uncertainty as this concept differs from country to country.

12 http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/crossroads/sprachenmosaik/harald-haarmann-dassprachenmosaik-europas [acc. 15.02.2019]. 13 http://de.wikipedia.org; http://fr.wikipedia.org; http://es.wikipedia.org [acc. 15.02.2019]. 14 https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-charter-regional-or-minority-languages/ languages-covered [acc. 10.02.2019].

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1.2  Problems with the definition of the terms “language” and “European language” (a) Different numbers of languages in different lists None of the five major sources above shows the same number of languages. This is best illustrated by a comparison between three major language specific editions of Wikipedia: Wikipedia English lists 121 languages, Wikipedia French 108, Wikipedia Spanish 132. The differences arise – to show just an e­ xample – as the Spanish list includes 32 Caucasian languages and 10 varieties of Romani that are not found in other language lists. This results in large differences in the number and names of languages in the lists. Some languages are found in all lists and some in only four, three, two or one, which necessitated extensive research in additional sources. (b) Different names with different spellings for the “same” language A second quite confusing problem was that a number of languages have different names, different spellings and are found as such in the consulted lists. Examples for this are: • Abkhaz: Abxaz, Abkhazian; • Aramaic: Aisor, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Aramaic • Arbëresh: Arbëneshë, Arbanasi Albanian • French Channel Islands: Jèrriais. Jèrriais/Dgèrnésiais)

• Mari: Cheremis; Kabardian: Kabardino-Cherkess, East Circassian; • Lezgian: Lezgi/Lezgin; • Mirandese: Asturleonese, Mirandés • Rhaeto-Romance: Rumantsch Grischun, Romansh, Rumantsch etc.

(c) Unclear concepts related to the term “language” A third and by far the most significant complication arose from the fact that there are language names in the lists (e.g. the English Wikipedia) like “AustroBavarian”, “Svabian German” [Schwäbisch], “Mainfränkisch” [Main Franconian], “Ripuarian (Platt)” and “Palatinate German” [Pfälzisch] which are traditionally considered regional varieties of German and are usually listed as (historical) “dialects” of German. Linguistically and historically they may be considered as “languages” but do not function today as such, they are used as spoken everyday language and generally not used in writing. The list also contains language

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names like “Walloon” [Belgium French], “Silesian” [Schlesisch] and “Silesian German” [Schlesisches Deutsch], which are different language types:  national varieties (Belgium-French), nearly extinct dialects (Silesian German) and mixed languages (Silesian). They are all listed under the heading of “European language”. This is quite instructive, as it involuntarily gives insight into one of the central problems of linguistics and language policy of today: there is no consensus about the most basic term of linguistics:  “language”  – and hence none about derived terms like “pluricentric language”, “official language” and related terms like “national variety”, “dialect”, “minority language” and other terms denoting status types of languages. This reveals a central source for conflicts in PCLs and beyond, and a massive shortcoming of the linguistic sciences.

2 A new attempt to define the pluricentric languages of Europe and their national varieties: defining the term “language” by classifying “lingoids” according to their status in order to become “languages” The confusing situation around the term “language” and “European language” led me to compile a complete list of all languages included in the five lists (plus consulting further online resources), to classify them according to their status in order to be able to define central terms of variational linguistics and terms underlying the concept of PCLs. The aim of this section is to identify the pluricentric languages of Europe. A  first attempt made in this direction was my paper published in 200315. This paper, however, is outdated today due to developments in the theory of pluricentricity and changes in the political situation in Europe. A  new approach is needed that includes the definition of basic linguistic concepts like “language”.

2.1  Criteria and concepts to define the term “language” In this chapter, a list of “European languages” is presented. To achieve this, the term “language” had to be defined at first. For this, the term “lingoid” is introduced. It is used to describe any means of human communication that is traditionally called a “language” whose status in the social domain is not yet decided. It is a neutral hyperonym for any kind of unclassified “language”. A  “lingoid”

15 Muhr (2003): Die plurizentrischen Sprachen Europas. [The pluricentric languages of Europe].

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becomes a “language” if this communication system has achieved political/social acknowledgement and an official function in a given social/political realm it is attributed to. The reason for the introduction of this term is that the compilation of the list of European languages turned up many ambiguous and unclear lingonyms (language names). It was not clear what type of “language” is meant by these names or whether they “exist” at all, especially when they appeared only once in the lists. It seemed therefore reasonable to have a neutral umbrella term in analogy to the term “phone” in phonology that describes any vocal utterance on the level of phonetics whose phonological status is not (yet) decided. The following classification of European lingoids is based on the criteria of recognition by a political or societal authority that has the power to decide over the status of lingoid(s) being used on the territory the authority governs. The “political or societal authority” would be in the most cases the government of a nation or of a state/department/region etc. within this nation. Outside the formal structures of nations, the body passing such decisions could be a council of elders, a leader/ leaders of a social or ethnic group etc. These political entities and powers decide whether a given “lingoid” “exists” (on the territory), which means that it is given a commonly used name and whether and how it may/must be used in this realm. It is the political and social process that converts a “lingoid” into a “language”, and it is the political entity that bestows “lingoids” with rights and brings them into existence as “languages”. A “language” in this concept is therefore a lingoid that has full recognition through a political entity and an attributed status. Lingoids without this recognition exist of course but they cannot be called a “language” in the sense described here16. Based on this it is possible to define the term “European language” (and later on the term “European pluricentric language”). Definition: A European language is a lingoid that is native to one of the (presently) 82 political entities of the European continent, used by speakers living there, recognized by a political entity and bestowed a specific status that defines its use and its rights within the given realm.

16 A good example for the validity of this concept is my home town Graz in Austria. About 150 lingoids (languages) are spoken in a town of not more than 300,000 inhabitants. However, there is only one language in the sense depicted above: Austrian German. It is the only language that is/and may be officially used in the public domain (administration, media, schools, etc.) and is also used by most inhabitants in their private lifes. All other “languages” are restricted to the private domain and (apart from publications of engaged linguists) do not exist officially.

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2.2  The number of European lingoids that are potentially “languages” The research described above yielded 238 European lingoids, of which 199 are languages according to the previous definition and 39 are unrecognized minority languages or languages of migrant communities (mostly with very few speakers) or regional languages (often called “dialects”) or languages used by itinerant communities that are without a formal status and thus formally non-existent. The number of lingoids/languages that was found might in fact be larger as there are smaller lingoids in the Balkans and in Russia that are probably not included in any of the lists consulted.

Part III: A comprehensive list of all European languages and lingoids – Classified according to their occurrence and status 1 Category (1): acknowledged lingoids with predominant rights that are used with this status in only one nation: national monocentric languages (21): ( 1) Occupy a well-defined territory where they are a source of social cohesion; (2) Have the highest social status in this territory. The status is bestowed on the lingoid by the state institutions and usually secured through laws; (3) Their usage is prescribed for certain text types and communicative situations (administration, institutions of the state etc.); (4) Are part of identity and self-identification of the nation and its inhabitants; (5) These lingoids are norm-setting centres in their own right, and also function as a model for the same language in other nations with the status of a minority language. List:  Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Icelandic, Latvian, Letzebuergesch (Luxembourgian), Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Montenegrin, Polish, Rhaeto-Romance (Rumantsch Grischun), Slovakian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Welsh (y Gymraeg). Note (1):  Welsh (y Gymraeg) is only recognized as a “minority language” but is the second official language of Wales, which is a constitutional part of the United Kingdom and legally a sovereign state within the United Kingdom. The language is also an important source of identity for the population of Wales and unique to this political entity. It can therefore be considered a co-official national monocentric language.

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Note (2):  Rhaeto-Romance (Rumantsch Grischun) is one of four national languages of Switzerland and confined to this country. This language must therefore also be classified as a monocentric national language.

2 Category (2): acknowledged lingoids that are used within more than one nation where they have the highest status: national pluricentric languages (27): (1) Occupy a well-defined territory in at least two nations where they are a source of social solidarity. To a greater or lesser extent, several nations share this language. (2) Have the highest status - bestowed by the state and usually secured through laws; (3) Their usage is prescribed for certain text types and communicative situations (administration, institutions of the state etc.); (4) The lingoid is part of the identity and self-identification of the nation and its inhabitants by speakers aware of their own linguistic and pragmatic characteristics; (5) The participating nations have a number of speakers that is large enough to establish their own linguistic centre that codifies and standardizes the variety after a longer period of time. List: Albanian, Armenian*, Azerbaijani North (Azeri), Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Frisian*, German, Greek, Hungarian*, Irish (Ireland Gaelic), Italian, Norwegian, Occitan*, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scots, Sami*, Serbian, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Turkish*. Note (1): There are several languages in this list with a high degree of internal fragmentation, which makes their status as PCL disputable: Frisian, Occitan, and Sami. They are listed here until their status as PCL is clarified. Note (2)  Specific features of this type:  The term “pluricentric language” does NOT name a single lingoid. It is an umbrella term for several (at least two) acknowledged national lingoids of the same name that in their territory have (in most cases) the highest status and act like monocentric national languages. Note (3):  It is important to note that a considerable number of speakers are necessary to develop a norm-setting centre and thus a variety of its own which is codified and standardized after some time. To qualify as a PCL the national varieties must have a certain number of speakers and at

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least the quality of a regional language. However, the status of a regional language is sometimes denied to NVs by the political institutions of some states that are in power to regulate the status of a lingoid. Therefore, it is the number of speakers, which sets a national centre, irrespective of the officially attributed status (see the situation of Hungarian as a typical example).

3 Acknowledged lingoids (and thus languages) used in just one nation – But with a common history and shared linguistic features with the language(s) of other nations: national varieties of pluricentric languages: (65): ( 1) Occupy a well-defined territory; (2) Have the highest status - bestowed by the state and often secured by law; (3) Their usage is prescribed for certain text types and communicative situations (administration, institutions of the state etc.); (4) Form part of the identity of the nation and its inhabitants; (5) Are languages shared with (an)other nation(s) (6) These lingoids usually do not have an official language name of their own – they are just named after the name of language type (2). (7) They often share language regulation bodies that regulate orthography and other aspects of the formal written language (written standard language) (8) They are called “national varieties” and are the realization of pluricentric languages. The national varieties constitute the pluricentric language. They must therefore be the primary source of description as a whole as they represent single nations and have the same status in each nation like a monocentric language. List:  Albanian Albanian, Albanian Kosovo, Albanian Macedonia, Armenian Armenia, Armenian Artsakh*, Armenian Western*; Azerbaijani (Azeri) Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani (Azeri) Russia, Basque Spain, Basque France, Catalan Andorra, Catalan Baleares; Catalan Catalunya, Catalan Valencia, Croatian Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatian Croatia; Dutch Belgium (Flemish), Dutch Netherlands, English England*, English Ireland, English Northern Ireland*, English Malta, English Scotland*, English Wales, French Belgium, French France, French Monaco, French Switzerland, German Austria, German Belgium, German Germany, German Italy; German Liechtenstein, German Luxembourg, German Switzerland, Greek Cyprus, Greek Greece, Hungarian Romania*, Hungarian Serbia*, Hungarian Slovakia*,

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Hungarian Ukraine*, Irish Ireland, Irish Northern Ireland, Italian Italy, Italian San Marino, Italian Switzerland, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Occitan Spain, Occitan France, Portuguese Portugal, Romanian Romania, Romanian Moldova*, Russian Estonia*, Russian Latvia, Russian Lithuania, Russian Ukraine*, Sami Norway*, Sami Sweden*, Sami Finland*, Scots Scotland, Scots Ulster, Serbian Serbia, Serbian Bosnia Herzegovina, Spanish Spain, Swedish Finland, Swedish Sweden, Turkish Cyprus, Turkish Turkey. Note (1):  The naming of NVs of PCLs in this list needs an explanation. Each language name is composed of the name of the language in the first position, followed by the name of the country in second position, while in the standard form of naming NVs of PCLs it is exactly the other way round. This naming has been chosen here exclusively in order to have all national varieties of single PCLs together in one place. Note (2): The marking of a language name with an asterisk (*) in this list is an indication that there is some particularity with this NV, which means that there is a deviation in official status or issues about the language name etc. These issues will be discussed further down in this paper.

4 Category (4): acknowledged lingoids used in sections of the territory of a certain nation: official regional languages (66*) 1. Occupy a well defined but reduced section of the territory of a nation alongside the national lingoid(s). 2. Have a reduced status restricted to this region with rights secured by law 3. The usage of these regional languages in certain official text types and communicative situations (administration, institutions etc.) is confined to this area. 4. Form part of the identity of the region and its inhabitants and often take their name from the region they occupy. 5. Provided there is a substantial number of speakers, the regional language can become a norm-setting centre. List:  Abaza (Adyghe), Abkhaz (Abxaz, Abkhazian), Adyghe (West Circassian), Aghul, Aragonese (Spain), Aramaic/Aisor (Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Aramaic) (Kurdish Autonomy Region), Aranese (Occtitan), Archi, Asturian (Bable), Avar (Avaric), Bashkir, Basque, Catalan, Chechen, Chuvash, Corsican, Dargwa, Erzya, Farese (Faroese), Franco-Provençal (Arpitan), Frisian-North, Frisian-West, Friulanian,

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Friulian (Furlan), Gagauz (Gagausian), Galician (Galego), Gallurese, GermanSouth-Tyrol, Greenlandic (Inuit), Ingush, Istro-Venetian (VENET), Judeo-Tat (Juhuri), Kabardian (Kabardino-Cherkess, East Circassian), Kalmyk Oirat, Karachay-Balkar (Karatschai-Balkarian), Komi-Permyak, Komi-Zyrian, Kumyk, Ladinian (Dolomite Ladin), Lak, Leonese (Leonesian), Lezgian (Lezgi/ Lezgin), Limburgish, Low German (Plattdütsch, Lower Saxon), Mari (Cheremis), Mirandese (Asturleonese, Mirandés), Mòcheno (Fersentalerisch), Mordvinian Erzya, Mordvinian Moksha, Nenets (Yurak), Nganasan, Nogai (Nogay, Nogai Tatar), Occitan, Ossetian (Ossete, Ossetic), Piedmontese, Rutul, Northern Sami, Sardinian, Sassarese, Sicilian (Siculo, Calabro-Sicilian), Tabasaran, Tat/Tati, Tatar Crimean (Crimean), Tatar Kazan, Tsakhur (Tsaxur, Caxur), Udmurt (Wotjakian), Venetian. Note (1): A large number of the regional languages of this list are official languages of the federal republics of the Russian Federation, which according to article 68 of the Russian constitution have the right to their own state language other than Russian.17 However, a new education bill passed in 2018 makes the teaching of the languages of the republics optional and reduces them to two hours per week. This has seriously undermined this right and aims at a Russification of the Russian Federation.18 Note (2): Many lingoids of this type would otherwise often be called “dialects” or “regional varieties” of a national language as it is the case with German, for example. However, in many other cases (as in Russia) they are “regional languages”, because they are acknowledged on the levels of republics or regions and have an official function in this area. This is particularly the case in Spain and Italy, where there is regional devolution, which includes the official recognition of the languages of these regions.

1 7 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Russia [acc. 25.02.2019]. 18 https://www.idelreal.org/a/28937644.html; https://theconversation.com/russiais-cracking-down-on-minority-languages-but-a-resistance-movement-isgrowing-101493 [acc. 25.02.2019].

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5 Category 5: acknowledged lingoids different from national language(s) and only used in a small part of a certain nation and by a small minority of its inhabitants with very reduced rights: protected minority languages19 (57/93)20: They share the following features: 1. Occupy a well-defined section of the territory of a nation alongside the national lingoid(s); 2. Have a reduced status and have linguistic rights only for a specific social group  – which is bestowed by the state and usually secured by law. They “exist” because they were given some rights in a confined area. 3. The right of usage in certain official text types and communicative situations (administration, institutions etc,) is confined to this area/this group; 4. These lingoids are also often used in other nations too especially in neighbouring countries with a contiguous language area. List: Arabic Cypriot Maronite (Kormakiti Arabic), Arbëresh (Arbëneshë, Arbanasi Albanian), Aromanian (Macedo-Romanian/Vlach), Beás (Boyash Roma, Beash, Rudari, Ludari), Bunjevac (Bunjevački govor, Bunjevački jezik), Cimbrian (Northern Italy), Cornish (Kernowek), Crimean Tatar, Croatian Moravian, Finnish Kven, Finnish-Meänkieli (Tornedalsfinska), French Channel Islands (Jèrriais. Jèrriais/Dgèrnésiais), Frisian-Sater, Gaelic Manx, Gaelic-Scottish (Scots Gaelic), Gallo, Griko (Grico, Italiot Greek), Hebrew, Istriot (Istro-Romanian, Vlach), Italo Albanian (Arbëresh), Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), Karaim (Karaimic), Kashubian (Kashub), Krymchak (Krimchak, Judeo-Crimean Tatar), Lemko (Lemkian, Ruthenian, Rusyn Poland), Molise Basilicata (Slavic in Southern Italy), Romanes (Romani, Romani Chib, Roma language), Romani Sinti (Sintenghero Tschib(en), Sintitikes, Romanes), Romani Vlach, Rusyn (Ruthenian, Ruthene), Sami Inarisami, Sami Lulesami, Sami-Skolt (Sami/Eastern Skolt Sami), Sami-South Sami, Sorbian Lower, Sorbian Upper, Tatar Finland (Mishar), Vepsian (Veps), Walachian, Yenish (Yeniche, Jenisch), Yiddish. 19 For this type see European Charter of Minority languages: https://www.coe.int/en/ web/european-charter-regional-or-minority-languages/languages-covered [acc. 25.02.3019]. 20 The first number (57) names minority languages that are specific to a single country, the second number (93) counts all minority languages – many of them exist in several countries.

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Note (1): The first number “57” above indicates the number of protected minority languages (PMLs) that are unique PMLs in Europe, while the second number “93” gives the number of PMLs listed in the European Charta of Minority languages across all member states of the Council of Europe (some MLs are protected in more than one state). Note (2): Many lingoids of this type often only have a small number of speakers. Usually they are in most cases no norm-setting centres due to the small number of speakers and lack of resources. In addition, these lingoids often differ substantially in their linguistic substance from the mother-variety, which often leads to diglossia in education.

6 Category (6): acknowledged lingoids derived from national language(s) that are only used by specific groups of inhabitants of nations with specific linguistic needs because of their physical impairments: protected sign languages as a type of minority languages (31/20)21: They share the following features: 1. They share the same national territory like the monocentric national languages (Type 1) or the national varieties of pluricentric languages (Type 3). 2. Are the primary means of communication of specific groups of the population with physical impairments (hearing impairment, muteness etc.). 3. Have a reduced status and have linguistic rights only for a specific social group – which is bestowed by the state and usually secured by law. List: Type (1) Monocentric sign languages (31) Armenian SL, Azerbaijani SL, Bosnian SL, Bulgarian SL, Croatian SL, Czech SL, Danish SL, Estonian SL, Finnish SL, Georgian SL, Hungarian SL, Icelandic SL, Irish SL, Latvian SL, Lithuanian SL, Macedonian SL, Maltese SL, Moldavian SL, Northern Ireland SL, Norwegian SL, Polish SL, Portuguese SL, Romanian SL, Russian SL, Serbian SL, Slovakian SL, Slovenian SL, Spanish SL, Turkish SL, Ukrainian SL, Yugoslav SL List: Type (1) Monocentric sign languages (31) Type (2) Pluricentric sign languages (20) 21 The first number (30) indicates the number of monocentric sign languages, the second (20) the number of pluricentric sign languages. The list is based on the article “List of sign languages” on Wikipedia (English edition).

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Albanian-Albania SL, Albanian-Kosovo SL, Catalan Catalonia SL, CatalanValencia SL, Dutch-Flemish-Belgium SL, Dutch-Netherlands- SL, English-British SL, English-Northern Ireland SL, French-Belgium-Walloon SL, French-France SL, French-Switzerland SL, German-Austrian SL, German-Germany SL, GermanSwiitzerland SL, Greek-Cyprus SL, Greek-Greece SL, Italian-Italian SL, ItalianSwitzerland SL, Swedish-Finland SL, Swedish-Sweden SL

7 Category (7/8): lingoids of type (4) and (5) with no recognition by the political entities where they are occurring and thus only existing informally and without explicit rights (16/21): unrecognised and unprotected regional/minority languages – Invisible languages (I): 1. Its speakers usually occupy only small sections of the territory of a nation or are scattered about the whole nation. They may be of the type (4) regional or (5) minority languages; 2. Have no recognition and therefore have no status and do not officially “exist”; 3. Only in very few cases, they develop actions to standardise and codify their language (if the social group is powerful enough). 4. This situation leaves the specific social groups without any right of use in official national contexts; List (6):  Following type (4)  – unrecognised/unprotected regional languages:  Asturian, Breton, Chakavian (Kajkavian), Extremaduran, Gascon (Aranés, Aranese, Arnais, Aranese Occitan), Karelian Proper, Karelian Olonets, Ligurian, Lombard, Masurian, Mingrelian (Megrelian, Iverian), Neapolitan, Resian (Slovenian in Italy), Shtokavian, Silesian, Svan, Udi, Vičsch, Võro, Walachian, West Polesian, Wymysorys (Vilamovian) etc. List (7):  Following type (5)  – unrecognised/unprotected minority languages:  Arvanitika Albanian (Arvanitic), Bats (C’ova-Tuš, Batsi), Budukh, Domari (Middle Eastern Romani, Tsigene, Luti, Mehtar), Judeo-Italian (Italkian), Kryts (Kryc), Kurdish Northern (Kurmanj), Megleno-Romanian (Meglenitic, Moglenitic), Pomak (Greek Bulgarian), Sami-Kildin Sami (Kola Sami), Sami-Pite Sami, Scottish Cant (Scottish Traveler Cant), Talysh, Urum, Votic etc. Note:  The list above is probably not complete, as some of the lingoids belonging to this category are not mentioned in the lists that served as the basis for this compilation or are described in literature that is difficult to access.

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8 Category (8): nationless lingoids (diaspora languages) – Migrant lingoids with no recognition by political entities: (partly) invisible languages (II): 1. Category (8) includes lingoids that are used by traditional diaspora communities, which came into existence due to migration in the course of political events or due to labour migration. 2. These lingoids share all features of categories (6)  and (7)  and have no rights whatsoever. This is particularly the case with diaspora languages that came into existence through labour migration and are not recognized in any European nation. Some traditional diaspora languages like Yiddish or Armenian sometimes happen to achieve some recognition in some countries as minority language (see above category (5)). 3. List (only to name some as an example): Assyrian (Asidor, Neo-Aramaic), Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Kurdish, Yiddish, Turkish, Romanian, Polish, the languages of Ex-Yugoslavia etc. in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and many other countries etc.

9 Category (9): nationless lingoids of the itinerant people and territorially unbound languages with no recognition by political entities: invisible languages (III): 1. Category (9) includes lingoids that are mainly used by itinerant people who travel around in different countries. 2. These are the most powerless lingoids as they “own” no explicit territory, no rights, and no nation of origin and thus have no support. Some of these lingoids are also secret languages (crypto languages) used solely for communication within the community. 3. Examples: Varieties of Romanes, Yenish, Polari (Palari, Palarie), Scottish Cant (Scottish Traveller Cant), Shelta (Cant, Sheldru). Some of these lingioids are recognized in some European countries as minority languages (Switzerland, Scotland, UK).

Part IV: “European pluricentric languages” and national varieties in contact and conflict 1 Introduction This chapter will deal with a selected number of European pluricentric languages (EPCL) and NVs that have been outlined in part III of this paper and belong to type

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(2) and (3) of this categorization. It describes different types of EPCLs and NVs in Europe and shows different types of conflicts. It will also list some special cases of pluricentricity. The main criteria for the description of PCLs, which show some issues in respect to contact and conflict is “visibility in the social realm” and “the struggle to achieve social visibility”. The description starts with languages/lingoids, which might be PCLs but are invisible for different reasons like the lack of official recognition, dispersion across many countries, strong internal fragmentation etc. The description will move forward to different types of conflict to those PCLs that have achieved an uncontested pluricentricity. Needless to say, there will also be some languages that have become invisible after the development of certain political processes have occurred.

2 Special cases of European PCLs – Two national varieties of the same language within the same nation or a compound nation consisting of multilingual constituent political entities The languages discussed in this section are not languages where there are conflicts or strong effects of intensive contact with other languages. They are rather special cases of pluricentricity that are dealt with here for the sake of the completeness of the overview and for the integration into the scheme outlined in the second section. There are four cases in this category: Norwegian, Danish, British English, and Basque.

1  Norwegian: pluricentricity based on several internal national varieties – Type (1) This language is the first of two cases that have two national varieties within one and the same nation: Bokmål and Nynorsk with substantial linguistic differences. Both varieties are taught in schools and have the same rights. Both can therefore be considered as national varieties of the same national language that exist within the same nation making Norwegian a special case of a PCL. The development of this dual standard followed the usual pattern of the “building away”22 from a previously dominant language/variety (in this case Danish) to the establishment of a new norm. This process went alongside the foundation of Norway as a separate nation that in 1814 first split from Denmark (together in union with Sweden) and 1905 from Sweden becoming a fully independent nation. Two approaches in the establishment of Norwegian surfaced in the course of the 19th

22 Fishman (2006).

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century.23 The writer Knud Knudsen argued for taking the spoken language of the “towns people” which was close to Danish and suggested that the pronunciation should be “Norweganized” He suggested the term “rigsmal” (derived from German “Reichssprache”) as name for the national language. The author Ivar Asen proposed instead that Norwegian should be based on the rural varieties of the region around Bergen, which he thought to be untouched by Danish influence. He suggested the term “landsmaal”, as this variety was closer to the local speech. This term both alluded to the countryside-origin of the variety and referred to the “land” as synonym for the nation. The names for the two varieties changed many times up to 1938 until the terminological pair bokmal/nynorsk was finally set. Both approaches were also linked to political camps, “which could be crudely described as right-wing and left-wing approaches to nationalism”24. The German invasion in 1941 repealed the orthographic reform of 1938, which was accused of having been under the influence of the Communists who at this time were well represented in Parliament. The reform was re-established after the liberation in 1945 and the teaching of both varieties in school and the use of both NVs continues even today.

2  Danish: pluricentricity based on several internal national varieties – Type (2) Quite similar is the case of Danish that is an official language in Denmark and on the Faroe Islands, which is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Danish is taught in the Faroe schools and spoken by most inhabitants alongside Faroese, even though there seem to be differences in fluency with some speakers as Faroese is the first language on the island.25 Greenland is also a self-governing part of the Danish Kingdom. Before 1979, Danish was the second official language there together with Greenlandic. Since the introduction of home rule in 2009, Greenlandic has become the sole national language and Danish a minority language and unofficial second language, which most inhabitants speak. Danish can therefore also be considered a PCL but it is second special type of PLC, which is due to the fact that the Faroe Islands and Greenland are constituent parts of the Danish Kingdom. The situation resembles, in many ways, that of British English. 2 3 See: Calvet (1998:137 ff) and especially Haugen (1966). 24 Calvet (1998:139). 25 https://www.quora.com/How-well-can-most-Faroese-people-speak-Danish 27.2.2018].

[acc.

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3  British English: pluricentricity based on several internal national varieties – Type (3) British English is conventionally considered to be a single NV and the mothervariety of all other NVs of English around the world. In the light of the specifications for the determination of PCLs and NVs that were outlined in the second section of this paper, this view is to be questioned and British English should be considered a PCL with four NVs (and not as “dialects” as this is the case in a well-known introduction (Hughes/Trudgill/Watt, 2012). The reason for this is found in the constitutional construction of the United Kingdom that itself consists of four constituent states: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It is a legal construction similar to that of Denmark. Apart from England, the other three constituent countries have their own devolved parliaments and local governments that have the right to decide about matters like healthcare, education, justice, environment, policing, rural affairs, and housing while defence, foreign policy, and most taxation stay with the government in London. Moreover, in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland languages other than English are recognised as national languages, which influence the NVs of British English. In Wales, the Welsh language received official status in 2011 and is used by about 20 % of the population. Welsh English is marked by a number of specific features (especially in pronunciation and in the lexicon).26 In Northern Ireland together with Hiberno-English – the Northern Irish variety of English - there is also Irish (Gaelic) and Ulster Scots which is also marked by strident features of its own.27 In Scotland, the languages other than English are Scots (spoken by about 30 % of the population) and Scots Gaelic. Scottish English itself is also marked by a number of marked features in pronunciation and in the lexicon. Scottish Standard English is strongly influenced by Scots,28 which has been acknowledged by the Scottish parliament as a “traditional language” of Scotland and is a protected regional or minority language by the Charter of European Regional or Minority Languages. Scots is also called “Lowland Scots” or “Doric”.29 Over 1.5 out of 5.2 million people reported that they could speak Scots (Scottish census of 2011). It is also a recognised language in Northern Ireland (Ulster Scots) and thus a PCL. The “conflict” about the status of Scots has recently been resolved 2 6 27 28 29

Trudgill/Hannah (2017). See in detail Hickey (2019) (this volume) and Hickey (2012). Hughes et. al. (2012). For its history see Jones (2002) and for its linguistic features Corbett et. al. (2006).

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as “the Scottish Executive recognises and respects Scots (in all its forms) as a distinct language, and does not consider the use of Scots to be an indication of poor competence in English.”30 This resulted in a rise in status in 2016 by being included in the curriculum for schools. Nonetheless, there is no standard written form of Scots. The website on Scots language education notes that “learning that Scots is a language in its own right gives many young people a renewed sense of self-respect. When children realise the literary and historical value of the language they speak, they have a greater belief in themselves as individuals.”31 This can only be underlined and shows the close connection between positive attitudes on the native language and personal self-esteem. Scots is also used in Northern Ireland (Ulster Scots) where it is recognised as a regional or minority language and regulated by the cross-border Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch)32. Its status is still disputed.33

4  Catalan: pluricentricity based on several internal national varieties – Type (4) Catalan is not an endangered language but a language that shows some internal fragmentation which has led to two centres and two language names that are considered by some activists as separate languages. Catalan is a co-official language (together with Castilian) in Catalonia, on the Balearic Islands and Valencia, it is the only official language in Andorra and a minority language in France and Italy. Due to its status and distribution, Catalan clearly is a PCL. Catalan is split into two major varieties – the Eastern and Western variety with a relatively low amount of linguistic differences. However, Catalan has two linguistic centres:  Central Catalonian and Valencian and two language names:  Catalan and Valencian.34 The internal variation of Catalan is even more complex as schoolbooks are printed in three versions even though a small number of differences distinguishes them and are easily mutual intelligible  – the Central Catalonian, the Valencian and the Balearian.35 The two main varieties have their own codification institutions (Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) in Barcelona and

3 0 https://www.gov.scot/publications/scots-language-policy-english/ [acc. 20.03.2019]. 31 http://www.scotseducation.co.uk/fourcapacities.html [acc. 20.03.2019]. 32 Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_dialects [acc. 15.02.3019]. 33 For details see the article of Hickey (2019) in this volume. 34 See: Edelmann (2019) and Mas (2019) for the details of the complex language situation. 35 Edelmann (2015: 149).

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Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL) in Valencia.36 It is this particularity which makes Catalan a special case among the PCLs that is similar to Norwegian. As the Valencian variety has a name of its own, it could be assumed that it is perceived as a language of its own, which is denied or confirmed depending on the political position. Mas (2012:292) describes in detail four models that are used by different political protagonists around Valencian:  “secessionist, particularistic, convergent and uniformist”. They “represent the graduation from the maximum content of strictly Valencian variants to the minimum, with the corresponding and symmetrical presence of variants from the other varieties”37. The author shows that most institutions active in the field of the Valencian language are following the particularist/convergent model. Since the foundation of the Valencian academy the IEC in Barcelona has increased the number of experts for Valencian and turned towards the inclusion of expressions from non-dominant varieties of Catalan and practising a “compositional and polymorphic” model of codification38. The case of Valencian versus Central Catalan shows a well-known pattern in the controversies between dominant and non-dominant varieties of PCLs: While the Valencian academy tries to uphold the specific features of Valencian, there are many (supporting the unity of the language) that are of the opinion that there is no need for a separate codification and advocate the dominant form. Here again it is a struggle of a non-dominant variety to become and stay visible. On the other hand, there is also convergence between the two varieties, especially in orthography, trying to keep the linguistic unity of the language. The language plays an important part in the ongoing attempts of the Catalonians to achieve independence from Spain. A  detailed account of the present situation of this language – also in the light of the endeavours to achieve the independence of Catalonia is given by Mas (2019).

5  Basque The case of this language is a bit different from the previous ones as it is not a national language. Alongside Spanish, Basque is one of two recognized languages in the Basque Autonomous Community in the north of Spain with full rights on the level of this region, and therefore it has the status of a regional language. The 36 For a comprehensive overview about Catalan as a PCL see Mas (2012), (2019) and Edelmann (2015), (2019). 37 Mas (2012: 292). 38 Mas (2012: 296).

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same is the case with Galician. The pluricentricity of this language is derived from the fact that the language area extends into France where it is recognized as a minority language. Basque can therefore also be considered a PCL as it has a Spanish centre and a French one39. The language also played a symbolic role in the decade long war that raged in the Basque area for independence, which finally ended in 2011.

3 PCLs where pluricentricity is (partly) based on unrecognised political entities with invisible varieties 1  Armenian Armenian is a PCL with a kind of double pluricentricity. On the one hand there is a large Armenian diaspora especially in the US and France (but also in many other countries) that uses “West-Armenian” which is an older variety of Armenian. The strong ethno-linguistic awareness of the West-Armenian community equalizes the fact that West-Armenian is nowhere recognised and officially does not “exist” with an official status in any political entity. Even though there is some convergence going on between East- and West-Armenian,40 Armenian is considered a PCL based on the existence of the two varieties.41 Armenian is also a PCL because of the existence of the breakaway territory “Republic of Artsakh” (Nagorno-Karabakh) that split off from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s and is formally an independent country but not supported internationally. It is internationally not recognised by any country except Armenia. While the standard variety of Artsakh Armenian shows little difference to Armenian Armenian there are strong differences in the spoken variety42. Armenian is a PCL for this (formal) reason too, as this political entity may become (or already has become) a norm-setting centre. The invisible variety of Artsakh Armenian will only become socially visible if its status and political fate has been settled by the political process that decides the status of the Republic of Artsakh itself.

3 9 See Edelmann (2016) for an introduction in the situation of this language. 40 Thanks for the information to Jasmin Dum-Tragutt (Salzburg, Austria) (personal communication). For the ongoing changes in the use of East- and West-Armenian see Dum-Tragut (2012). 41 Cowe (1992). 42 Thanks again to Jasmin Dum-Tragut for the information.

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2  Turkish Turkish has not been considered a PCL until now. However, the constitution of Cyprus clearly states in Art. 3.1 that “The official languages of the Republic are Greek and Turkish” with the provision in clause 2 that “Legislative, executive and administrative acts and documents shall be drawn up in both official languages…”43 This makes Cyprus Turkish a NV of Turkish. However, due to the occupation of Northern Cyprus by Turkey the territory is an internationally unrecognized breakaway territory - North-Cyprus - that presently constitutes its pluricentricity. Turkish on Cyprus is the strange case of an official and quasi unofficial language at the same time. There is substantial scientific literature44 about Cyprus Turkish under the term “Cypriot dialects”45 and a dictionary which was issued in 199246 showing that there is some language planning. Currently the variety is only visible in Turkey. A change in status in the direction of full recognition according to the Cyprus constitution will only occur if the Cyprus dispute is resolved.

4 Diaspora languages as potential PCLs: nationless lingoids which are fighting for status and social visibility The languages of this category usually do not occupy a defined territory as their speakers are either living scattered about in large urban agglomerations or in small communities with little communication between them. This situation hinders codification, standardization and the development of linguistic centres that support the maintenance and development of these languages. Their status as PCLs is disputable because they are highly fragmented and have difficulties to form a linguistic centre.

1  Assyrian, Neo-Aramaic Communities of this lingoid are found in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan. It is a highly fragmented lingoid, which has official recognition only in Kurdistan in the North of Iraq and in Armenia under the name of “Assyrian Neo-Aramaic” and “Chaldean Neo-Aramaic” which are linguistically

43 http://www.cyprus.gov.cy/portal/portal.nsf/0/302578ad62e1ea3ac2256fd5003b61d4? OpenDocument& ExpandSection=3&Click= [acc. 05.03.2019] 44 See Yükselen (2012) and Taşçı (1986). 45 Demir (1992): Kıbrıs Ağızları Üzerine Notlar [“Notes on Cypriot dialects”]. 46 Erdogan (1992).

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different.47 Due to its internal fragmentation the language could also be placed under category 6.6.

2  Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish: the language(s) of Jewish communities in Europe 2.1 Yiddish Yiddish is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews who settled all over Europe but were persecuted throughout history - which finally led to the Holocaust in WWII. The language is a typical diaspora language as the Jewish communities are/were scattered across many regions and countries and developed a Western and Eastern variety. Seen from its occurrence it could be considered as a PCL, but it is only recognized as a European minority language under the Charter of European Minority Languages in seven countries:  Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine. Despite its recognition as a minority language, its lack of a substantial centre and the lack of support from European nations, it is to be considered as a diaspora language rather than a PCL. 2.2 Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) This language is derived from Spanish of the 15th century when the Jewish (Sephardic) community in Spain was evicted from Spain due to the edict of Isabella I  in 1492. The community dispersed throughout the Mediterranean countries, especially to the Ottoman Empire with Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece) and Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) as their main centres.48 Several varieties developed through contact with local languages in the different countries, which caused a decline in mutual comprehensibility. Today it is spoken by small minorities in the Balkans, Greece and Turkey, and it is seriously threatened with extinction. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only European country where it has the status of a minority language. The only support is found in courses given at some universities in Israel and the US and the announcement by the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) in 2017 to install a special academy for Judaeo-Spanish in Israel. The language suffers as do all diaspora languages from the lack of a central agency and a school system that supports it. Judaeo-Spanish, like Yiddish, is a diaspora language rather than a PCL. 4 7 See Beyer (1986) and Khan (2018) for an overview. 48 See Gabriel/Grünke (2018) for the general situation.

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5 European languages with a high amount of internal linguistic fragmentation that makes their status as a PCL unclear, impedes their standardization and makes the survival of the language difficult The languages of this category are marked by a high degree of internal fragmentation that reduces the mutual comprehensibility and obstructs the development of a common standard variety. This in turn often leaves the single varieties at the level of informal spoken languages (vernaculars) with functionality reduced to a few domains.

1  Occitan Occitan in its variety of Aranese Occitan has the status of a recognized regional language in Catalonia, Spain. Occitan is also spoken in France and Italy. The language is heavily fragmented as there are six varieties:  Auvergant, Gascon, Provençal, Limousin, Languedocien, Vivaro-Alpin in France and Aranese in Spain. The situation is aggravated by the fact that France signed, but never ratified the European Charter of Minority Languages49 and leaves Occitan unprotected and unsupported in France where most speakers live. Carrera (2019) (this volume) gives a thorough update of the present situation of Occitan and an overview of attempts to create a common orthography. As with many fragmented languages there is a discussion going on among linguists whether the lingonym is an umbrella term for several single languages or a language covering all varieties (Holtus/Metzelin/Schmitt, 1991). Sumien (2006) deals with it extensively. There is no single written standard and there are even competing spelling norms within one and the same variety (such as in Béarnais and Gascon).50 There are two main orthographic norms: The Mistral writing system (developed by the writer Frederic Mistral in his dictionary of 1879 and the classical writing system based on medieval Occitan. An updated form of the classical writing system was adopted by the Institut d’Estudis Occitans. However, how Sumien (2012) shows in detail, other spelling systems for single varieties were introduced and used in parallel but also contributed to the development of koiné varieties in some sub-varieties that supported the survival of the language. Attempts to create a standard variety are still going on. Due to its 49 The latest attempt to ratify the Charter in France in the National Assembly failed in 2015 due to the resistance of the political right-wing parties. [https://www.francetvinfo. fr/societe/le-senat-dit-non-a-la-charte-europeenne-des-langues-regionales_1712811. html, [acc. 21.92.2019]. 50 Joubert (2015: 164).

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fragmentation and the lack of standardization, the status of Occitan as a PCL is doubtful. Too many protagonists seem to fight for their particular interests instead of following the model of the development of Rumantsch in Switzerland (Schmidt, 1982/Darms, 1989) where a united written language across seven varieties has successfully been created and is now used throughout the community.

2  Frisian This language is split into three varieties (West Frisian, North Frisian, Saterland Frisian) which are not mutually intelligible. In addition to their geographic distance, the three varieties are also influenced by different languages:  West Frisian is strongly influenced by Dutch, Saterland Frisian and North Frisian by German, and Low German. The status of Frisian as a single language is therefore disputed by scholars who prefer to speak of the “Frisian languages”. Its status as a PCL is doubtful. The social visibility of the three varieties/languages is guaranteed via the recognition as regional or minority languages in the Netherlands and Germany.

3  Sami This lingonym is an umbrella term for, “depending on the nature and terms of division, ten or more Sami languages”51. The language area is spread over Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia with neighbouring varieties mutually intelligible but not with varieties that are further apart. Moreover, Sámi in all countries has the status of a minority language and very few speakers. Its status as PCL is therefore also doubtful. Social visibility and support are guaranteed via the recognition as regional or minority languages to a greater or lesser degree in the four countries where the language is native. For an insight into the linguistic situation of these languages/varieties, see Rueter (2019) (this volume).

6 European pluricentric languages or NVs that struggle(d) to become visible after political or social developments made or kept them invisible There are five PCLs (or varieties of them) that fall into this category: Gaelic/Irish, Ulster Scots, Greek, Hungarian, Kurdish and Russian.

51 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_languages [acc. 25.02.2019].

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1  Greek Greek is a PCL as it is also the national language of (the Greek part of) the Republic of Cyprus. It is neither an endangered language nor is there an overt ongoing language conflict. There was however a massive internal conflict in Greece that resembled in many ways the one in Norway. It is justified to include it here as it showed all features of a conflict between a dominant and non-dominant variety for acknowledgement and social representation. And, there is Cyprus Greek that struggles for its codification and standardization. Karyolemou (2012:  174) points out that Cypriot Greek is not only used as “Innenstandard”  – a variety used in everyday conversation but also “in semiformal and formal encounters” and it has been retained in the large diaspora community (esp. in Australia). The idea that Greek could have several national varieties is, however, met with strong rejection by the elites and by general belief. Mackridge (2009: 6) gives the reason for this: “One of the most pervasive language ideologies in Greece is the belief that Greek is a single language from antiquity to the present”. Cypriot Greek has not been codified so far, “as the dominant political ideology insisted instead on the need to consolidate the bounds of the Greek community of Cyprus with the rest of the Hellenic world in order to preserve the unity of the Hellenic ethnos. It thus became impossible for nonGreek Cypriots to identify with a local variety that defined a strong ethnic identification towards an exogenous community.”52 The situation bears all the signs of “linguistic schizophrenia”53 where the national variety is overwhelmingly used but deemed inferior whereas the dominant variety is little used but thought to be of superior quality. The resistance to allow the development of a second NV of Greek is also connected with the rigid language norms of Greek that developed since the early 19th century after Greece became independent from the Ottoman empire. The older, complex and more puristic Katharevousa variety was replaced in education and state administration in 1976 by the Demotic variety, which is closer to the everyday spoken language. This has led to a strong language shift.54 The intelligentsia had created Katharevousa after the establishment of the Greek state in 1830. The overall strategy was the elimination of all expressions originating from other languages but especially Turkish expressions that had come into Greek through the long adherence of Greece to the Ottoman Empire and the 5 2 Karyolemou (2012: 174). 53 Muhr (2012). 54 See: Mackridge (2009): Language and Identity in Greece, 1766–1976.

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introduction of archaic features from classical Greek.55 This caused diglossia and a noteable rift in access to education for the (mostly illiterate) lower classes and favoured the educated upper class, which resulted in the “Greek language question”. It had been discussed ever since the foundation of the state in 1830 and was resolved only by the introduction of Demotic in 1976. The replacement did not go unchallenged as the large Greek diaspora (some 2 million speakers) and the Greek Orthodox Church in the diaspora continued to use Katharevousa.56 Therefore, the Greek language question does not seem completely settled even though some elements of Katharevousa have been integrated into Demotic and thereby forming Modern Greek. Modern Greek is the rare example where a once dominant variety of a language was replaced by a non-dominant one of the same language due to a social revolution following the abolition of the military regime that had ended democracy in 1967. The military regime of right-wing officers had banned the use of Demotic in education and administration and made Katharevousa the official language and enforced diglossia.57 The link between the authoritarian government and Katharevousa became more obvious than ever. The return to democracy in 1974 was accompanied by a change to Demotic in 1976 - a more democratic form of language that achieves the inclusion of large parts of the population and ended the reign of the elitist Katharevousa variety.

2  Russian Russian is a “new” PCL that came into existence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This resulted in a number of countries outside the Russian Federation where Russian has an official or quasi-official function. It is a co-official national language in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, widely used and a de facto official language in Moldova and Uzbekistan, acknowledged for inter-ethnic communication in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. It is also an official regional language in Ukraine and a “national” language in the unrecognized territories of Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In addition, it is an unrecognized minority language in the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.58 The status and usage of Russian is uncontested in most post-Soviet

5 5 Mackridge (1985). 56 Ibrahim/Karatsolis (2013). 57 Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question [acc. 05.03.2019]. 58 For a detailed overview about the status and number of speakers in the post-soviet countries, see Del Gaudio (2012).

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countries. However, there are conflicts in the three Baltic states as well as in Ukraine.

2.1 The situation of Russian in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania59 It is the situation of Russian in the three Baltic states, which is of particular interest as there is a large Russian speaking population there: Estonia (24.9 %)60, Latvia (37,2  % speak Russian at home)61, Lithuania (6,3  % concentrated in 3 towns). Russian is not recognized in any of these states, and the Russian speaking population is deprived of most of its civil rights. The reason for this is the fear of being invaded by Russia again with the Russian-speaking population playing a supporting role. Citizenship in Estonia and Latvia is primarily based on the principle of jus sanguinis (at least one parent must have the citizenship of the country) and have knowledge of the Estonian, or Latvian language respectively. This has resulted in large groups of “stateless persons” without any right to vote or travel etc.62 6.1 % (79,300 persons) of the population of Estonia63 and (13.1 %) (237,759 persons) in Latvia64 are stateless residents. In Latvia, many children (14,331 in 2017) that were born after August 21, 1991 are also affected.65 This is contrary to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights which in Art. 3.1 stipulates that no citizen of the EU may be discriminated against because of his/her language66. It is a remarkable deviation from the European rule of law, as it is a clear case of discrimination based on language. It must be said that the number of stateless persons has decreased in recent years but it is still very high. This has led to initiatives at the level of the European Parliament’s committee of Petitions in

5 9 See Katona (2019) for the specific situation of Russian in Estonia. 60 Estonian Statistics Database http://pub.stat.ee/px-web.2001/Dialog/Saveshow.asp [acc. 07.03.2019]. 61 OSCE: Minority education attacked in Latvia. https://www.osce.org/odihr/394916? acc. 07.03.2019]. 62 For an overview see Gromilova (2015). 63 Human Rights Watch, January 16, 2017 [https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/17/itstime-end-child-statelessness-estonia, [acc. 07.03.2019]. 64 European network on Statelessness:  Statelessness among children in Latvia:  current situation, challenges and possible solutions. [https://www.statelessness.eu/blog/ statelessness-among-children-latvia-current-situation-challenges-and-possiblesolutions, [acc. 07.03.2019]. 65 ibid. 66 Article 21, 1 [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:​ 12012P/TXT&from=DE [acc. 05.03.2019].

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201667, but there seems to have been no immediate improvement in the situation. Contrary to this, is the situation in Lithuania, which has received praise from the UNHCR for having prevented increased statelessness (based on language). As of 2016 there “were about 3,400 stateless persons living in Lithuania”68. In Latvia the conflict over Russian and the other minority languages has reached a new stage as a new law of 2018 drastically reduces education in the minority languages (including Russian) from the school year 2019 onwards. The law “provides that for instruction in grades 1–6 … at least 50 % of the curriculum [is] taught in Latvian and for grades 7–9 – at least 80 %.”69 The law is clearly directed against non-EU-languages and also limits the right to use EU official languages other than Latvian. It is a questionable measure that will most likely entice extremism from the people affected by it and it is against the spirit of the founding ideas of the European Union that are based on cooperation and social representation of languages and social groups.

2.2 The situation of Russian in Ukraine Large parts of Ukraine are overwhelmingly Russian-speaking with a number of Russian speakers that ranges from 59.3 % in East Centre, 84,5 % in the South to 92,3 % in the East (Donetsk, Luhansk area)70. Russian in Ukraine has a long and conflictive history; it was used to suppress the Ukrainian language during the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and at some stages of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian was portrayed as ungrammatical, a kind of distorted language with low status. After independence in 1991, Ukrainian became the only national language. In 2012, despite criticism of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, a new law permitted the introduction of Russian as a regional language where the population with a mother tongue other than Ukrainian was more than 10 %. This was quickly introduced in seven regions by the end of 2013 and caused a lot of debate. This law was repealed in 2014 but not signed by the then president. The Constitutional Court decided in 2018 that the law of 2012 did not comply with the Constitution of Ukraine. This is due to the events that happened 67 European network on Statelessness: The fight for voting rights of stateless persons in Estonia and Latvia; https://www.statelessness.eu/blog/fight-voting-rights-statelesspersons-estonia-and-latvia [acc. 07.03.2017]. 68 The Lithuania Tribune, October 26, 2016 https://en.delfi.lt/lithuania/society/unhcrpraises-lithuania-for-having-prevented-increased-statelessness.d?id=72679074 [acc. 07.03.2019]. 69 ibid. Fn 36. 70 Del Gaudio (2013:357).

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during and after the Maidan uprising, which resulted in the ousting of president Yanukovych in 2014, in the annexation of Crimea by Russia contrary to international law in 2014 and the subsequent Russian supported war of secession of the Donbass and Luhansk area along the Russian border in the east. Ukraine and Russia have been in a state of war ever since. In 2017, Ukraine has also prohibited the importation of books from Russia, which had accounted for 60 % of all books traded into Ukraine. Ukrainian Russian has developed quite a number of specific features (Del Gaudio, 2012; Del Gaudio/Ivanova, 2015). Immediately after the annexation of Crimea (Del Gaudio/Dorofeev, 2016), the process of reversing Ukrainian Russian into Russian Russian in Crimea began. This is very likely to have happened in the other regions that have been occupied since 2014. Ukrainian Russian is the unfortunate case where a language war was exploited for territorial expansion and developed into a real war. It serves as a warning and reminder that language issues are always political in nature and therefore have to be treated with care.

3  Hungarian – A language gradually gaining visibility as a PCL Hungarian is a language that occurs in several of Hungary’s neighbouring countries: Austria, Croatia, Romania, northern Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and western Ukraine. In all these countries, Hungarian only has the status of a minority language. In northern Romania and southern Slovakia, however, Hungarian can be considered a regional language with 1.4  million speakers living in a cohesive area of settlement in Romania and about 520,000 speakers in southern Slovakia. Hungarian is also dominant in parts of Vojvodina – the northern province of Serbia with about 290.00 speakers71. Muhr (2012:33) defines Hungarian as “pluricentric but lacking the appropriate status”. The demographic situation clearly justifies the recognition of Hungarian as a PCL, since the language forms a linguistic centre in each of these regions.72 The recognition of Hungarian as a PCL started during the mid 1990s by the publications of Lanstyák (1995), and especially by Kenesei (2006), who were overcoming the very centralistic view of the norms of Hungarian that had prevailed until then73. Hungarian still has to fight for its status in Slovakia and especially in Ukraine where it has recently lost some of its rights due to new language laws. In Ukraine, a decree of 2008 7 1 Data from Huber (2016). 72 See Vančo/Muhr/Kocmacs/Huber (2019): Hungarian as a pluricentric language in language and literature (Volume 2 of the Nitra conference). 73 See: Huber/Molnár (2015).

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stipulates that Hungarian school graduates have to take the university entrance exam in Ukrainian and not in their native language. Because of this, the percentage of participants in University entrance exams from Hungarian speaking schools that did not qualify rose from 30 % in 2008 to 62 % in 2015.74 In 2017, a new language law restricted education in minority languages after the first four classes, thus ending a 150-years old tradition in Transcarpathia.75 This is another negative outcome of the war in eastern Ukraine. The law was directed against the rights of Russian but also led to the discrimination against other minority languages that see the education in their native language diminished.

4  Kurdish – A suppressed and fragmented language trying to survive and remain visible Kurdish is a lingoid that is spoken in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Northern Iraq is the only territory where it has the status of an official regional language (Kurdish autonomous region), apart from being an acknowledged minority language in Armenia and an acknowledged language of provincial identity in five villages of Azerbaijan. It is often portrayed as “the largest language without a state of its own”76. Kurdish falls into several categories that are not favourable for language maintenance, language Ausbau and status improvement. It is on the one hand a highly fragmented language with three major varieties  – Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish) in Turkey and in Northern Iraq, Sorani (Central Kurdish) and Palewani (Southern Kurdish) that are not or almost not mutually intelligible and from a linguistic point of view are separate languages. To make the situation even more complicated, there is no common orthography and no common codification and language planning. There is, however, a very strong ethno-linguistic awareness that makes the Kurdish population consider themselves one people. Based on this criterion, Kurdish can be considered a PCL (just as Armenian and Yiddish). Kurdish is included as there is a large Kurdish-speaking community in Turkey (and in many European countries), which is a member of the Council of Europe (COE). Despite the provisions of the COE in respect to human rights, the Turkish authorities massively persecute Kurdish speakers (after a short period of political thaw) and the language is currently (again) banned in many public domains. 7 4 Kontra (2019). 75 Skutnabb-Kangas (2019:71) quoted after Kontra (2019). 76 McDowall (2005) and www.mashallahnews.com/language/languages-stateless-nation. html [acc. 07.03.2019].

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Researchers dealing with the language planning measures of different Turkish governments call this policy the “invisibilisation” of Kurdish (Haig, 2004). The attitude is attributed to Turkish nationalism ever since Turkey was founded in 1921. There are no exact numbers available about how many Kurdish speakers there are in Turkey as the Turkish government has ceased to make demographic counts based on the criteria of language and ethnicity in 1965. Estimations speak of 10–12.5 million speakers mainly living in the southeast of the country.77 The Turkish constitution (Art.  42.9) stipulates that “Turkish nationals may not be taught and educated in any language other than Turkish in the educational institutions.”78 Despite this, there has been a short period of tolerance  – the “Kurdish opening” - between 2006 and the so called “putsch” in 2016. In this period, private television channels were allowed to broadcast programmes in Kurdish and from 2009 onwards, there was even a 24-hour Kurdish channel opened by the state-owned Turkish television. The “opening” was a relative one as the teaching of Kurdish in educational TV-programmes was reduced to 45 minutes a day and four hours per week.79 However, the letters x, y and w – necessary for writing in Kurdish - were banned until 2013 in public texts as they are not part of the Turkish alphabet. After the peace negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish government had broken down in 2015 and even more so after the “putsch” in 2016 the Turkish government has repealed many of the previous measures. The use of Kurdish in the public domain has been curtailed again, elected representatives and teachers of Kurdish and other minority languages in Diyarbakir have been sacked80, the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul that had provided language classes has been shut down.81 At present, institutions that provide classes in Kurdish are again criminalized by the government and portrayed as supporters of the forbidden PKK guerilla.82 This entails that teachers may not 7 7 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Turkey [acc. 15.03.2019]. 78 https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf [acc. 07.03.2019]. 79 Skutnabb-Kanga, Tove/Fernandes, Desmond (2008). 80 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/middleeast/amid-turkeyspurge-a-renewed-attack-on-kurdish-culture.html [acc. 07.03.2019]; See also:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Kurdish%E2%80%93Turkish_conflict_ (2015%E2%80%93present) [acc. 07.03.2019]. 81 https://www.thenation.com/article/in-turkey-repression-of-the-kurdish-languageis-back-with-no-end-in-sight/ [acc. 06.03.2019]/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Kurdish%E2%80%93Turkish_conflict_(2015%E2%80%93present) [acc. 06.03.2019]. 82 A guerrilla group that is fighting for the independence of the Kurdish areas and is considered as terrorist group by the Turkish government and by some European governments.

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speak any language other than Turkish even in primary school classes where the pupils have no knowledge of Turkish and do not understand it because their mother tongue is a minority language like Kurdish.83 This surely is a very counterproductive form of pedagogy and – judging from the other measures taken - intended to create a kind of linguistic genocide. Kurdish in Turkey is one of the most extreme examples of linguistic and ethnic suppression in the world. Speakers of Kurdish therefore consider the right to speak their language in public without being persecuted as an act of liberation: “Speaking Kurdish is important to me and to almost all Kurdish people because it represents our liberty.”84 The situation of this language is one of the most precarious of all PCLs in Europe and a sad example of an ethnic group that has been denied its rights over a long time.

5  Gaelic/Irish, Ulster Scots and Irish English – Undoing the suppression and invisibility of Gaelic (Irish) and Ulster Scots in Ireland Compared to other languages discussed in this section, the status of Irish in the Republic of Ireland (RIR) and Northern Ireland (NIR) is a success story. The language regained the status of a first national language in the RIR in 1937 and since has been a recognised minority language in NIR after centuries of suppression and marginalisation. This was only achieved after a long fight for acknowledgement that began soon after the lost battle of Kingsdale in 1601 with the loss of most members of its nobility who fled to Spain, the incorporation into the British Empire and the loss of many speakers during the famine of 1845–49. By the early 20th century, the language became associated with cultural and political national nationalism even though only a minority was able to speak and use it. The slogan of that time was “gan teanga, gan tīr” – “no language, no country”85 and shows that the unity of nation and language was aimed for but not achieved as the majority of the population only knew English. After the Irish war of independence and the independence of the Southern part of Ireland from the British Empire as the Irish Republic (IR) in 1921, the Northern part with a large Protestant population was cut off and, as Northern Ireland (NIR), remained a part of the UK. While the objective of the Irish language movement was put into practice in the IR, the speakers of Irish had a hard time in NIR. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was hostile to the use of the language as it was a sign of identity for the Catholics in NIR. Irish was excluded in NIR from radio and 8 3 ibid. Fn 50. 84 www.mashallahnews.com/language/languages-stateless-nation.html [acc. 07.03.2019]. 85 O’Reilly (2001:79).

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television for almost the first 50 years, and it was forbidden to use it in schools. Irish was made invisible in NIR between 1921 and1998 and only received formal recognition in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The strength of anti-Irish language attitudes is shown by the following statement of a member of the Ulster Democratic Party in 1996, two years before the Good Friday Agreement: “We are Ulster Scots descended from a proud and fiercely independent people with a longer tradition than that promoted by nationalists. Their language is a dead language for a dead people.”86 Today, due to the Good Friday Agreement, Irish in Northern Ireland is a recognised minority language with 10 % of the population using it actively but gaining more and more support even among Protestants. There is also a cross-border body known as Foras na Gaeilge that regulates the language. Alongside Irish, Irish English (also called Hiberno-English) with its marked features in pronunciation and lexicon is also a strong Irish identity marker. Ulster Irish English has more pronunciation similarities with Scottish English while Dublin English is the dominant variety of Irish English. The case of Irish and Irish English shows again the link between the secession of one country from another and the identity expressed through a language that previously had been suppressed and marginalized.

7 A language manages to become visible and gain rights in a bilingual country that leads to the split of the nation along the language border and creates de facto monolingual independent states: the case of Dutch and French in Belgium Belgium is not only the home of NVs of three PCLs (Dutch, French, and German) but also a multilingual country with a political and linguistic particularity:  It has been divided into three monolingual territories that in many ways act as if they were independent states with far reaching effects on the population and the administration of the state. The reason for this is found in Belgian history. Belgium was founded in 1830 after a Revolution against the reign of the Dutch protestant King William I started in the so-called Southern Provinces where mainly Dutch and French speaking Roman Catholics were living and a high level of unemployment existed. The history of Belgium is closely linked to the “Dutch language Question” – the gradual

86 Quoted after Póilin (1997: 31).

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upgrading of Flemish (Belgium Dutch), which tried to become more and more visible in the public realm. Between 1830–1873, Belgium was uniquely a French speaking country, Dutch had no recognition at all. During the period of 1873–1898, several laws established Dutch as official language in the institutions and public documents such as “bonds, coins, and banknotes were made bilingual”87. “The language law of 1893 finally declared that Dutch and French official texts had the same force in law.”88 1930 saw the next step by replacing the personality principle through the territoriality principle. It was introduced as the French-speaking Wallons “were vehemently opposed to a system of generalized bilingualism at large”89, and so territorial monolingualism seemed to be the only solution. The law also created a dual administration, one French-speaking and one Dutch-speaking, avoiding bilingualism. In 1963 a “language frontier” was created, dividing the country into three monolingual entities (French, Dutch and German) and Brussels as the only mixed one. The effect of this measure was a complete monolingual separation of all institutions of the state including all political parties that also split “with no political party left to represent the whole country”90. There are now two different educations systems, monolingualism in the media and little personal bilingualism (20 % in the French and 59 % in the Dutch region). The split also affected bilingual universities and their libraries such as the Catholic University of Leuven in 1968, which was split into French and Dutch speaking parts. One incredible results effect was the splitting of the university library by using the strange criterion that every second book of the catalogue went to either university. Language struggles are still going on around Brussels. For multilingual nations, Belgium is a negative example and a warning as this territorial separation along a linguistic border has caused bitter political struggles and language struggles wars ever since. Positive counter-examples to this are Switzerland where the principle of “language peace” is cherished, and the well-designed solution of a trilingual South Tyrol in Italy.

8 7 Willemyns (2013: 165). 88 ibid. 89 Willemyns (2013: 166). 90 Willemyns (2013: 168).

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8 Struggles over language names and the status of the languages after a nation split into several new nations creating new national languages with an unsettled status either as PCL or NV There are four cases that fall into this category: The establishment of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin, the establishment of Albanian as a PCL, the decade old establishment of Macedonian by splitting from Bulgarian and the question whether Moldovan (Romanian) is a language in its own right or a NV of Romanian. The four cases have of this category have in common the dispute as to whether the lingoids are languages or NVs of another language.91

1  The split of Serbo-Croatian into Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin as national languages in Ex-Yugoslavian nations – Two competing approaches The first and most far-reaching case is the one which led to the split of Serbo-Croatian (SBCR) into four languages. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1991/92 into six states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) one of its official languages – SBCR also split, at first into three languages – Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian – and after the independence of Montenegro from Serbia  – additionally into Montenegrin. The establishment of the four languages is determined in the constitutions of the four nations and one of the results of the Balkan wars that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This has caused a much-discussed language issue92 that had already plagued Yugoslavia, as SBCR was the official language of four republics of Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia Montenegro and Serbia) and of Yugoslavia in external communication.93 Despite the official constitution of the four languages, however, the existence of four languages is currently strongly opposed and it is maintained that they are not “languages” but “just” national varieties of a single language. This position is also found in the English version of Wikipedia and similarly in the German version of Wikipedia.94 91 See the papers of Stojanov (2019) and Kapovic (2019) (this volume) for a detailed description of the matter from a different point of views. 92 See Hodges (2016) for a comprehensive overview, Stojanov (2019) and Karpovic (2019) (this volume). 93 See Gröschel (2003) for the regulation of the official languages in Yugoslavia before the split into several countries. 94 Serbokroatisch … ist eine plurizentrische südslawische Sprache. [Serbo-Croatian… is a pluricentric South-Slavic language.] [acc. 12.03.2019].

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“Serbo-Croatian, (previously also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) or Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS)), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties.”95

The (anonymous) authors of Wikipedia base their statements on publications among others on Bugarski (2000), Hinrichs (1997), Buncic (2008), Kordič (2008, 2010) and Gröschel (2001, 2009). It is interesting to see that most authors supporting the idea that SBCR still exists and is a PCL with four national varieties are/were working at German universities. Many of these authors (often explicitly) point to the model of the pluricentricity of German96 when denying a political process that took place 25 years ago in the Balkans. From the point of the sociology of science, this is quite remarkable, as these members of the Slavicist scientific community are all living and working in a dominant nation and seem to transfer their dominant views on pluricentricity to other languages refusing them the right to constitute themselves as independent linguistic and social entities.97 The activities of this group of authors is strongly opposed by national regulators (esp. in Croatia) who try to enforce the endonormativity of the their language by either reactivating archaic items of vocabulary or neologisms and specific features of orthography (as in Bosnian). Snježana Kordič (2006, 2010)  is the most influential author of those propagating the model of the continued existence of SBCR. She published several papers on the matter and in 2010 the much-received book Jezik i nacionalizam (Language and nationalism). In her book and in an interview in 201898, the main argument put forward by her for the continued existence of SBCR is the “mutual intelligibility” of the four languages and the fact that in all four cases the same underlying regional variety “Štokavian” had been codified in the 19th century. Kordić is also the main author of the “Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku” (The

9 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian [acc. 12.03.2019]. 96 e.g. Bunčić (2008). 97 There seems to be a deep-rooted underlying idea/fear of a split of a language, which has to be fended off as it is felt as a severe loss of power. The arguments put forward by this group of German slavicists repeat many arguments that are very much similar to the ones that were/are put forward against the existence of Austrian German as a NV of German, whose existence is also conceived as a loss of power. 98 https://www.kosmo.at/die-sprachpolitik-am-balkan-aehnelt-jener-des-drittenreiches/2/ [acc. 15.03.2019].

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Declaration on the common language) that was published online in 201699 and invites peoples of Ex-Yugoslav countries to sign and support it. As of March 2019, almost 10,000 people have signed it100, mostly people working in academic or economic professions. The first line of the declaration says:  “Asked whether a common language is used in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia  – the answer is yes (confirmed).”101 The declaration states that “Using four names for standard variants – Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian – does not mean that they are four different languages” and that the common language (which in the declaration is not given a name102) is of “polycentric type” (pluricentric type) like “German, English, Arabic, French…”. This, it is maintained, “does not call into question the individual right to express affiliation to different nations, regions or states” and the right of “…each state, nation, ethnic-national or regional community to freely and independently codify its own common language variant”. This is quite inconsistent as at the same time it is lamented that “[i]‌nsisting on a small number of existing differences and the violent separation of four standard variants leads to a number of negative social, cultural and political phenomena”. If there is a separate codification, it will of course lead to a (linguistic) separation of the four languages. In addition, there is no indication how the old power relation could be overcome, as Serbia had always been predominant in former Yugoslavia – a factor that contributed substantially to the demise of Yugoslavia. Moreover, mutual intelligibility is by no means a sufficient and valid argument against the constitution of a “language”. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible but nobody would say that they are not “languages” as this has been decided by the state institutions. The same is the case with Luxembourgish, which is quite intelligible with the German Moselfrankonian dialects it derives from – in the aftermath of the German occupation during WWII. Kordič confirmed her positions in the aforementioned interview by adding that “The language policy in the Balkans resembles the one of the third Reich”. This is an overstatement and factually wrong, as the Nazi language policy was purist too but mainly aimed at the extinction of Slavic languages (which is of 9 9 http://jezicinacionalizmi.com/deklaracija/ [acc. 10.03.2019]. 100 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1XVGV5Z306SeDFzpdpUHhfeKvoAFdaakS48LqXfGozA/pubhtml. 101 “Na pitanje da li se u Bosni i Hercegovini, Crnoj Gori, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji upotrebljava zajednički jezik – odgovor je potvrdan.” 102 In an interview in 2018 (Fn 62) the author suggested the term „naš jezik“ („our language“).

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course not the case here). The case of SBCR shows the importance and validity of the definition of the term “language”, that was developed in the first section of this paper: A language is a lingoid that has been attributed a status by a political or social entity. The governing bodies of the four nations have done this. Even though there is mutual intelligibility, this will not reverse the memories and atrocities of the Balkan wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia. “Languages” are constituted by social/and or political processes in the first place which are the socio-semiotic expression of a turn away from the former connectedness. This is underlined by the following anecdote: When I once provocatively asked a young student from Bosnia who had participated in my course on Austrian German and PCLs why Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian should not be considered as national varieties of SBCR, she simply answered: “We don’t want to be together with them!” I think that sums it up. I can only agree with Kafadar (2009:103), who states that linguistically speaking, the three (four) independent languages do not exist: But since all nations in this linguistic area construct their identity largely through and within the language ... and this construction of national identity is strongly supported by current politics ... three languages (Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian) officially exist in this monolingual area.103

Except Serbia, all post-Yugoslav nations are still struggling to consolidate their identity. The constitution of a national language is an important means to achieve this. Purist and often arbitrary linguistic measures and an aggressive language policy are undoubtedly leading to unpleasant and divisive social effects that are rightly criticised as “nationalistic” and not leading to the better understanding between nations and people.104 How deep the rift is can be imagined by the fact that most linguists of the former dominant nation Serbia regard SBCR still as one language with four varieties while most linguists of the formerly non-dominant

103 „Da alle Nationen auf diesem Sprachgebiet aber ihre Identität zum größten Teil durch und in der Sprache konstruieren … und diese Konstruktion der nationalen Identität durch die aktuelle Politik sehr stark unterstützt … existieren offiziell drei Sprachen (Bosnisch, Kroatisch und Serbisch) auf diesem einsprachigen Gebiet. “ [Note: Montenegrin had not yet been established at this time, when the paper was published]. 104 See the paper of Stojanov (2019, this volume) who has been threatened with being sacked by his department of the University of Zagreb because of his presentation at the 6th conference of the WGNDV where he referred to the concept of pluricentricity of Croatian.

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variety Croatian are convinced that a single SBCR language never existed. The divergences can only be solved in the end by cooperation but not by discussing the existence of languages and linguistic differences away with unfounded arguments that are based on the lack of linguistic differences.

2  The secession of Kosovo from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Albanian in Kosovo and Albania – A new territory does not necessarily create a new PCL in the minds of the elites Another outcome of the dissolution of Yugoslavia was the secession of the province of Kosovo in 2008 from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was the successor state and consisted of Serbia and Montenegro. The secession of the territory with an overwhelmingly Albanian-speaking population was preceded by the Kosovo war in 1998/1999 where the Kosovan side was supported by NATO. This constituted a second nation where Albanian was established as the national language, turning Albanian into a PCL. This came about with some problems, as Albanian identity is clearly based on the unity of nation and language and any talk of pluricentricity is considered as a “de-standardization” (Jusufi, 2018:136): “…Albanian, although a pluricentric language in reality, is treated and protected as a monocentric language for ideological reasons being based on a concept of the Herderian language nation and not on a concept of state nation.”

The situation of Albanian monocentrists became even more complicated by the fact that in 2019 Albanian became a co-official national language in North Macedonia with about 25 % of the population belonging to this language group. Since then, the Albanian language area has officially spread over three sovereign nations. Jusufi (2018:140) reports that many representatives among the academic circles dealing with the Albanian language both in Kosovo and Albania are almost aggressively arguing against the idea that Albanian is a PCL by using terms such as “… standard phobia, dilettantes, anti-standard anarchists, … localist fanaticism, politically militant academism and pseudolinguists.” This shows that the question of a “common Albanian language” is highly controversial and emotionally loaded. Muco (2018:  154) also points out that the linguistic facts refute the obstinate refusal to acknowledge the pluricentricity of Albanian. Especially Kosovo Albanian being in contact with Serbian for more than 80 years has developed “lexical differences, new idiomatic expressions and semantic differences as some words have taken on different meanings.” This is most probably also the case with Macedonian Albanian where extensive studies are not available at the moment. Albanian is a PCL where the traditional linguistic and cultural elites have not yet

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come to grips with the new situation. It is a case of a PCL on stage (3) (Muhr, 2012) where the acceptance of pluricentricity is not yet settled. As the examples of other PCLs show, it will take decades until the dispute is resolved.

3  The establishment of the Macedonian language by splitting off from Bulgarian and the refusal by the Bulgarian Academy of Science to acknowledge this The case of Macedonian and Bulgarian is treated here, as it shows many similarities with the Greek and Serbo-Croatian case. It is an older and somehow a “forgotten” language-conflict that is only known to a few specialists dealing with that area. However, it is still of interest as some of the stakeholders in the matter still will not concede after more than 40 years. The conflict has been ranged under the title “The Macedonian Question” ever since 1870–72, when an independent Bulgarian orthodox church was established. “It is from this period that first statements appear maintaining that Macedonian was a language different from both Serbian and Bulgarian.”105 The Macedonian literature and literary language developed gradually in Yugoslavia and Serbia in the 20th century between 1913– 1944.106 Macedonia (2019 renamed into North Macedonia) is a territory with a very tumultuous history. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the territories of today’s Macedonia were divided between Greece (Aegean-Macedonia, 50 percent), Bulgaria (PirinMacedonia, 13 percent) and Serbia (Vardar-Macedonia, 37 percent). In the areas that had fallen to Serbia, strong Serbianization was attempted via the introduction of Serbian schools but failed. Bulgaria annexed Macedonia from 1941– 1994, but seems to have behaved as if it was an occupying forces, alienating Slav Macedonians.107 The Bulgarian administration was soon regarded as a foreign one and standard Bulgarian was associated with the occupying forces. It was in August 1944, that Tito’s partisans in Macedonia, organised in the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the People’s Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM), proclaimed Macedonian official language after getting the green light from the COMITERN. Finally, in 1945 the new Macedonian standard (orthography and basic morphology) was accepted by the Macedonian Ministry of Education with the codification following in subsequent years.108 The new standard spread 1 05 106 107 108

Pulevski 1875:48–49 after Friedman (2000:75). Friedmann (2000:194). Miller 1975:123–125. Quoted after Sánchez Prieto (2013:240).

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quickly as it was closer to the spoken language. Macedonian and Bulgarian are still comprehensible among each other but generally considered different languages (and would have to be considered such according the definitions set up in the previous part of this paper). It is another example of the ineffectiveness of basing the definition of the term “language” on the criteria of linguistic similarity and comprehensibility. Despite these facts, the Bulgarian academy of sciences still insists (BAN 1978:  21  ff) that Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian and not a language of its own. Petrov (1985) speaks of “a standard literary norm” (“bălgarski knižoven ezik”) and two regional written language norms, a Macedonian one (“pismenoregionalna norma na bălgarski ezik v R Makedonija”) and a Banat Bulgarian one (“banatska pismena norma na bălgarski ezik”)”.109 Here again, a repeated pattern resurfaces which consists of the refusal by cultural elites to accept the constitution of a separate language from their own just as it is the case with SBCR. The case of Macedonian shows, that any split of languages  – be it into a national variety or a language of its own, is generally met with opposition by the dominant language community, as it is a loss of power and influence. Once again, the split was caused by the alienation through occupation and suppression and the long-time entrenchment of these events in the collective memory.

4  “Moldovian Romanian” or simply “Moldovian” – The fight for the right to name their own language – Dominant and elitist views versus non-dominant and particularist Moldova is one of the smaller successor states of the Soviet Union. It became independent in 1991. Since then, the country has been occupied in a kind of language question of its own that concerns the name of the national language. The “Declaration of Independence” of 1991 named the official language “Romanian”. Three years later, the newly passed constitution of Moldova states in Art. 13(1) “The State language of the Republic of Moldova is the Moldovan language based on the Latin alphabet”110. The Academy of Sciences rejected this decision the same year on the grounds that the (standard) language is the same as in Romania. In a referendum of 2004, 87  % of the electorate voted for the term Moldovan. This was overthrown by the constitutional court again in 2013 and stipulated in 2017 that the Declaration of independence was superior to the constitution and the name of the national language in the constitution should 1 09 Ibid. (2013: 241). 110 http://www.presedinte.md/titlul1 [acc. 18.03.2019].

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be amended and switched to Romanian.111 There is no indication that this has achieved enough parliamentary support. Art. 13(1) of the official version of the constitution on the webpage of the Moldovan president still states that Moldovan is the state language.112 What might seem nothing more than a petty squabble over a name is much more than that if one looks at the proponents of the two sides. There is on the one hand the Socialist Party (pro Russian) which defends the name Moldovian, and on the other hand the Liberal parties (pro European) who support Romanian. Moreover, the dominant nation Romania (it pursues a very rigid and centralist language policy) is also of the opinion that the correct name is Romanian and not Moldovian.113 This opinion is prevalent in the cultural elites and could be seen as a case of linguistic cringe, as this group fears for the loss of its symbolic capital. The government and the state institutions do not seem to have undertaken any language planning and status planning measures since independence which leaves the population uniformed about which features are genuinely Moldovan and which General Romanian. The negative effects and confusions arising from it are best shown by a discussion thread on Wikimedia about the failed attempt to install a Moldovan version of Wikipedia114 and a street interview conducted by a journalist asking for different expressions on a market in the capital Chisinau.115 What do you sell, “castravetsy” [cucumber in Romanian] or “pepeni” [melon in Romanian, cucumber in Moldovan]? Fruit-seller: It depends how they ask. People from the countryside ask for “pepeni,” but usually they ask for “castravetsy.” When you say “castravetsy,” how do people react? Fruit-seller: Those who don’t know the word are surprised. What do people usually call melons? Fruit-seller: Castravetsy. In fact, “castravetsy” is correct. But what do the Romanians call “pepeni?” Fruit-seller: Watermelons.

The struggle over the name of the Moldovan national language is a paradigm example for what happens when a non-dominant variety of a PCL (a) wants to have a name of its own for its NV or (b) even wants to declare it to be a language. 111 Moldova’s Top Court Endorses Proposal To Switch Official Language To ‘Romanian’ In Constitution: https://www.rferl.org/a/moldova-romanian-constitutional-courtmoldovan/28826605.html [acc. 18.03.2019]. 112 http://www.presedinte.md/titlul1 [acc. 18.03.2019]. 113 See the exchange in 2008 between the then Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin and the Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu at the international security conference in Munich: https://www.rferl.org/a/1079514.html [acc. 18.03.2019] 114 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_ Moldovan_Wikipedia [acc. 19.03.2019]. 115 https://www.rferl.org/a/1079514.html [acc. 19.03.2019].

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It is evident that neither the representatives of the dominant variety nor the elites of a small country want to have a language name of its own, being afraid that this would result in linguistically different language and after some time cutting them off from a larger language market. Michael Clyne (1992: 460) already remarked that NVs are disadvantaged if they do not have a proper language name of their own. As the Moldovan example shows, it is not enough just to have a language name  – there has to be codification and language planning to be able to rise self-awareness in the language community about its native linguistic features and by that support language loyalty.

9 Summary The overview has shown a large range of ongoing or solved conflicts in European PCLs and their NVs. It turns out that the main cause for conflicts is the split of nations into new political entities. The “one-nation-one language-concept” has prevailed for a long time and hinders the development of national varieties and the acceptance of pluricentricity. There are quite a number of European countries where languages are denied their rights and kept invisible. The most strident case is Kurdish in Turkey with a large number of speakers and the varieties of Russian in the Baltic states and in Ukraine. Another large-scale conflict is the status of the successor languages of Serbo-Croatian. As language conflicts are potential political conflicts or derived from them, many conflicts have been mitigated through the introduction of the European Charter of Minority and Regional Languages, but many issues remain open and should be brought closer to a solution.

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Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide: New Pluricentric Languages-Old Problems. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 331–344. Gromilova, Anna (2015): Statelessness: Challenging the “Europeanness” in the Baltics. In: Revista de Științe Politice. Revue des Sciences Politiques. 47, p. 268–282. Central and Eastern European Online Library https://www.ceeol. com/search/article-detail?id=733773, [Acc. 05.03.2019]. Gröschel, Bernhard (2001): Bosnisch oder Bosniakisch? Zur glottonymischen, sprachpolitischen und sprachenrechtlichen Fragmentierung des Serbokroatischen. In: Waßner. U. H. (Mg): Lingua et linguae. Festschrift für Clemens-Peter Herbermann zum 60. Geburtstag. Aachen: Shaker. p. 159–188. Gröschel, Bernhard (2003): Postjugoslavische Amtssprachenregelungen - Soziolinguistische Argumente gegen die Einheitlichkeit des Serbokroatischen? In: Српски језик, број 8/1-2, годича VIII, Београд Srpski jezik. 8/1–2. Beograd. p. 135–196. Gröschel, Bernhard (2009): Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik: Mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit. Munich: Lincom Europa. Grzega (2006): Euro-Linguistischer Parcours: Kernwissen zur europäischen Sprachkultur. Frankfurt: IKO. Haarman, Harald (2011): Das Sprachenmosaik Europas [The language mosaic of Europe] EGO “Europäische Geschichte Online”. http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/ crossroads/sprachenmosaik/harald-haarmann-das-sprachenmosaik-europas. [acc. 25.03.2019] Haig, Geoffrey (2004): The invisibilisation of Kurdish: the other side of language planning in Turkey. In: Conermann, S./Haig, G. (eds.) Die Kurden: Studien zu ihrer Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur. Schenefeld: EB-Verlag. p. 121–150. Haugen, Einar (1966): Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hickey, Raymond (2012): Standard Irish English. In: Hickey, R. (ed.) (2012): Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World. Cambridge University Press. p. 96–116. Hickey, Raymond (2019): The pluricentric languages of Northern Ireland. In: Muhr, R. et. al. (eds.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Berlin: Peter Lang. p. 141–154. Hinrichs, U. (1997): Südslavische Sprachwissenschaft und SüdosteuropaLinguistik«. In: Zeitschrift für Balkanologie 33/1, p. 9–25. Hodges, Andrew (2016): Language standardization and the production of nationalized political subjects through language? Perspectives from the social sciences and humanities. In: etnološka tribina 39/46, p. 3–45.

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Holtus, Günter/ Metzeltin, Schmitt/Michael, Christian (1991): Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik (LRL): Bd. 5, Französisch, Okzitanisch, Katalanisch, 2: Okzitanisch, Katalanisch. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Huber, Máté (2016): Problems and advantages of treating Hungarian as a pluricentric language. In: Muhr, R. et. al. (eds.): Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide. Volume 1: Pluricentric Languages across Continents – Features and Usage. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 303–314. Huber, Máté/Molnár, Timea (2015): Attitudes of speakers of non-dominant varieties of Hungarian towards their own variety and the dominant one. In: Muhr, Rudolf/Dawn, Marley, in collaboration with Anu Bissoonauth and Heinz L. Kretzenbacher (eds.): Pluricentric Languages. New Perspectives in Theory and Description. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 245–258. Hughes, Arthur/Trudgill, Peter/Watt, Dominic (eds.) (2012): English Accents and Dialects 4th ed. London: Arnold. Ibrahim, Zeinab/Karatsolis, Andreas (2013): Excluding speakers of the dominating variety: the cases of Greek and Arabic. In: Muhr R. et. al. (eds.): Exploring Linguistic Standards in Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages/Explorando estándares lingüísticos en variedades no dominantes de lenguas pluricéntricas. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 131–144. Jones, Charles (2002): The English Language in Scotland: An Introduction to Scots. East Lington: Tuckwell Press. Joubert, Aurélie (2015): Occitan: a language that cannot stop dying. In: Jones, Mari C. (ed.) (2015): Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 171–188. Jusufi, Lumnije (2018): Pluricentric developments of Albanian between national unity and linguistic heterogeneity. In: Muhr Rudolf/ Meisnitzer, Benjamin (eds.) (2018): Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide: New Pluricentric Languages-Old Oroblems. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 135–146. Kafadar, Enisa (2009): Bosnisch, Kroatisch, Serbisch - Wie spricht man eigentlich in Bosnien-Herzegowina? In: Henn-Memmesheimer, Beate/Franz, Joachim (eds.) (2009): Die Ordnung des Standard und die Differenzierung der Diskurse: Akten des 41. Linguistischen Colloquiums in Mannheim, Teil 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. p. 95–106. Kapović, Mate (2019): Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: notes on contact and conflict. In: Muhr, Rudolf/ Mas Castells, Josep/Rueter, Jack (eds.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Berlin et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 177–188. Karyolemou, Marilena (2012): Cypriot Greek as a non-dominant variety of Greek. In: Muhr R. (ed.): Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages.

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Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 167–186. Kenesei, István (2006): Hungarian as a Pluricentric Language. EFNIL Annual Conference. Madrid. Available online at: http://www.efnil.org/conferences/ archives/madrid-2006/papers/07-EFNIL-Madrid-Kenesei.pdf (Acc. 11.03.2019). Khan, Geoffrey (2018): The Neo-Aramaic dialects of northern Iraq. In: Haig, Geoffrey/Khan, Geoffrey (eds.): The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia: An Areal Perspective. Berlin, Boston: Mouton de Gruyter . Kontra, Miklós (2019): Wanted: linguistic (human) rights in the study of non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages. In: Muhr, Rudolf/Mas, Josep/Rueter, Jack (ed.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Wien/Berlin: Peter Lang. p. 61–76. Kordič, Snježana (2006): Sprache und Nationalismus in Kroatien. In: Symanik, B. (Hg.) Studia Philologica Slavica. Festschrift für Gerhard Birkfellner zum 65. Geburtstag. Teilband I. Berlin: UT Verlag. p. 337–348. Kordič, Snježana (2008): In: Biljana Golubovic/Jochen Raecke (Hrsg.): Bosnisch, Kroatisch, Serbisch als Fremdsprachen an den Universitäten der Welt. München: Biblion Media. p. 93–102. Kordič, Snježana (2010): Jezik i nacionalizam [Language and Nationalism]. http://bib.irb.hr/lista-radova?autor=173535. [acc. 18.03.2019] Lanstyák, István (1995): A magyar nyelv központjai. [The Centers of the Hungarian Language] In: Magyar Tudomány. 10, p. 1170–1185. Mackridge, Peter (1985): The Modern Greek Language: A Descriptive Analysis of Standard Modern Greek. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackridge, Peter (2009): Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mas, Josep-Àngel (2012): Catalan as a pluricentric language: the Valencian case. In: Muhr R. (ed.): Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 283–300. Mas Castells, Josep-Àngel (2019): Identity and use of a pluricentric language in conflict: Catalan in Spain. In: Muhr, Rudolf/ Mas Castells, Josep/Rueter, Jack (eds.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Berlin et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 91 –106. McDowall David (2005): A Modern History of the Kurds. 3rd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. Miller, Lee (1975): Bulgaria During the Second World War. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Muco, Albana (2018): Albanian as a pluricentric language. In: Muhr Rudolf/ Meisnitzer, Benjamin (eds.) (2018): Pluricentric Languages and nondominant Varieties worldwide: New pluricentric languages-old problems. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 147–158. Muco, Albana (2019): Albanian and other languages in contact on the Balkans. In: Muhr, Rudolf/ Mas Castells, Josep/Rueter, Jack (eds.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Berlin et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 189–200. Muhr, Rudolf (2003): Die plurizentrischen Sprachen Europas. In: Gugenberger, Eva/Blumberg, Mechthild (eds.): Vielsprachiges Europa. Zur Situation der regionalen Sprachen von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis zum Kaukasus. Frankfurt am Main/Wien: Peter Lang. p. 191–233. Muhr, Rudolf (2012): Linguistic dominance and non-dominance in pluricentric languages: A typology. In: Muhr R. (ed.): Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 23–48. O’Reilly, Camille C. (2001): Irish Language, Irish Identity: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the European Union. In: O’Reilly, C. C. (ed.): Language, Ethnicity and the State. Volume 1: Minority Languages in the European Union. London: Palgrave. p. 78–103. Petrov, Konstantin (1985): Iz istorijata na bălgarskija knižoven ezik. Sofía: BAN. Póilin, Aodán Mac (1997): Plus ca change: the Irish language and politics. In: Póilin, A. M. (ed.): The Irish Language in Northern Ireland. Belfast: CULTACH. p. 31–48. Pulevski, Ġorģi (1875): Rečnik od tri jezika. Belgrade: Državna Štamparija. Roudometof, Victor (ed.) (2000): The Macedonian Question. New York: East European Monographs. Salewski, Michael (2004): Geschichte Europas. Staaten und Nationen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. München: Beck. Sánchez Prieto, Raúl (2013): Politics shaping linguistic standards: the case of Dutch in Flanders and Bulgaro-Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia. In: Muhr, Rudolf/Amorós Negre, Carla et. al. (eds.): Exploring Linguistic Standards in Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages/ Explorando estándares lingüísticos en variedades no dominantes de lenguas pluricéntricas. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 227–244. Schmid, Heinrich (1982): Richtlinien für die Gestaltung einer gesamtbündnerischen Schriftsprache: Rumantsch Grischun: Chur. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2019): Afterword. In: Csernicskó, István/Mihály Tóth (eds.): The Right to Education in Minority Languages. Central European traditions and the case of Transcarpathia. Uzhhorod: Autdor-Shark. p. 68‒71.

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Skutnabb-Kanga, Tove/Fernandes, Desmond (2008): Kurds in Turkey and in (Iraqi) Kurdistan – a comparison of Kurdish educational language policy in two situations of occupation. In: Genocide Studies and Prevention 3/1, p. 43–73. Stojanov, Tomislav (2019): Abandoned pluricentricity – the case study of the Serbo-Croatian linguonym. In: Muhr, Rudolf/ Mas Castells, Josep/Rueter, Jack (eds.): European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Berlin et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 163–176. Sumien, Domergue (2006): La Standardisation pluricentrique de l’occitan. Nouvel enjeu sociolinguistique, développement du lexique et de la morphologie. Turnhout: Brepols. Publications de l’Association Internationale d’Etudes Occitanes. p. 3. Sumien, Domergue (2012): Occitan: Harmonizing non-dominant standards throughout four states. In: Muhr R. (ed.) Non-dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang. p. 263–282. Taşçı, Yıltan (1986): Kıbrıs Ağzı Dil Özellikleri. Lefkoşa: Akar Yayıncılık. Trudgill, Peter/Hannah, Jean (2017): International English: A Guide to Varieties of English Around the World. London: Routledge. Willemyns, Roland (2013): Dutch. Biography of a Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yükselen, Gökçe (2012): Kibris’ta Türkler tarafindan konuşulan lisanin adi ne olmalidir? [What should be the name of the language spoken by the Turks in Cyprus?] In: Dilektolog 2012/4, p. 89–103.

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Dutch national varieties in contact and in conflict Abstract: In 2003, the Nederlandse Taalunie, officially recognised that the Dutch language area is pluricentric with “two equal national varieties” [own translation] (Nederlandse Taalunie, 2003) in Europe: Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch. In reality however, Netherlandic Dutch was the dominant variety. Evidence of this could be found in lexicography, but also in literature and literary translation. Nevertheless, the status of the non-dominant Belgian Dutch variety is changing. This chapter looks at recent changes in lexicography and norm-adherence in Belgium with regard to the use of the Belgian national variety. It illustrates how the attitude towards and the status of non-dominant varieties, just like languages, are in constant flux. This may eventually result in a shift from “asymmetrical pluricentricity” towards more “symmetrical pluricentricity”.

1 Introduction When in 1980 both the Belgian and the Dutch government signed the Verdrag tussen het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden en het Koninkrijk België inzake de Nederlandse Taalunie,1 they agreed to decide on Dutch language matters together. A  Dutch language-planning body was established:  the Nederlandse Taalunie2 (henceforth Taalunie) aiming to integrate the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking community in Belgium with regard to language and literature. In its early days, the emphasis was indeed on union and safeguarding linguistic unity in the immediate Dutch language area. This was also in line with what Belgian Dutch speakers agreed on, since, rather than developing their own linguistic standard, in the 19th Century in Belgium, they decided to adopt the readily available Netherlandic Dutch standard. In this way, they acknowledged there was only one linguistic centre, the Randstad area in the Netherlands, and only one linguistic standard. Therefore, up until the 1990s little attention was paid to the differences between Dutch as it was used in Belgium vis-à-vis the Netherlands. Linguistic variation was usually glossed over for the sake of this lofty ideal of linguistic uniformity and unity. Nowadays, the Taalunie celebrates 1 The treaty between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium on the subject of the Dutch Language Union. 2 The Dutch Language Union.

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linguistic variation acknowledging that this variation contributes to the richness of the Dutch language, while still emphasising that “the essential characteristics of Dutch […] are the same” (Nederlandse Taalunie 2009:2). At the beginning of the 21st Century, two national varieties of Dutch were officially recognised: Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch (Nederlandse Taalunie 2003). The existence of a second linguistic centre in Belgium was therefore acknowledged. In 2004, Surinam, a former Dutch colony in South America where Dutch still is the official language, joined the Taalunie as an associate member. Subsequently, “Surinam Dutch” was recognised and a few years later “Caribbean Dutch” as well. In the present chapter, the focus will be on Belgian Dutch in relation to Netherlandic Dutch.

2 The status of Belgian Dutch vis-à-vis Netherlandic Dutch In 2016, the Taalunie launched a multilingual campaign entitled “One language. This is what we share.” (Nederlandse Taalunie 2017),3 the aim of which was to clear up the confusion “abroad and at home” [own translation] (idem), particularly as regards the status of Belgian Dutch: “For example, Flemish [i.e. Belgian Dutch] and Dutch are sometimes seen as two separate languages, or Flemish is seen as a dialect of Dutch.” [own translation] (idem). The accompanying video and the brochure clarify Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch speakers perfectly understand each other. Moreover, the cultural exchange across the border is highlighted, e.g.: “Not only are Dutch and Flemish people able to read books written by authors from the entire linguistic area, they are also able to share the same translations of international literature” (idem). Dutch speakers can indeed read one another’s books, but as a number of studies by the Taalunie have shown, “[i]‌n addition to an increased interest in translations into Dutch, there is an excessive focus on the literary production of one’s own authors in both countries.” [author’s translation] (van Baelen 2013:70). It is one of the tasks of the Taalunie to promote and encourage literary cooperation and literary translation, so it aims to remedy this limited literary border traffic. Another goal of the Taalunie is to ensure that the grammar, spelling and terminology of standard Dutch are optimally described. This also means taking into account the language variation in standard Dutch. Currently, it is financing a thorough revision of the online Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (e-ANS). In this standard grammar, the national varieties of Dutch will be systematically labelled. The 3 This was also the motto of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world’s largest trade fair for books, in 2016, when both Flanders and the Netherlands were guests of honour.

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Taalunie also finances an ambitious online dictionary project, which at present is still incomplete:  the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek (ANW) describing the standard Dutch lexis from 1970 to the present and labelling the different varieties of Dutch, i.e.:  Netherlandic, Belgian, Surinam and Caribbean Dutch. In 1992, Guido Geerts asked himself if Dutch were a pluricentric language. He stated that it was “quite likely” that the Belgian Dutch speakers who did not “accept a pluralistic view of Dutch” represented “a good majority” (Geerts 1992:78). Today, however, the pluricentricity of Dutch is no longer questioned. It is not only officially recognised by the Taalunie, as illustrated above, the Taalunie also helps codifying the national varieties of Dutch. In that sense, there is no “conflict” between Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch about norm-setting issues. What exactly constitutes the Belgian Dutch norm, however, is a discussion that started in the 1990s and does, at time, still create “conflict” within the Belgian Dutch language community. However, recent decades witnessed a wide range of research interest into Belgian Dutch and – to a lesser extent - Netherlandic Dutch, for example, in computational and corpus linguistics (e.g. De Hertog et al. 2014; Peirsman et al. 2010; Ruette et al. 2014; Speelman et al. 2006), lexicography (e.g. Daems et al. 2015; De Caluwe 2012; Geeraerts et al. 1999; Martin 2010), linguistics (e.g. Plevoets et al. 2008; Van de Velde & Houtermans 1999; van Hout et al. 1999), sociolinguistics (e.g. De Schryver & De Saedeleer 2014; De Schryver 2015; Grondelaers & van Hout 2011; Zenner et al. 2015), but also in (audiovisual) translation studies (e.g. De Ridder & O’Connell 2018; Delaere et al. 2012; Prieels & De Sutter 2017; Remael et al. 2008; Schyns & Noble 2008).

3 Dutch lexis in contact and conflict The most striking differences between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch are differences in pronunciation. Although Belgian Dutch speakers chose to adhere to the Netherlandic Dutch standard, in Belgium, gradually a different pronunciation standard developed. The pronunciation of newsreaders at the Flemish public service broadcaster (henceforth VRT) is considered the standard pronunciation. As far as lexis is concerned, it cannot be denied that there is a considerable amount of overlap between the varieties, but for a long time, lexical variation between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch has been downplayed. A lot of Netherlandic Dutch undoubtedly has been absorbed in Belgium, both consciously through language planning efforts, and unconsciously through language contact. Yet, there is still a lot of marked Netherlandic Dutch lexis that, for some reason, has not come into use in Belgium and, likewise, a lot of typically Belgian Dutch lexis, to date, is still widely used in Belgium and has not been replaced

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(yet). Research has shown that lexical convergence4 took place between 1950 and 1990 (Geeraerts et al. 1999). This was also a period characterised by language contact with the Netherlandic variety through radio and television, but more significantly so, this period was marked by adamant language planning efforts in Belgium, in particular, by the Flemish public service broadcaster, aiming at teaching Belgians standard (i.e. Netherlandic) Dutch. However, after the 1980s, such forceful language-planning efforts slowly petered out and with the emergence of commercial broadcasters in Belgium offering a wider range of programming, Dutch speakers in Belgium stopped tuning into Dutch channels and were less exposed to Netherlandic Dutch. Subsequently, the turn of the century saw the official recognition of both a Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch national variety by the Taalunie, the authoritative dictionary, and the Flemish public service broadcaster. The latter indeed radically changed its language policy in 1998 announcing that it would adhere to the Belgian standard moving forward and that it would allow for the use of standard Belgian Dutch in its radio and television broadcasts. This meant that Belgians were more exposed to their typically Belgian Dutch lexis and the use of these variants no longer met with the same opposition. A follow-up study to Geeraerts et al (1999) looking at more recent data revealed that the lexical convergence they had observed, however, had come to a halt in 2012 (Daems et al. 2015). When comparing lists of Netherlandic Dutch words drawn up almost 20 and 10 years ago, there are striking differences between the numbers of items that are still considered Netherlandic Dutch today. For instance, in 2001, Willy Martin (2001) gave 37 examples of marked Netherlandic Dutch words and phrases. Only 16 of these were given a Netherlandic Dutch label in the latest Prisma dictionary edition (Martin et al. 2018), of which Martin is one of the editors-in-chief: 15 were not labelled – implying that they are now also used in Belgium5 – and 6 were not in the dictionary. By contrast, in another publication almost 10 years later, Martin (2010) listed 85 examples of a wide range of different Netherlandic Dutch words and phrases. When looking up these 85 words and phrases in the latest Prisma edition (Martin et al. 2018), the vast majority (90 %) are still considered Netherlandic Dutch, as they were given this usage label: only 6 have no geographic usage label6 and 2 items could not be found in the dictionary. Geerts’s (1992) examples of Belgian Dutch lexis are mainly substandard or colloquial

4 In that Belgians have taken up Netherlandic Dutch, not the other way around. 5 e.g. lekkage, akkefietjes, oud en nieuw. 6 e.g. habbekrats, met pensioen, jakkes.

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Belgian Dutch. A thorough description of Belgian Dutch lexis only started in the late 1990s. Significant in this regard, is the contribution of the lexicologists Willy Martin and Willy Smedts who created a reference file of Belgian Dutch7 in which they collected, defined, and categorised almost 4.000 Belgian Dutch words and phrases. In this file, 16 % of the items were categorised as substandard and 15 % as colloquial Belgian Dutch. Until today, the status of lexis that is categorised as such is unclear at best, or rather low at worst. It is often not considered standard Belgian Dutch and, as a result, its use is avoided in more formal writing and (audiovisual) translation (De Ridder & O’Connell 2018). In the 2005 update of the reference file, almost 1/3 of the lexis was categorised as such. In 1999, Van Dale dictionary introduced a new set of labels in its 13th edition to improve the lexical description of the Belgian Dutch variants. This often meant that labels such as “Gallicism”, “regional”, “dialect”, “not generally used”, “archaic”, or “rarely used” were replaced by “General Belgian Dutch” in later editions. At times, labels were simply removed altogether implying that these words and phrases are not marked for geographic region, i.e. there is no restriction in their usage. Not surprisingly, most research into Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch is conducted by Belgian nationals. Moreover, in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, significantly more8 students, proportionally, study Dutch literature and linguistics than in the Netherlands. Dutch language topics relating to what constitutes standard Belgian Dutch and the status of colloquial Belgian Dutch, are not only discussed in academia, but, for instance, also on social media and in radio shows. These discussions go unnoticed, or meet with indifference in the Netherlands. In 1992, Geerts observed that “[t]‌here is no basis for saying that the Netherlands is out […] to claim for its own national variety a superior status, let alone a special position. The Dutch are not linguistic or cultural imperialists and they never have been. […] In general, there is in the Netherlands more indifference to the status of the language than interest in it.” (Geerts 1992:86)

This, in essence, is still the case today. The Dutch often do not understand the at times heated debates in Belgium on the linguistic standard, or the varieties of Dutch used by Belgian schoolteachers, in children’s television programmes, or by politicians. Dutch lexicography as regards Netherlandic Dutch changed radically

7 To date, no reference file of Netherlandic Dutch has been created yet. 8 In the current academic year (2018–2019):  884 students in the Netherlands (representing 2/3 of the language area), compared to 965 in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, which only constitutes 1/3 of the language area.

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after 2009, but this does not appear to have troubled the Dutch very much. On the one hand, the restriction label “Netherlandic Dutch” was introduced, which meant that Dutch nationals, suddenly, saw words and phrases with which they were perfectly familiar labelled in the Prisma dictionary and, since 2015, also in the authoritative Van Dale dictionary. On the other hand, the lexicographic custom of simply presenting dictionary users who look up a Belgian Dutch word with the Netherlandic Dutch counterpart or a synonym that is unmarked for geographic region, rather than providing the definition of the word ceased as well. Since the 15th edition, dictionary users are no longer redirected in this way: the definition is provided and subsequently the Netherlandic Dutch counterpart – if there is one – is added. In the same way, when looking up a Netherlandic Dutch word, the Belgian counterpart is added to the definition. The table below illustrates this by comparing the dictionary entries for the Belgian Dutch word vluchthuis [litt. escape house] and its Netherlandic Dutch counterpart blijf-van-mijn-lijf­huis [litt. ‘keep your hands of me’ house] in the 14th and the 15th edition of the Van Dale dictionary. entry Van Dale (2005) 14th edition vluchthuis labelled (alg.Belg.N) [algemeen Belgisch Nederlands, i.e. general Belgian Dutch] blijf-van-mijn-lijfhuis [no definition given at all, only the Netherlandic Dutch counterpart is mentioned] blijf-van- no label, i.e. general mijn(unmarked) Dutch lijfhuis (het)toevlucht voor door hun partner mishandelde vrouwen en hun kinderen [definition provided without mentioning the Belgian Dutch counterpart]

Van Dale (2015) 15th edition labelled BE [Belgian Dutch] toevlucht voor door hun partner mishandelde vrouwen of mannen en hun kinderen ≈ NL blijf-van-mijn-lijf­huis [definition provided together with the Netherlandic Dutch counterpart] labelled NL [Netherlandic Dutch] toevlucht voor door hun partner mishandelde vrouwen of mannen en hun kinderen ≈ BE vluchthuis [definition provided together with the Belgian Dutch counterpart]

These are the Dutch coinages for a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. In this case, for this specific concept there is no general Dutch word that is unmarked for national variety. In the case of these entries, the 15th edition of the Van Dale dictionary describes the lexis neutrally and presents both varieties in perfect

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symmetry. Ruud Hendrickx, the Belgian editor-in-chief9 of the Van Dale dictionary, explained that the label for Netherlandic Dutch was quickly accepted by his Dutch colleagues, as they understood the dictionary merely intends to describe the lexis (Comer 2016:3). He did point out, however, that it is hard to locate and label Netherlandic Dutch variants in a dictionary of over 200,000 entries. Authoritative dictionaries just like Van Dale dictionary, however, are implicitly normative and never just descriptive, as Hendrickx acknowledges. After all, dictionary editors decide to take up given words or phrases or not. In doing so, they decide what is part of the standard lexis and what is not. They are also responsible for any restriction labels they introduce and these may present nondominant varieties as deviations from the dominant variety, for instance, as was the case in the older Van Dale editions. The introduction of the Netherlandic Dutch label in Van Dale, almost 15 years after the recognition of both Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, was long overdue. Still rather a lot of Netherlandic Dutch remains unlabelled in this dictionary today. Shibboleths of Netherlandic Dutch like the adverb hartstikke [≈utterly], for instance, are at the moment still unlabelled in the online-edition of the dictionary, while they get a Netherlandic Dutch label in the Prisma dictionary (2018). If the distribution of hartstikke is analysed in the 500-Million-Word Reference Corpus of Contemporary written Dutch (SoNaR) the word occurs significantly more often in texts originating from the Netherlands, where 1,985 instances were found, while only 174 could be retrieved in texts originating from Belgium. Copywriters, authors or translators who want to establish if, in a particular text, a given word or phrase is suitable for the Belgian market, can at present only use the smaller Prisma dictionary as a resource, as this dictionary has been labelling marked Netherlandic Dutch since 2009. The below table compares the online version of both dictionaries consulted in November 2018. With every new edition of the Prisma dictionary, the number of items that were labelled Netherlandic Dutch increased. Prisma 2018 Number of headwords 72,186 Number of times restriction labels for Belgian 3,349 (4.6 %) Dutch Number of times restriction labels for 4,645 (6.4 %) Netherlandic Dutch

Van Dale 2018 246,215 6,275 (2.5 %) 4,296 (1.7 %)

9 Van Dale has been working with two editors-in-chief, since 1984: a Dutch and a Belgian national.

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Prisma 2018 Number of times restriction labels for Surinam n/a Dutch Number of times restriction labels for n/a Caribbean Dutch

Van Dale 2018 669 53

In this dictionary, the proportion of Netherlandic Dutch vis-à-vis Belgian Dutch is also higher, unlike the proportions in the Van Dale dictionary. Most importantly, while the Prisma dictionary is three times smaller in terms of the number of headwords, the restriction labels for Netherlandic Dutch are used more often (4.645 times) than in the Van Dale dictionary (4.296 times). New coinages originating from Belgium also appear to be taken up in the general Dutch lexis. Between January 2017 and November 2018, NL-Term, a Taaluniefunded terminology organisation, for instance, recorded 83 new coinages of which 43 were taken from Belgian sources and 40 from Dutch sources. Of these neologisms, 7 were added to the Van Dale dictionary without label, only one of which was coming from a Dutch source. The 6 remaining items came from Belgian sources.10 As Nicoline van der Sijs and Roland Willemyns (2009:61) pointed out, more Belgian Dutch lexis than many Belgians realise has been taken up by the Dutch, particularly sports commentary vocabulary. They give 25 examples of words and phrases11 and of these, only one (gekwetst [physically hurt]) was given a Belgian Dutch usage label in the latest online-edition of Van Dale. This indeed implies that the remaining 24 examples are considered unmarked general Dutch today. Moreover, both Prisma and Van Dale dictionary have removed Belgian Dutch labels from dictionary entries over the years, when the editors felt these words and phrases have also come in use in the Randstad or its periphery: particularly, in the southern part of the Netherlands bordering on Belgium. Linguists usually refer to the low percentage of words and phrases that take a Belgian Dutch restriction label in Van Dale (2.5 % in 2018) to trivialise the lexical differences. Yet, any claims about the amount of national variation in the Dutch lexicon should be based on the percentage of both marked Belgian Dutch and marked Netherlandic Dutch. Surinam and Caribbean Dutch lexis cannot be disregarded here either. The above figures show that 11 % of the Prisma dictionary entries contained restriction labels for Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch. The frequency of occurrence and distribution of this marked lexis in general 1 0 e.g. plucheplakker [someone who is hooked on the trappings of power]. 11 e.g. een afgetekende overwinning [a clear-cut victory], but also gezapig [indolent] or prietpraat [nonsense].

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language use would have to be analysed to establish the amount of the lexical variation between both varieties. An estimated 90  % of the lexis is probably shared by the Belgians and the Dutch. Nonetheless, it is important to study the lexical variation between both varieties, and the status of the marked lexis, so that it can be described and labelled correctly. In recent decades, for instance, Belgian authors and translators have been complaining about editors removing Belgian Dutch lexis, or interfering with their creative language usage and new coinages, because Dutch editors often assume that any word they are not familiar with is probably Belgian Dutch. Such editing practices clearly do create conflict between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch and have a wider impact on Dutch-language literature.

4 Dutch linguistic norms in contact and conflict While in the past, many authors (e.g. Kristien Hemmerechts) and fiction translators have proactively avoided using marked Belgian Dutch lexis, today particularly the former are less inclined to do so. When editors at publishing houses suggest to remove marked Belgian Dutch lexis, they often meet with opposition. As a result, readers abroad and at home will encounter more Belgian Dutch lexis in recent Belgian literature. The celebrated Belgian author Dimitri Verhulst, who in 2009 won the Libris Literatuur Prijs, the most prestigious literary prize in the Netherlands, even refuses to work with Dutch editors. In translated fiction, however, the linguistic standard is still Randstad Netherlandic Dutch and the majority of fiction published in the Dutch language area is translated from another language. Some publishing houses even prefer to hire Dutch nationals to translate foreign fiction. Figures showed that, while 33 % of the fiction published in the Dutch language area originates from Belgium, only 10  % of the translated fiction was translated by Belgian translators (Hofstede 2007). In 2009, the Taalunie called such “discrimination” against Belgian translators “unacceptable” [author’s translation] (Naaijkens 2009). Several Belgian translators have criticised this practice, but also the underlying issue of the adherence to this one-sided Randstad norm (e.g. Frans Denissen quoted in de Jong-van den Berg 1998; Van Raemdonck 1999). Translation studies research has shown that translations in general are more conservative as regards norm adherence. However, in the Dutch language area this unconditional adherence to the Netherlandic Dutch norm has come under increased criticism not only from Belgian authors and translators, but also from Dutch nationals like the translation scholar Désirée Schyns (Schyns 2002; Schyns & Noble 2008) and translator Rokus Hofstede (2007). Jacques Westerhoven, a

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Belgian translator who translated Haruki Murakami’s famous 1984 trilogy, explained how he had to make a case for the use of the aforementioned vluchthuis in his translation. His Dutch editor wanted him to use the Netherlandic Dutch counterpart instead, but he finally managed to convince his editor that blijf-vanmijn-lijfhuis [litt. keep-your-hands-of-me house] sounds too assertive and, in this case, was not suitable a translation. Désirée Schyns and the French translator Philippe Noble wrote a pamphlet in favour of Neerlandofonie in which they called for a more inclusive written standard, but also a more clearly defined standard (Schyns & Noble 2008). However, this has not yet led to a proper debate on the written standard. Unlike in the case of literary translation, where only one Dutch translation is published for the entire Dutch language area, there are usually separate audiovisual translations for the Dutch and the Belgian market. Since Toy Story (1995), such full length foreign-language animation films for children are dubbed twice. Rather than screening these films in the Netherlandic Dutch version in Belgium, as used to be the case, a separate version is made for the Belgian market based on a Belgian Dutch translation with Belgian voice actors using different regional Belgian Dutch varieties. Other foreign language fiction series for teenagers and adults are usually subtitled. Here too, different subtitles are used for the Dutch and the Belgian market. VRT prides itself on having its own translation department providing not only subtitles, but also voice-over commentaries in the case of documentaries, for the programmes it broadcasts. This enables VRT to maintain linguistic quality conforming to its language policy. Streaming platforms such as Netflix, but also commercial television channels such as Nickleodeon and Disney TV, however, use one version for their Dutch-speaking target audience in both Belgium and the Netherlands. This is usually the Netherlandic Dutch version. However, some new trends appear to emerge in audiovisual productions for children: The cast of VRT’s local children’s productions, nowadays, often includes one or more Dutch nationals. These series are also watched in the Netherlands (e.g. Nachtwacht broadcast by VRT and Nickleodeon). Foreign animation films like Otto the Rhino (2013), or Christopher Robin (2018) combining live action and animation, were only dubbed once and this version was screened in both Belgian and Dutch cinemas. In these films, most voice actors have a Netherlandic Dutch accent, but the main characters and their family have a Belgian Dutch accent. What is more, in the Dutch version of the highly popular children’s series PJ Masks broadcast by Disney Junior both in Belgium and the Netherlands, only Belgian voice actors are heard. Several foreign-language teenage series broadcast by commercial channels like Disney Channel nowadays are dubbed, rather than subtitled (e.g. Soy Luna and The Lodge). Both Belgian

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and Dutch voice actors are used in the dubbing process and an attempt is made to use lexis that is unmarked for geographic region. All of these more recent trends of combining both varieties could mean that children in the Netherlands and Belgium will be more exposed to one another’s national variety. It is important to add, though, that in these children’s programmes usually no regional varieties or lower registers of Belgian Dutch are used. Further research would have establish if such language contact contributes to linguistic convergence with Dutch children taking up features of Belgian Dutch pronunciation or lexis, and Belgian children taking up features of Netherlandic Dutch.

5 Conclusion The asymmetry with regard to the smaller number of Dutch speakers in Belgium compared to the Netherlands is often used to assert the “natural supremacy” of the Netherlands, e.g.: “the natural supremacy [the Netherlands] has acquired in the course of history and its greater population and the corresponding size of its cultural output, insofar as this is of a linguistic nature” (Geerts 1992:87)

However, it is doubtful that such a supremacy is recognised by Belgian Dutch language professionals today. Belgian Dutch speakers have become more confident and assertive in their use of the Belgian Dutch variety. Politicians, teachers, authors, translators are in favour of a Belgian Dutch standard that allows for more features of Belgian Dutch (particularly lexis). While today, all main Dutchlanguage literary publishers reside in the Netherlands, a number of recent successful novels12 were published in which both standard and lower registers of Belgian Dutch are used. Interestingly, in contrast to the literary publishers, all Dutch newspapers are owned by Belgian publishers today. The collaboration between editorial staff on both sides of the border may also contribute to a convergence of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch lexis (Comer 2016:5). Dominant varieties of pluricentric languages are usually the varieties of the country where the language originates. The cradle of Dutch, however, stood in the County of Flanders and as Willemyns (2013:xi) aptly put it, Dutch has “two motherlands (Belgium and the Netherlands)”. The late sociolinguist Kas Deprez mentioned – what he called – the “Flemish claims on Dutch” (Deprez 1998:106) since “[m]‌any Flemings [...] feel that Flanders is entitled to make a contribution” (idem) to 12 e.g.: Gij nu (Griet Op de Beeck 2016), Wil (Jeroen Olyslaegers 2016) and Het smelt (Lize Spit 2016).

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the Dutch language.” The particular history of Dutch in Belgium and the successful linguistic struggle mean that the language is deeply rooted in its northern part and not taken for granted. The Dutch, who to date still have not enshrined Dutch in their constitution, seem to have a more pragmatic attitude to language. The ease with which English is replacing Dutch as the language of instruction at Dutch universities illustrates this. In 2018, 23 % of all bachelor courses and a whopping 74 % of all master courses at Dutch universities were entirely taught in English. By contrast, the Belgian figures (less than 2 % of the bachelor courses and 22 % of the master courses) far from exceeded the in Belgium imposed legal maximum of respectively 18 % and 50 %. The fact that Dutch is a pluricentric language with a Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch variety in Europe is also taught at universities abroad. For over a decade, Stockholm University’s Dutch section has had teaching staff from both Belgium and the Netherlands. The pronunciation and lexical differences between the varieties are explained and every year, a number of students also indicate that they are particularly interested in learning the Belgian variety. Johan De Caluwe13 studied symmetry between both varieties as reflected in the “linguistic and cultural organisation of both language communities” (2013:45). He observed “highly symmetrical forms of cooperation in a wide variety of projects” (idem). While De Caluwe has legitimate grounds to raise concerns about many organisations including the Taalunie,14 but also all main literary publishers being based in the Randstad area and thus reinforcing the dominant position of this linguistic center in the Netherlands, the least that can be said is that the asymmetry in the Dutch pluricentric language area is far from fixed.

References Comer, B. (2016): Ruud Hendrickx over het nieuwe Van Dale woordenboek: beschrijvend, niet normerend. Over Taal, (1), 3–5. Daems, J., Heylen, K., & Geeraerts, D. (2015): Wat dragen we vandaag: een hemd met blazer of een shirt met jasje? Taal en Tongval, 67(2), 307–342. De Caluwe, J. (2012): Dutch as a bicentric language: a lexicographic (r)evolution. In: R. Muhr (ed.) Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. (pp. 143–154). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 13 De Caluwe also co-edited the Atlas van de Nederlandse taal (Jansen et al. 2017), which was published in two editions, one for the Belgian and one for the Dutch market. In 2018, it won the Jaarprijs Wetenschapscommunicatie, an annual prize for scientific communication. 14 Although the Taalunie has a – be it smaller – office in Brussels as well.

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De Caluwe, J. (2013): Nederland en Vlaanderen: (a)symmetrisch pluricentrisme in taal en cultuur. Internationale Neerlandistiek, 51(1), 45–59. De Hertog, D., Heylen, K., & Speelman, D. (2014): Stable lexical marker analysis: a corpus-based identification of lexical variation. In: A. Soares da Silva (ed.) Pluricentricity: Linguistic Variation and Sociocognitive Dimensions. (pp. 127–140). Berlin: De Gruyter. de Jong-van den Berg, N. (1998): Literaire vertaling in Nederland en Vlaanderen: tussen kunst en beleid. In: H. Bloemen, J. Hulst, N. de Jong-van den Berg, C. Koster & A. B. M. Naaijkens (eds.) De kracht van vertaling: verrijking van taal en cultuur. (pp. 77–86). Utrecht: Platform Vertalen & Vertaalwetenschap. De Ridder, R., & O’Connell, E. (2018): Using audiovisual translation to track language planning developments: Flemish Public Broadcasting Subtitles from 1995 to 2012. In: J. Díaz Cintas, & K. Nikolić (eds.) Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation. (pp. 212–224). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. De Schryver, J., & De Saedeleer, H. (2014): Vlaamse volksvertegenwoordigers kiezen voor meer Belgisch-Nederlands: 1 Woordenschat. Over Taal, 2014(2), 34–36. Delaere, I., De Sutter, G., & Plevoets, K. (2012): Is translated language more standardized than non-translated language? Using profile-based correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 24(2), 203–224. Deprez, K. (1998): The language of the Flemings. In: K. Deprez, & L. Vos (eds.) Nationalism in Belgium: Shifting Identities, 1780–1995. (pp. 96–109). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Geeraerts, D., Grondelaers, S., & Speelman, D. (1999): Convergentie en divergentie in de Nederlandse woordenschat: een onderzoek naar kleding-en voetbaltermen. Amsterdam: Meertens-Instituut. Geerts, G. (1992): Is Dutch a pluricentric language? In: M. G. Clyne (ed.) Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. (pp. 71–91). Berlin: Mouton. Grondelaers, S., & Van Hout, R. (2011): The standard language situation in the Low Countries: top-down and bottom-up variations on a diaglossic theme. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 23(3), 199–243. Hofstede, R. (2007): De paradox van Denissen. Filter: Tijdschrift Over Vertalen, 14(1), 5–7. Jansen, M. M., Van der Sijs, N., Van der Gucht, F., & De Caluwe, J. (2017): Atlas van de Nederlandse taal. Editie Vlaanderen. Tielt: Lannoo.

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Martin, W. (2001): Natiolectismen in het Nederlands en hun lexicografische beschrijving. Belgisch Tijdschrift Voor Filologie En Geschiedenis, 79(3), 709–736. Martin, W., Smedts, W., & Hofman, M. (Eds.) (2018): Prisma Groot Woordenboek Nederlands met onderscheid tussen Nederlands-Nederlands en Belgisch-Nederlands. Houten. Uitgeverij Unieboek-Het Spectrum. Martin, W. (2010): Belgisch-Nederlands en Nederlands-Nederlands. Bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble? In: E. Hendrickx, K. Hendrickx, W. Martin, H. Smessaert, W. Van Belle & J. Van der Horst (eds.) Liever meer of juist minder? Over normen en variatie in taal. (pp. 111–121). Gent: Academia Press. Naaijkens, A. B. M. (2009): Het vertaalpleidooi – een jaar later. Filter: Tijdschrift Over Vertalen, 16(2), 20–26. Nederlandse Taalunie. (2003): Rapport variatie in het Nederlands: eenheid in verscheidenheid. Den Haag. Nederlandse Taalunie. Nederlandse Taalunie. (2009): How Can We Help You? The Dutch Language Union in brief. Den Haag. Nederlandse Taalunie. Nederlandse Taalunie. (2017): Nederlands in Nederland en Vlaanderen. [http:// taalunieversum.org/inhoud/nederlands-nederland-en-vlaanderen] [acc. 25.08.2019] Peirsman, Y., Geeraerts, D., & Speelman, D. (2010): The automatic identification of lexical variation between language varieties. Natural Language Engineering, 16(4), 469–491. Plevoets, K., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2008): The distribution of T/V pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. In: K. P. Schneider, & A. Barron (eds.) Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. (pp. 181–210). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prieels, L., & De Sutter, G. (2017): Between language policy and language reality: a corpus-based multivariate study of the interlingual and intralingual subtitling practice in Flanders. Perspectives, Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 1–22. Remael, A., De Houwer, A., & Vandekerckhove, R. (2008): Intralingual open subtitling in Flanders: audiovisual translation, linguistic variation and audience needs. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 8(4), 25 January 2010, 76–105. Retrieved from: http://taalunieversum.org/inhoud/ nederlands-nederland-en-vlaanderen. Ruette, T., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2014): Lexical variation in aggregate perspective. In: A. Soares da Silva (ed.) Pluricentricity: linguistic variation and sociocognitive dimensions. (pp. 95–116). Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Schyns, D. (2002): Wie heeft er schrik van Zuid-Nederlands? Pleidooi voor een tolerantere houding ten aanzien van Zuid-Nederlandse taalvarianten. Filter: Tijdschrift Over Vertalen, 9(4), 37–45. Schyns, D., & Noble, P. (2008): Neerlandofonie: pleidooi voor een transnationale en transcontinentale taal. Ons Erfdeel, 2008(2), 98–107. Speelman, D., Grondelaers, S., & Geeraerts, D. (2006): A profile-based calculation of region and register variation: the synchronic and diachronic status of the two main national varieties of Dutch. In: A. Wilson, D. Archer, P. Rayson & Corpus Linguistics Conference (eds.) Corpus Linguistics Around the World. (p. 233). Amsterdam. Rodopi. Van Baelen, C. (2013): 1+1 = zelden 2. Over grensverkeer in de VlaamsNederlandse literaire boekenmarkt. Den Haag. Nederlandse Taalunie. Van de Velde, H., & Houtermans, M. (1999): Vlamingen en Nederlanders: over de uitspraak van nieuwslezers. In: E. Huls, & B. Weltens (eds.) Artikelen van de derde sociolinguïstische conferentie. (pp. 451–462). Delft: Eburon. Van der Sijs, N., & Willemyns, R. (2009): Het verhaal van het Nederlands: een geschiedenis van twaalf eeuwen. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Van Hout, R., De Schutter, G., De Crom, E., & Van de Velde, H. (1999): De uitspraak van het Standaard-Nederlands: variatie en varianten in Vlaanderen en Nederland. In: E. Huls, & B. Weltens (eds.) Artikelen van de Derde Sociolinguïstische Conferentie. (pp. 183–196). Delft: Eburon. Van Raemdonck, G. (1999): Een boek vertalen, is een boek herschrijven. Leesidee Jeugdliteratuur, 1999(5), 229–238. Willemyns, R. (2013): Dutch: Biography of a Language. Oxford: University Press. Zenner, E., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2015): A sociolinguistic analysis of borrowing in weak contact situations: English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in a Dutch reality TV show. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(3), 333–346.

Josep-Àngel Mas Castells

Identity and use of a pluricentric language in conflict: Catalan in Spain Abstract: Most speakers of the Catalan language are based in Spain and, therefore, they usually have to make a choice between Catalan and Spanish to get involved in communication. The studies dealing with the factors influencing this choice yield different results depending on the three main territories: Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands. This diversity is due, primarily, to different intensity – and even different sense – in terms of language policies and language use planning. On the other hand, the pluricentric character of this language also reflects differences regarding corpus planning. The social identity factor is intertwined with both dimensions, the status and the corpus, and at the same time shows a relative relevance as regards other factors. That relevance may be diverse, depending on the territories and the historic context, currently influenced by the crisis in the relations between the Spanish State and Catalonia

1 Introduction In contexts of language contact or conflict, the use of the available languages within the social environment is not “free” in the sense of being totally arbitrary, but, on the contrary, it is conditioned by a series of factors. These factors may be of two kinds: primary or secondary. Primary factors are those belonging to the individual speaker, that is, aspects he or she cannot choose or change: geographical and social origin, sex, language of parents. Secondary factors, on the other hand, may experience changes over the years and the speaker may be more or less conscious of them: (general and linguistic) ideology, social network and attitudes (Casesnoves & Mas & Tudela, 2018). Social identity (national or regional) might seem a primary factor, almost a synonym of origin. Nevertheless, it should be undoubtedly classified as a secondary factor, since it is not so much related to an alleged objectivity that has to do with the birthplace, but it is rather concerned with the way in which the speaker represents himself or herself as a member of one or more communities. That is to say, what may be decisive and is, therefore, of interest from a sociolinguistic standpoint, is the way in which speakers define themselves in contexts of identity conflict or, at least, lack of consensus. It is important to notice that such a self-definition is part of a continuum, rather than absolute. Thus, it is possible

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to feel more or less Scottish rather than British, as Corsican as French, Catalan rather than Spanish, and so on. In fact, the influence of the social identity factor on keeping or switching ones language has been emphasized in recent sociolinguistic research literature (Clyne, 1992, Casesnoves & Sankoff, 2003; Woolard, 2009; Casesnoves & Sankoff 2003; Woolard, 2009). From the point of view of Critical Discourse Analysis, it should be considered as an ideological issue, inasmuch as in these societies there is usually no full consensus on what their members are in terms of nationality. This feature, conflict or lack of consensus, is the distinguishing trait of what is ideological in a given society – and may not be so in another one, or at a different time within that same society (Van Dijk, 1999). This relative character also applies to the link between ideological factors and the use of a given language in contact: they will vary across languages and societies, as well as between different historic moments within the same society. In the case of the Catalan language, spoken by a medium-sized language community of nearly 8.5 million speakers in Spain (Pradilla & Sorolla, 2015), it is clear that the identity factor has a relative and fluctuating influence on the choice of language. This statement is valid both in terms of time and space: differences may be detected between the current situation and that of years ago, and also between different territories, influenced by different language policies and with their own para-standards, which comprise the Catalan lingüístic domain. The main objective of this study is bringing to light this fluctuating character, as well as predicting what may happen in the rest of Catalan-speaking regions in a European country that handles language diversity in a conflictive manner. In order to meet that objective, first, a brief overview is described about the language policies regarding Catalan which are currently in force in Spain. Then, come reflexions about the pluricentricity of the Catalan language and the polizitation of the corpus planning (Kloss, 1967) debate. The next part sumarizes the main factors influencing language use and ideological struggle about languages and variation in the Catalan linguistic domain. The discussion section contributes some insights to be considered in the future in view of the data.

2 Language policies about the status of the Catalan language In general, the Spanish identity has been constructed traditionally over the centuries based on the Spanish language, even though three more languages are spoken in Spain: Catalan, Galician and Basque. The way in which this country has approached its own language diversity has ranged from a little tolerance to overt prosecution with the explicit aim of extermination, for instance during

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the hardest years of Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). Certainly, the situation improved with the death of the dictator and the claims for freedom and democracy, which included the right to use one’s mother tongue. As a result of these claims, the Spanish Constitution (1978) recognizes the plurilingualism of the country and the right to use these languages (without mentioning them at all), and it also establishes that “Castilian is the Spanish official language of the state” and that “all Spaniards have the obligation to know it and use it”. This asymmetry between Castilian, the true and obligatory Spanish language, and the rest of the Spanish languages  – which are not even mentioned – does not break with the century-lasting diglossic framework promoted by the Spanish State. Moreover, in the sixties and seventies the monolingual users of languages other than Castilian disappeared, due to the real universalization of Primary and Secondary Education, exclusively focused on Castilian. In addition to all this, we should consider the strong interior immigration, from Spanish-speaking regions to Catalan-speaking and Basque-speaking ones, so it is not surprising that this situation resulted in a strong ‘accommodation norm’ (Giles and Johnson, 1981), according to which in communicative interactions with Castilian speakers, Catalan speakers have to change language. Diglossia and the accommodation norm have been palliated by language policies implemented in the different territories, but only partially and in an inconsistent way. It has been possible to develop these policies in a territory-based manner because the 1978 Constitution itself sets Spain as a quasi-federal state with 17 autonomous communities. The range of competences of these communities is established in the respective Autonomy Statutes (a kind of regional Constitution). These statutes lay the foundations of the language policy developed by the parliaments and official bodies of each autonomous government. Let us discuss next what each one of the three major territories of the Catalan language - Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands - have done in this respect. Catalonia is the territory in which language policies in favor of Catalan have been implemented – and are being implemented. To begin with, its 1979 Autonomy Statute proclaims Catalan as preferential language for official usage: in public education, in public communication media and at all levels of public administration. And the new 2006 Statute establishes the objective of consolidating Catalan internationally, specifically with its official status in the European Union. Additionally, laws and decrees have been implemented to promote the use of the Catalan language, like those that set Catalan as the preferential vehicular language in education. This was possible, obviously, because there has been a continuous presence of nationalist and pro-independence political groups in

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the local government institutions, as well as a strong civic activism committed to the language. Thus, Catalan language policy has led the language from a situation of ‘normalization’ to one of ‘sustainability’ (Marí, 2011). The 1983 Statute of the Balearic Islands establishes Catalan as a preferential language too, and states the need for designing a normalization plan to achieve linguistic equality. In spite of certain legal regulations in favor of social and public recovery of the language, it may be said that language policy has been as changeable as the color of local governments:  more favorable to Catalan during the progressive periods and more restrictive during the conservative ones (Villaverde, 2005). The Valencian Country is the territory with the lowest degree of language use regulation among the Spanish regions with their own officially recognized language, both in terms of a lack of laws and decrees and with regard to their scope (Bodoque, 2011). To begin with, the Valencian Statutes of 1982 and 2006 establish Valencian as a co-official language, yet not as preferential in official usage, unlike what happened in the Catalan and Balearic ones. And the only law of a linguistic character which has been enacted is the so-called Llei d’Ús i Ensenyament del Valencià (Law for the Use and Education in the Valencian language) (1983), which only with great effort has managed to make some progress in the educational field. This progress has never consisted of a universal school presence, not even a massive one, with Valencian as a preferential vehicular language. Up until the new Decree on Multilingualism, enacted by the current Valencian government, which is a coalition of left-wing parties including a little nationalist component, there have been three school programs which parents could choose from, differentiated by the degree in the use of Catalan as instructional language. This new decree continues to establish different degrees in the use of the language that institutions can choose from, but always with the aim of increasing the vehicular use of Catalan. In addition, the decree has been appealed by the PP, the Spanish conservative party which has been in power for nearly twenty years in the local government, where it has developed a language policy that some scholars have qualified as counter-planning, whereas that of the Socialist Party governments has been described as underachieving (Pradilla, 2004). The data on the use and transmission of the language, consequently, portray Valencia as the major Catalanspeaking territory with the most worrying data: Furthermore, the lower rates of use in the Valencian Country correspond to the younger speakers or urban areas, which could be an indicator of an ongoing language shift process (Mas, 2018).

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Identity and use of a pluricentric language in conflict 60 Catalonia 50

Balearic Islands

2003

2013

2005

2015

2004

2014

40

30 Valencian Country 20

10 0

In banks

With the doctor

In shops

In the supermarket

At home

With friends

Fig. 1:  Evolution of the rate of use of Catalan in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country. Source: Casesnoves & Mas (2018)

3 Policies on corpus planning: pluricentricity and compensatory hypertrophy of linguistic varieties Several authors have declared the pluricentricity of the Catalan language, both from a diachronic perspective and from a synchronic standpoint (Mas, 2012; Edelmann, 2015). Currently, the existence of two normative institutions reinforces this argument:  the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC (Institute of Catalan Studies), set up in 1911 and with authority to establish the codification of the whole Catalan language in compliance with a 1976 ministerial decree, and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, AVL (Valencian Language Academy), created in 1998 by the Valencian regional government (Generalitat Valenciana), with legal authority thus restricted to the territory of the Valencian Community. The Dominant Variety (DV) of Catalan, according to all the parameters, is Central Catalan, the one spoken in Barcelona and surrounding regions. It is the variety with the largest number of speakers; it is the constituent variety; orthography codification was promoted from that territory, so that the first grammars and dictionaries were based on it; its speakers consider it is better than the consecutive varieties, whose features are seen as more “incorrect” (Muhr, 2012).

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In any case, the fact that makes a language become pluricentric is not having a dominant variety, but having non-dominant varieties (NDV), where speakers claim and struggle for the consideration of their varieties as being as valid as the DV; that is to say, they do not accept diglossia1. This adhesion to the endonormative variety involves the willingness of completing or amending the task of the language codifying institution, globally understood, usually located and based in the DV territory. That willingness often leads to the setup of some localized codifying institution, such as the AVL, in the case of Catalan, which operates in a somehow autonomous way, yet also in coordination with that institution of the whole language. If the lack of coordination between institutions results in heading toward counter-reference, autonomy becomes independence; that is, if the local and new institutions carry out the codification process aiming at the maximum level of differentiation from the initial and older institution, then a new codification is finally created – often referred to, in an exaggerated way, as a new language – through elaboration or Ausbausprache (Kloss, 1967). In the case of Catalan, apart from this claim for an endonormative variety typical of the NDVs which define the pluricentric languages, we should add the characteristic claim that has been the banner of the Spanish conservative groups. In the Balearic Islands, both the right-wing Spanish nationalist groups of the PP party and the right-wing regionalists of the Unió Mallorquina party have claimed themselves to be the advocates of the Balearic variants against a supposed imposition of the Catalan variants. Given that the Universitat de les Illes Balears (University of the Balearic Islands), more specifically its Department of Catalan Philology, is the authority in the field, neither the universities nor the world of education and culture have supported such a claim at all. On the contrary, what they have done is denounce the incongruity, i.e. the fact that the hypothetical advocates of Balearic are those who have least defended its use, and designating the supposed Balearic-Catalan conflict as a smoke screen focused on linguistic forms to conceal the actual (Balearic) Catalan-Spanish conflict regarding language use. It must be pointed out that there has never been any civic association nor any relatively important political party that has advocated the linguistic independence of Balearic, apart from some very minor and small groups. In Valencia, however, the linguistic separatist stances have caused a broader gap in society. In recent history, a political party overtly in favour of the linguistic independence of Valencian, Unió Valenciana (UV), supported the PP regional

1 Clyne (1992), Muhr/Delcourt (2001).

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government in 1995 and took part in the first government of the city of Valencia, led by the same group. But the highest instance of institutional use accomplished by counter-normative Valencian (that is, the one codified aiming at the maximum degree of differentiation with regard to the unifying codification)2 was the Valencian Parliament meeting book (Diari de les Corts Valencianes) – a sort of report of the minutes including the sessions of the Valencian parliament, chaired by the leader of UV. Neither the official journal of the regional government (Diari Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana) nor the world of education, even though they were run by the PP, disturbed the language model resulting from the IEC’s proposals, although they put forward some corrections biased towards particularism. In fact, the PP party, which ran the government from 1995 to 2015, always held an ambiguous standpoint regarding the linguistic affiliation of Valencian, an ambiguity which was rather leaned towards linguistic independence (Bodoque, 2011). In spite of all that, it should be emphasized that the vindication of Valencian as a language radically differentiated from Catalan has never been socially majoritarian. It may be so, though, that there is a claim for a more prominent role in common codification, a stance that may be even found in the great Valencian champions of language unity, such as Joan Fuster, as well as in the establishment of a Valencian para-standard. This strong desire urged some Valencian writers and dignitaries to adapt the basic norms of contemporary codification of the Catalan language, mainly lead and developed by Pompeu Fabra and undertaken by the IEC, and they signed them in the Castelló Norms (Normes de Castelló) document in 1932. This was the base for the setup of the AVL in 1998 and for its consolidation as a statutory institution, which implies placing a big bet on autonomous codification attitudes  – as opposed to linguistic independence or Ausbausprache3. Moreover, the Valencian people constitute the second speaking community in number of speakers: more than two million; six million

2 For instance, in this counter-normative Valencian you can use the letters ch or y, wich are out of normative Valencian Catalan –but included in normative Spanish, ‘by chance’. 3 AVL has clearly proclaimed the unity of the language in several documents. For example, in the definition of ‘valencià’ in the Diccionari normatiu valencià: “Romanic language spoken at the Valencian Community and also in Catalonia, Balearic Island, the French Department of East Pirinnes, the Principality of Andorra, the eastern strip of Aragon and the sard city of Alguer, places where it is called Catalan ” [My translation]. The PP has claimed against this definition, even though AVL was created under a government of this party.

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in Catalonia in the first place and less than a million in the Balearic Islands in the thirth (Mas, 2012: 286). Both facts allow us to state that Valencian is the most dominant of the NDVs in the Catalan language. At the moment of writing this study, the European elections and the general elections in Spain as well as elections on the level of the autonomous regions and the local communities have just been called. It is a deplorable fact that the right-wing political parties, PP and Ciudadanos (Cs)  – even though the latter designates itself as liberal – have stopped playing an ambiguous role about the unity of Catalan language and openly start taking sides for linguistic separatism. For instance, the PP candidate for the mayoralty in the City of Valencia, as well as the Cs candidate for President of the Valencian Parliament, have recently declared that Valencian and Catalan are two different languages. Some days later, a member of the PP candidate list for the Valencia municipal government announced that they would replace the spelling of the City name with the unofficial secessionist one4. However, even if these parties reach the local government, it is very unlikely that they will manage to replace the current language norms with the secessionist ones: the AVL, the universities and the educational sector in general would not approve such an action, since they have always and openly advocated the unity of the language.

4 Social identity as a central issue Social-territorial identity may seem, a priori, the main element in the defence and use of one’s own linguistic variety, both when it is necessary to defend and use it in the presence of the strength of a dominant language and when there is the need to do so internally, facing the DV of one’s own language. In other words, the different perception and appraisal of identity, from regionalism to nationalism and from the prevalence of particularism to unity, has an influence on language choice in cases of language conflict and also on the more or less systematic preference of the endormative variety or the exonormative variety, being a variety of the DV in pluricentric languages. Therefore, when there are conflicts in pluricentric languages, the speakers of the NDV have to activate the defence of their own identity at two levels simultaneously: externally, at the language conflict level, and internally, at the pluricentric level.

4 See, for instance:  https://valenciaplaza.com/competicion-de-​anticatalanismo-​ y-linguismo-entre-catala-y-canto.

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In the case of language conflict between Catalan and Spanish in Spain, some studies were carried out which directly focus on identity or take it into account the different factors that may influence the choice of language (Casesnoves & Sankoff, 2003; Newman, Trenchs-Parera & Ng, 2008; Woolard, 2009; Casesnoves & Mas, 2017). According to international research, identity is shown to be one of the main factors affecting the keeping or switching of the language. This is a common trait, grosso modo, shared among the three major territories: Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands. It is also common knowledge that the studies approach this issue by asking speakers about their own self-perception in a gradual scale of “Spanishness” (or Spanish feeling) and that the lowest results in that scale correspond to the highest levels in the use of Catalan. It must be emphasized that this is true of the three territories (Casesnoves & Mas, 2017). In spite of that, some territorial specifications are necessary. In Catalonia, where studies are more frequent and far-reaching, an unsteady up-and-down trend may be observed regarding the evolution of the correlation between identity and one’s own language use:  it is strong in the eighties and nineties, clearly regressive at the beginning of this century and climbing back again nowadays Woolard 2009; Pujolar & González 2013; Casesnoves & Mas, 2017). During the lowest influence period, a prestigious author such as Kathreen Woolard (2009: 147) stated: “Language affiliations are viewed by these young people even more than those in past years as the exercise of options, as stylistic choices that individuals can and do make, rather than as enduring essential characteristics”

This separation of language use from ideology and ethnicity can be interpreted as related to the success of language normalization policies implemented by the different Catalan governments. The current situation, given the open political and territorial conflict between Catalonia and Spain, has caused a certain degree of “re-ideologization” of the language in terms of identity reassertion linked to the use of the language. In turn, although the NDV territories of the Catalan language behave in general in a similar way regarding the correlation “less Spanish feeling – more use of Catalan”, they present a series of distinctive features. Both the Valencian and the Balearic people share an ideological framework regarding identity which is more complex than that of the Catalan people, who simply have to place the degree of Spanish feeling on one extreme and that of Catalan feeling on the other. Taking into account that identities are constructed through contrast (Castelló, 2008), the situation for Catalan people is straightforward: the more Catalan they feel, the less Spanish, with the possibility of a middle ground of balance between both identities. On the contrary, Balearic and Valencian people define themselves

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around three elements:  degree of Spanish feeling, Valencian/insularity feeling and Catalan feeling. It should be noticed that this third point of reference, according to which Balearic and Valencian people would also be Catalan to a greater or lesser extent, has always been a very minority one. For instance, there has not been not a political party defending the Catalanesh of Valencian or Balearic people in their regional parliaments ever. Nevertheless, it has been – and still is – present in the debate of political parties, particularly as a weapon used by conservative parties against progressive ones. Thus, right-wing parties (PP, Cs) use the term catalanista (i.e. with strong Catalan feelings) in order to discredit any group implementing or in favour of any measure taken to promote the use of the vernacular language, both in the Balearic Islands and in Valencia. Such a discredit affects not only the nationalist parties, which are forced to defend their own idea of Valencianity/Insularity as opposed to Catalanity, but also national parties, such as the Socialist Party (PSOE). In spite of its little social relevance, Catalan identity is usually included in Balearic and especially in Valencian sociolinguistic studies, since there is the hypothesis of a stronger correlation with the use of Catalan. In fact, it seems that a high level of shared identity with the Catalan people should correlate with a high level of use of the equally shared language. Nevertheless, the most recent studies clearly suggest a small effect of this common-Catalanity ideology on language use, which, becomes less important than a preferential Valencian/ Majorcan identity no matter what (Castelló, 2013; Casesnoves & Mas, 2017). The Valencian people, it will be noted, are the only ones from the three territories who are influenced not only by social identity, but also somehow by leftwing ideology when it comes to keeping their own vernacular language outside their homes. This may be interpreted as evidence of the great extent of ideological bias which continues to be associated with the use of the language outside family contexts or when interacting with other people identified as Catalanspeaking. This fact, in turn, is a symptom of the low efficiency of the language policy implemented in Valencia since the advent of the autonomous government (see 2). Another aspect related to identity ideology and language use that must be considered are linguistic attitudes. It is interesting to notice the prejudice or inclination of speakers, apart from their own beliefs explicitly stated in their ideology. In the context of the study of pluricentrity, attitudes across dialects are of prime importance: they show the degree of appraisal regarding pluricentrity as such, particularly by the DV speakers, and they also allow us to envisage the

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potential danger of secession of the NDV speakers, when they show a high level of rejection of the DV. There is only one study about interdialectal attitudes in Catalan, conducted by Casesnoves & Mas (2015) using the matched-guise technique with university students of Barcelona, Valencia and Palma. According to it, the linguistic attitudes of the Valencian and Balearic people are similar: the appraisal of their own variety and of the Catalan spoken in Barcelona, the DV, do not show significant differences. The people from Barcelona, in turn, have an attitude package totally coherent with what Muhr (2012) described typical for the DV speakers: a better appreciation of their own variety both in terms of prestige and solidarity, as well as little consideration of exonormative varieties (Valencian, in the case of the aforementioned study). The lack in this study of people in favour of linguistic independence of their own variety makes it impossible to assess the influence on language use of an attitude favorable to language unity. Such a lack is not surprising: Valencian and Balearic language secessionist speakers have a bad reputation in academic and cultural environments.

5 Discussion Catalan is a pluricentric language which shares the territory of Spain with Spanish and, consequently, competes in respect to social use. Spanish is the predominant language in all territories of the nation, including the Catalan-speaking linguistic domain. In addition, it is the only language which according to the constitution is compulsory for all inhabitants of Spain and at present it is the only language which has monolingual speakers. That is true not only in the territories that are overwhelmingly monolingual, such as Castile or Andalusia, but also in those regions where Castilian coexists with another language, such as in Catalonia or in the Basque Country. For decades all speakers of the other languages of Spain – Catalan, Galician and Basque – also speak Spanish. For several reasons, it is necessary to evaluate the latter statement, in order understand the debates on language policies going on in the different bilingual territories of Spain. First, the belief that Spanish is an endangered language is a fallacy. On the contrary, the data about language usage of the other languages such as Galician or Catalan in Valencia are rather alarming. Their language transmission rates are currently going down, particularly in the urban areas (O’Rourke & Ramallo, 2018; Casesnoves & Mas, in press). Second, because it helps us understand the importance of defending one’s own regional-national identity when it comes to defending these languages too, and vice versa: if their

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speakers can also speak Spanish and continue to speak those languages, then their motivation is not merely instrumental. Additionally, since the Spanish state has always exclusively promoted the Spanish language, which for this reason is called Spanish, as a symbolic base of Spanish identity, it is not surprising that the highest language use levels of the other languages correspond to those people who feel Spanish to a lesser extent. Data seem to suggest this fact, yet with a certain degree of fluctuation, which will be discussed later on. This retention of one’s own language as an identity defining component, before another supra-identity represented by another predominant language is very similar to the adherence to one’s own identity and linguistic variety, before the DV associated with another identity, which at times may also be presented as common. Therefore, it is evident that minority languages and pluricentric languages experience a double linguistic-identity dispute:  on the one hand, taken as a whole, they fight for occupying language use domains against another dominant language; on the other hand, internally, their NDVs fight for the normative and prestige value of these varieties against the DV. The former of these levels is external and concerns the language status, whereas the latter level is intralinguistic and corresponds to the corpus. But these two levels can selfishly be made to interact with each other damaging the NDV. That is the case with Catalan: the claim for their own varieties, made by the Balearic and, especially, by the Valencian people, is used to confront progress made by the language through the questioning of the agreed linguistic model – once overt opposition to the use of any language other than Spanish turned out to be authoritarian. Thus, it is not surprising that the groups that are more worried by a hypothetical regression of the Spanish language use wish to become the defenders of Valencian and Majorcan in opposition to Catalan, which they want to banish as an alien language in those territories. The maneuvre carried out by these conservative groups could be described as a compensatory idealization of the endovariants:  they try to compensate their little formal use of any language other than Spanish with a firm and exclusive defence of the vernacular varieties of Valencian and Mallorcan. The first consequence of such a situation, in which the presence of strategies in favour of organized linguistic secessionism should be added in the case of Valencia, is that a calm and orderly debate on corpus standardization is almost missing. Simultaneously defending public use of the language over Spanish and the other non-dominant varieties over Central Catalan requires a continuous demonstration of good will. To sum up, that situation sets the NDV of the pluricentric languages in conflict in a position of double domination. Their

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public use, therefore, runs the risk of experiencing multiple dangers, which makes it unattractive for most of the society, which usually avoids conflict. The best moment for the Catalan language in Catalonia, the territory where it has managed to achieve the most success, was the last decade, when its use was deprived of any conflict and of any struggle against Spanish. There was a kind of mirage in which it seemed that Catalan identity could become fully bilingual, with a very high level of linguistic competence in both languages and nearly without any differentiation in terms of use in the different domains, nor regarding linguistic attitudes. At present, though, the political conflict between Spain and Catalonia is polarizing all standpoints, in such a way that, on the one hand, Spanish is separate from Catalan identity, and, on the other hand, the groups with strong Spanish feelings promote anti-Catalan attitudes all over the country, including of course the rest of the Catalan-speaking territories. From a strictly linguistic point of view, it is evident that the varieties which have a lot more to lose are the NDVs of Catalan, a pluricentric language in linguistic, social and political conflict.

References Bastardas, Albert (2005). Cap a una sostenibilitat lingüística. Barcelona. CETC/ Angle Editorial. Bodoque, Anselm (2011). El model valencià de política lingüística. Revista de Llengua i Dret, 56, 143–171. Casesnoves, Raquel/Sankoff, David (2003). Identity as the primary determinant of language choice. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(1): 50–64. Doi: https://doi. org/ 10.1111/1467-9481.00211. Casesnoves, Raquel/Mas, Josep-Àngel (2015). Un tema oblidat: les actituds interdialectals del català. Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, 28(2015), 55–94. Casesnoves, Raquel/Mas, Josep-Àngel (2017). Ideology and language choice: Catalan-speaking university students. Sociolinguistic Studies, 11(1): 107–129. Casesnoves, Raquel/Mas, Josep-Àngel/Tudela, Anna (2018). Primary and secondary factors in language maintenance in a medium-sized community language: Catalan in Spain. International Journal of Bilingualism [https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367006917745697]. [acc. 20.12.2018] Casesnoves, Raquel/Mas, Josep-Àngel. L’atracció dels valencians cap al valencià: motius i abast del canvi de llengua en dos ciutats mitjanes. Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana. (in press). Castelló, Rafael (2008). Parlem valencià, però no som catalans. In: Àngels Massip (coord.): Llengua i identitat. Barcelona. Universitat de Barcelona.

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Castelló, Rafael (2013). La definició nacional de la realitat al País Valencià. In: V. Flor (ed.) Nació i identitats: pensar el País Valencià 45–71. Catarroja: Afers Clyne, Michael (ed.) (1992). Pluricentric Languages. Different Norms in Different Countries. Berlin/New York. Mouton de Gruyter. Delcourt, Christian/Muhr Rudolf (2001). Les Langue Pluricentriques. Varietés nationales des langues européennes à lintérieur et à l’extérieur de l’espace européen. Numbero thematique 79/2001 de Revue Belge de Philologie et Histoire. Fasc. 3: Langues et Litteratures Modernes. Delcourt, Christian/Muhr Rudolf (2001). Introduction/Einleitung zu „Les Langue Pluricentriques. Nr. 79/2001 de Revue Belge de Philologie et Histoire. Fasc. 3: Langues et Litteratures Modernes. 698–709. Edelmann, Gerhard (2015). Catalan as a pluricentric language. In: Muhr, R./Marley, D. (ed.), Pluricentric Languages: New Perspectives in Theory and Description 143–156. Germany: Peter Lang Giles, Howard and Johnson, Peter (1981). The role of speech in ethnic group behaviour. In Turner, J. C./Giles, H. (eds.), Intergroup Behavior 199–243. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kloss, Heinz (1967). Abstand languages and Ausbau languages. Anthropological Linguistics, 9, 29–41. Marí, Isidor (2011). De la normalització a la sostenibilitat: els límits de la planificació de l’estatus. Treballs de sociolingüística catalana, 21, 83–94. Mas, Antoni (2018). El valencià segons l’enquesta del SIES de 2015. Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana, 28, 127–145. Mas, Josep-Àngel (2012). Catalan as a pluricentric language: The Valencian case. In Muhr R. (ed.), Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture 283–300. Germany: Peter Lang. Muhr, Ronald. (2012). Linguistic dominance and non-dominance in pluricentric languages: A typology. In Muhr R. (ed.), Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture 283–300. Germany: Peter Lang Newman, Michael, Trenchs-Parera, Mireira and Ng, Shukhan. (2008). Normalizing bilingualism: The effects of the Catalonian linguistic normalization policy one generation after. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(3): 306–333. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008. 00369.x. O’Rourke, Bernadette, Ramallo, Fernando (2018). Identities and new speakers of minority languages: a focus on Galician. In: Smith-Christmas C., Ó Murchadha N., Hornsby M., Moriarty M. (eds.) New Speakers of Minority Languages. 91–109. London: Palgrave Macmillan, . Pradilla, Miquel, Àngel (2004). El laberint valencià. Apunts per a una sociolingüística del conflicte. Spain: Onada Edicions.

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Pradilla, Miquel Àngel/Sorolla, Natxo (2015). VIII Informe sobre la situació de la llengua catalana (2014). Spain: Observatori de la llengua catalana. Retrieved from; http://blogs.iec.cat/cruscat/wp-content/uploads/ sites/15/2011/11/Informe-2014.pdf. [acc. 20.01.2019] Pujolar, Joan; Gonzàlez, Isaac (2013). “Linguistic ‘mudes’ and the deethnicition of language choice in Catalonia”. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16(2), 138–152. Van Dijk, Teun. (1999). Ideología. Un enfoque multidisciplinario. Barcelona: Gedisa. Villaverde, Joam-Alert (2005). Introducció a la part monogràfica. Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana, 18, 19–28. Woolard, Kathryn A. (2009). Linguistic conciousness among adolescents in Catalonia: A case study from the Barcelona urban area in longitudinal perspective. Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 22, 125–149.

Gerhard Edelmann

Conflict between Valencian and Catalan: Is Valencian a language of its own or a variety of Catalan? Abstract: Catalan is a Romance language, which is spoken in Spain, Andorra, France and Italy by more than ten million people. In Spain, the language is co-official with Castilian in the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia, Balearic Islands, and Valencia. The commonly cited criteria for the differentiation between language and variety such as mutual intelligibility, structural distance and linguistic relationship, the concept of Ausbausprache and autonomy do not lead to a satisfactory result in the Valencian case. The introduction of the criteria language and identity as well as politics leads us to conclude that Valencian should be considered a variety of Catalan rather than a distinct language. The most important reason therefor can be found in the wording used by the prestigious Valencian Academy of the Language, in its Normative Dictionary, to define Catalan and Valencian.

1 Introduction Catalan (català) is a Romance language, which is spoken by 13,5 million people in four European countries (Institut Ramon Lull, 2018). In Spain, this language, together with Castilian, is considered as the official language of the three Autonomous Communities Catalonia, Valencia and Balearic Islands. However, in the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Community the language is called Valencian (valencià). In this article I  shall discuss the sociolinguistic status of Valencian, in particular, the disputed question whether it is a language of its own or a variety of Catalan. After in introduction into the linguistic situation I shall apply different sociolinguistic criteria that might enable us to find a satisfactory answer to this question.

2 The Catalan language and its varieties Catalan is spoken in four nations: Spain, Andorra, France and Italy. In Spain, Catalan – together with Castilian – is the co-official language in the Autonomous Communities Catalonia (Catalunya), Valencian Community (Comunitat Valenciana) and Balearic Islands (Illes Balears) and in parts of the Autonomous Communities of Aragon and Murcia. The language is also spoken in Andorra,

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Map 1:  Catalan speaking countries and regions (Països Catalans)

France (Roussillon) and in L’Alguer (Alghero), a city in the Province of Sassari, in the North West of Sardinia (Edelmann, 2015:157–158). There are more than 13,5 million speakers of Catalan. Catalan is split in two major varieties: Eastern Catalan (català oriental), and Western Catalan (català occidental). The main difference lies in the treatment of the unstressed vowels a/e and o/u of Vulgar Latin: they are neutralized in Eastern Catalan, whereas they remain distinct in Western Catalan. So, cançó (song) is pronounced c[a]‌nçó in Western Catalan and c[ə]nçó in Eastern Catalan. The verb posar (to put) becomes p[o]sá in Western and p[u]sá in Eastern Catalan (Feldhausen, 2010:5). There are other differences regarding morphology, syntax and lexic (Veny, 1987:19). Bosong (2008:106) stresses that the differences between the varieties are not very significant, Catalan being one of the most uniform languages of Romance-speaking Europe. Map 1 shows the distribution of the varieties (Feldhausen, 2010:6): The regions where Catalan is spoken are in dark grey. Western Catalan is to the left of the bold black line; Eastern Catalan to its right. The italic black lines indicate the Central Catalan region. Western Catalan comprises the two varieties of North-Western Catalan and Valencian, whereas the Eastern block has four varieties:  Central Catalan, Balearic, Rossellonese, and Alguerese. Each variety can be further subdivided into several subvarieties (Veny, 1987:23).

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The status of Catalan is different in the regions where it is spoken: In Andorra Catalan is the sole official language of the state, in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands it is co-official with Castilian, whereas in France and Italy, Catalan has the status of a minority language. The Catalan language has its origin in the Eastern part of the Pyrenees, in the so-called Marca Hispanica. During the Reconquista, the Crown of Aragon extended its territories conquering more land in the South. In the middle of the 13th century, the land of the Crown of Aragon, where Catalan was the official language, included Aragon proper, Catalonia, Valencia, Roussillon and the Balearic Islands. Until the 16th century Sardinia and Naples with Sicily came under the influence of the Crown of Aragon (Bosong: 2008:100 f.). In the Middle Ages Catalan was an important language of culture, which flourished in the areas of government and literature. I should like to mention the mystic Ramon Llull and the writers Ausiàs Marc and Joan Matorell, the latter author of Tirant lo Blanc (Bosong, 2008:100). With the unification of the crowns of Castile and Aragon to the Kingdom of Spain following the marriage of Isabella of Castile with Ferdinand of Aragon and the shift to the Atlantic after the discovery of America a period of political and cultural decadence began. The Roussillon came to France in 1659, and in the 18th century after the War for the Succession to the crown of Spain (1704 –1714), Catalan lost its role as an official language. However, the spoken language remained strong (Bosong, 2008: 101). Only in the period of Romanticism the Catalan language experienced a Renaissance (Renaixença). In the first decades of the 20th century the Catalan standard language was normalized. The task was carried out mainly by Pompeu Fabra between 1913 and 1930 (spelling rules, grammar, dictionaries), with which Catalan was given a unified and modern standard (Bosong, 2008:101). Between 1939 and 1975, during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the Catalan language was persecuted. The recognition of the language by the Constitution of 1978 after the dictator’s death in 1975 was the starting point for the process of normalization.

3 Valencian 1 History As mentioned before, during the Reconquista the Crown of Aragon extended its territories towards the South of the Peninsula. It was King Jaume I el Conqueridor (James I the Conqueror) who, from 1233 to 1245, conquered the territories which became the Regne de València (Kingdom of Valencia). Before the conquest,

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Sharq al-Andalus, where the Christian Kingdom of Valencia will be established, was populated only by an Arabic-speaking population, since Mozarabs, i.e. Christians living under Moorish rule, and Muslims, had disappeared during the previous century. In the following centuries there was immigration mainly from Catalonia and Aragon but also at much lesser extent from Castile and from the Balearic Islands (Ferrando/Nicolás, 2011). These historic factors created the “linguistic and cultural personality” (Veny, 1987:151) of the Kingdom of Valencia. Yet in the Middle Ages the expression “llengua valenciana” (Valencian language) was used to refer to the name given to the language spoken in Valencia. Joan Veny (1987:151), one of the most renowned Catalan linguists and dialectologists, characterizes the Catalan language of Valencia as “a language transplanted from Catalonia to a Mozarabic substratum in a territory where Muslims and Christians lived together and where the different immigration waves from Mallorca, Aragon and Castile led to a special linguistic physiognomy”.

2 Specific features Valencian has some specific features in vocalism and consonantism which it shares partly with the other Western Catalan varieties. The most striking differences from other varieties can be found in morphosyntax and morphology. So, for example, in Valencian like in Castilian, the pronouns have three categories of localization (este, eixe, aquell), the numeral dos (two) is used for masculine and feminine nouns etc. Important differences in verbal morphology are the verbal ending of the first person of present indicative in -e, the imperfect endings in  –ara, -era, -ira (cantara, volguera, sentira) and the second person of the present indicative of the verb ésser (to be) being eres as opposed to ets (Veny,1987:160–166). Lexically, it is interesting to observe that in some cases the etymology is in accordance with Castilian. So, the present-day Valencian equivalents of the Catalan word arribar (to come, to arrive), rentar (to wash), noi (boy) and aviat (soon) are aplegar (cfr. Spanish llegar), llavar (cfr. Spanish lavar), xic (cfr. Spanish chico) and prompte (cfr. Spanish pronto) (Veny,1987:166).

3 Linguistic competence Due to the Mediaeval Aragonese colonization and to the contemporary agregation of some Castilian lands some parts of Valencia are Castilian-speaking (Ferrando/Nicolás 2011). That is why the “Fifth Report on compliance in Spain with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of

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Europe” [“Quinto Informe sobre el cumplimiento en España de la Carta Europea de las Lenguas regionales o minoritarias, del Consejo de Europa”] (2017) makes a distinction between Valencian-speaking zones (ZV) and Castilian-speaking zones (ZC). According to the results of the most recent survey (Quinto informe, 2017:120– 122), 93.8 % (96.3 % in ZV and 76.7 % in ZC) understand Valencian “a little or rather well”; 72.4 % (77.6 % in ZV and 37.3 % in ZC) understand it “rather well or perfectly”. Most inhabitants of the Autonomous Community of Valencia can speak Valencian (78.2 %; 83.2 % in ZV and 45.2 % in ZC). As to reading and writing competence, 79.9 % (83.8 % in ZV) can read Valencian and 34.7 % of the interviewed persons indicated to be able to write it “rather well or perfectly”, whereas 40.3 % cannot write Valencian “at all”.

4 Codification and normalization In the Catalan-speaking territories, there are two codification and normalizing centers:  The Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) in Catalonia and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL) in Valencia.

Catalonia: Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) The Statutes of the IEC (Estatuts de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans) define its purpose, among other matters, as to establish the norms of the language and to take care that the normalization process be coherent in the whole linguistic territory (“establir-ne la normativa i vetllar perquè el procés de normalització d’aquesta llengua sigui coherent arreu del seu àmbit linguistic”). The IEC claims to be competent for all the territories of Catalan language and culture. To fulfill its purpose in the field of codification, the IEC has published a significant number of documents. First, it has edited the Catalan Ortography (1917) and the Catalan Grammar (Gramática Catalana), in the General Introduction of which it is stressed again that the IEC is competent for all the territories where Catalan is spoken. Then it has published the Dictionary of Catalan (Diccionari general de la llengua catalana). Antoni Maria Alcover and Francecs de B.  Moll published the Diccionari català valencià balear, which is a comprehensive work of the language spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, the Roussillon. Andorra, Aragon (Franja del Ponent) and in the Sardinian city of l’Alguer, that means, in all Catalan-speaking territories. There is a large number of other publications of the IEC, out of which I should like to mention the following: 1. “Diccionari del català contemporani”,

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[Dictionary of contemporary Catalan], 2.  “Diccionari descriptiu de la llengua catalana” (DDLC) [Descriptive Dictionary of the Catalan Language], 3. “Corpus textual informatitzat de la llengua catalana” (CTILC) [Computerized text Corupus of the Catalan Language], 4. “Vocabulari de la llengua catalana medieval and the Terminology Portal” [Vocabulary of medieval Catalan Language], and 5.  the “Portal CiT, Terminologia de Ciències i Tecnologia” [Teminology portal of Science and Technology) (Edelmann, 2015:160–161).

Valencia: The Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL) The Valencian Community with the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL) has its own codification and normalization Institute. In its Normative Valencian Grammar, the AVL recognizes that Valencian is part of the language spoken in the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, in Andorra and in the other territories of the historic Crown of Aragón; the different varieties pertaining to the same language or linguistic system. Valencian has the same hierarchy and dignity (dignitat) as the other varieties. The AVL pretends to preserve the particularities of the Valencian language. That is why the AVL gives preference to the genuine Valencian linguistic forms trying to maintain at the same time the cohesion of the language. The AVL has equally published other normative works such as the Basic Valencian Grammar (GVB), the Diccionari ortogràfic i de pronunciació del valencià (DOPV) and the Estàndard oral del valencià (Edelmann, 2015:161).

4 Language vs. variety Language and variety are ambiguous terms. To answer the question whether Valencian is a language of its own or whether it should rather be considered as a variety of Catalan, I shall discuss the criteria which have been established to make a distinction between the two concepts.

1 Mutual intelligibility Mutual intelligibility is a commonly cited criterion used to determine if two varieties are dialects of the same language or distinct languages: If speakers can understand each other, they are speaking dialects of the same language, if they cannot, they are speaking different languages (Wardhaugh/Fuller, 2015:29). If we applied this criterion to Valencian, the answer would be easy. We pointed out that the differences between the varieties of Catalan are not very significant, because Catalan is one of the most uniform languages of Romance-speaking

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Europe. As Valencian and the other varieties of Catalan are mutually intelligible, Valencian should be a variety and not a language. However, there are several problems with this criterion: First, mutual intelligibility is not an objectively determined fact (Wardhaugh/ Fuller, 2015:29). Furthermore, in a language where a dialect continuum exists some speakers of this language will understand another language and others not. Wardhaugh/Fuller (2015:30) mention the example of some varieties of German whose speakers can understand Dutch. The authors (Wardhaugh/Fuller, 2015:29) point out that there are many examples of named, distinct languages that are mutually intelligible such as Hindi and Urdu or Norwegian and Swedish, which are mutually intelligible, but, for political or socio-political reasons, are considered as languages. On the other hand, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are recognized as different languages, yet it is common for speakers of these languages to each speak their own language to each other and still be able to communicate (Wardhaugh/Fuller, 2015:31). Finally, there are sometimes unintelligible varieties which, however, are identified by their speakers as being the same language (e.g. German dialects).

2 Structural distance and linguistic relationship Berruto (2004:191) discusses the concept of linguistic relationship pointing out that two linguistic varieties, which do not belong to a language family cannot be varieties of one and the same language. He goes on discussing the concept of structural distance and draws the conclusion that there are no sufficient criteria to measure the structural distance between two languages or varieties. For our purpose, however, these criteria are of little relevance, because there is no doubt that Catalan and Valencian belong to the same language family and are linguistically very close.

3 Ausbausprache and autonomy In his intent to distinguish a language from a simple variety Berruto proposes to include the citeria of Ausbau and autonomy vs. heteronomy. A language is considered as Ausbausprache (language by development) if it can fulfil all communicative necessities of a social (national) community including the technological and scientific necessities (2004:192). A variety x is heteronomous if it develops towards another, superior variety y and if the verbal utterances of the speakers of x are corrected according to the norms of y. According to the author, this criterium explains why Spanish and Italian are languages and the Italian dialects are only varieties of Italian. Berruto (2004:192) states that the criteria “structural

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distance and intelligibility, linguistic relationship, Ausbau and autonomy” should enable us to resolve any case of doubt of the classification into language or variety. He tries to illustrate this by the example of Slovak and Czech, stating that the structural distance between these two languages, which are linguistically related, is very small. However, both are “Ausbausprachen” and autonomous in the above-mentioned sense and can therefore be considered as languages. Berutto acknowledges that there are cases such as Urdu and Hindi or Serbian and Croatian where for political, ideological or religious reasons these criteria are not sufficient to resolve the problem of classification (Berutto, 2004:192). In my opinion, also the Valencian case cannot be resolved by means of the mentioned criteria. That is why I propose to introduce the criteria of identity and politics.

5 Language and identity Wardhaugh/Fuller (2015:32) point out that the defining factor in determining whether two varieties are considered distinct languages or dialects of the same language is their socio-political identity, rather than their linguistic similarity or difference. Since the 19th  century, language has played an important part in the construction of national or ethnic identities. The French Revolution created the idea of the centralized state whose citizens are similar in language and culture whereas the German Romanticism understood a shared language as their identifying mark of a nation. This argument was used in modern times as the hallmark of linguistic movements as those in Corsica, Brittany and Quebec (Heller, 2005:1582). Edelmann (2018:259–260) showed how Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish), originally a Moselle Franconian variety of German, in and after World War II became a symbol for the resistance against the German occupation and for the independence of Luxembourg. Lëtzebuergesch is described as the language of closeness, which allows people to express emotions, feelings, and worries and gives them strength. The identity of Luxembourgers is linked to the upgrading of Lëtzebuergesch to the status of the national language of the Grand Duchy within the trilingualism of the country. Also, in the case of Valencian the relationship between language and identity plays an important role. However, the situation is difficult because there are three possible identities:  A Valencian, a Catalan and a Spanish identity. Mas (2012) described four models to characterize the relationship between language and identity in the case of Valencian.

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There are two models, which I would call the extremist models: The secessionist model considers Valencian as a language different from Catalan and remains completely outside the codification of the IEC, whereas the uniformist model, which is diametrically opposed, denies the particularities of Valencian and uses the Catalan forms (Mas, 2012:293). However, these two models have, in the words of Mas (2012:294) a merely testimonial presence in the Valencian educational and cultural circles. The models that are representative for today’s Valencian society are the particularistic and the convergent models, which differ insofar as the particularistic model prefers Valencian forms whenever possible, and the convergent model is rather orientated towards the Catalan standard (Mas, 2012:293). Without going into details concerning these models, Mas’ analysis shows clearly that there is a wide range of ways to understand the Valencian social identity without a consensus on a common identity (Mas, 2012:291). The author (Mas, 2012:296) speaks about “a de facto recognition of official pluricentrism”. In practical terms, a good example of this situation is the weekly news magazine (Revista) El Temps, which was founded 30  years ago and is published in Valencia and Barcelona in Catalan. The magazine considers itself as a referent for the Catalan-speaking countries (El Temps Num. 1562, 20 de Maig del 2014). The magazine respects the linguistic plurality of Catalan; so, depending on the authors, the articles are written according to the norms of the respective varieties.

6 Politics 1 The concept of language The second additional criterion to be considered is the role of politics. As mentioned before, in the three Autonomous Communities of Catalonia, Valencia and Balearic Islands, the own language is, besides Castilian, co-official. However, whereas in the Catalonian and the Balearic Statutes of Autonomy, this language (llengua pròpia, own language) is called Catalan, in the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Community the name Catalan is not mentioned. Art. 6. Numbers 2 and 8 of the Statute: 1.  La llengua pròpia de la Comunitat Valenciana és el valencià. [The language of the Valencian Community is Valencian.]

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8.  L’Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua és la institució normativa de l’idioma valencià. [L’Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua is the normative institution of the Valencian language.]

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The own language (llengua pròpia) of this Autonomous Community is called Valencian (valencià), which, as in Catalonia, together with Castilian, is the official language. Everybody has the right to know and to use these two languages. The Valencian Academy of the Language (Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua) is defined as the normative institution of Valencian (Edelmann, 2015:159), which is explicitly called “language” (idioma). The Preamble of the Statute refers to the historical Regne de València (Kingdom of Valencia) and to the Poble Valencià (Valencian people) and nacionalitat (nationality) according to Art. 2 of the Spanish Constitution. Does the term “language” refer to language distinct from variety? As mentioned before, the linguist Joan Veny uses the term Valencian language as the name of one of the varieties (dialects) of Catalan. The Valencian writer Vicent Lluis Simó i Santonja (2013:393–395) opposed the thesis of Valencian being a Catalan variety transplanted from Catalonia to Valencia and used historic arguments, mainly the popular name of Valencian, to defend the independence of a Valencian language. According to him, Valencian (of course not with this name) existed even before the Reconquista. Mas (2010) points out that the controversies regarding the name of the language are closely linked to the language models, which are briefly described in the chapter on language and identity. The controversies became especially visible when Catalan was employed within the context of the European Union, for example, in connection with the translation of the 2004 draft of the European Constitution. As we know, the Valencian Academy of the Language, whose nature, structure and functions are regulated by the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Community, is the official standardisation body for the Valencian language. It is interesting to see how the Diccionari normatiu valencià (2014) defines the terms valencià and català: valencià -ana [Valencian] Llengua romànica parlada a la Comunitat Valenciana, així com a Catalunya, les Illes Balears, el departament francés dels Pirineus Orientals, el Principat d’Andorra, la franja oriental d’Aragó i la ciutat sarda de l’Alguer, llocs on rep el nom de català. [Romance language spoken in the Valencian Community as well as in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France, the Principality of Andorra, the eastern strip of Aragon and the Sardinian town of Alghero; in these places it receives the name of Catalan.] Varietat d’esta llengua parlada a la Comunitat Valenciana. Valencià septentrional, valencià central, valencià meridional. [Variety of this language spoken in the Valencian Community. Northern Valencian, Central Valencian, Southern Valencian.] català -ana [Catalan]

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Llengua romànica parlada a Catalunya, així com a les Illes Balears, el departament francés dels Pirineus Orientals, el Principat d’Andorra, la franja oriental d’Aragó, la ciutat sarda de l’Alguer i la Comunitat Valenciana, on rep el nom de valencià. [Romance language spoken in Catalonia as well as in the Balearic Islands, the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France, the Principality of Andorra, the eastern strip of Aragon, the Sardinian town of Alghero and in the Valencian Community, where it receives the name of Valencian.]

According to these definitions, Valencian is the language spoken in the Community of Valencia and in the other Catalan-speaking territories, where it is called Catalan and Catalan is the language spoken in these territories. In the Autonomous Community of Valencia, it is called Valencian. As mentioned before, the name “llengua valenciana” (Valencian) was already used in the Middle Ages. The verdict of the official standardization body could not be clearer and rejects unambiguously the idea of Valencian being an own language different from Catalan. The Spanish central State does not adopt a clear position either in this matter. The official bodies such as Ministries make their information available in Castilian, English and the other co-official and regional languages of the State. For example, on the website of the Ministry of Justice (Ministerio de Justicia, 2018) the user can choose between Castilian, Catalan, Euskera, Galician, Valencian and English. On other websites, there is only one option of Catalan and/or Catalan. The users who visit the website of the Spanish Ministry of Finance (Ministerio de Hacienda, 2018) have the options Bienvenido, Benvinguts, Benvidos, Ongi Etorri and Welcome (Welcome in Castilian, Catalan/Valencian, Galician, Euskera and English). The users choosing Benvinguts are provided with texts in just one language. In view of this fact, Joan Vall Costa, a Catalan lawyer, requested the Consejo de Lenguas Oficiales en la Administración del Estado (Official Languages Council), an official body dedicated to analyzing, promoting and coordinating Central Government policies in relation to the use of official languages in the Autonomous Regions. He asked to take measures to offer in all cases only the option Catalan/Valencian or Valencian/Catalan if the Government believed that the denominations Catalan and Valencian refer to the same language. However, should the Government wish to stress the dialectal differences of the Catalan/ Valencian language, it should indicate the reasons why it does not do the same in the case of other languages of the State. As the Council did not answer, the lawyer filed a lawsuit before the Tribunal de Justicia Superior de Madrid, which in its decision Number 716 sentenced that the Council is obliged to take a decision.

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The result that Valencian is not an independent language distinct from Catalan is in line with the conclusion expressed in my article “Catalan as a pluricentric language” (Edelmann, 2015:166), that Catalan is a true pluricentric language according to the criteria developed by Clyne and Muhr. I would like to add that in the similar case of Romanian-Moldavian, Muhr (2012:31) pointed out that, irrespective of the naming and the undecided official status, Romanian and Moldavian (with some reservations) can be considered as varieties of a pluricentric language.

7 Summary Valencian has some specific features in vocalism, consonantism, morphosyntax and morphology, but speakers of Valencian can easily communicate with speakers of other Catalan varieties. The language has an own normalization and standardization body, the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL) in Valencia. As to the criteria applied to clarify whether Valencian can be considered a distinct language or a variety of Catalan, mutual intelligibility, structural distance and linguistic relationship, Ausbausprache and autonomy do not produce satisfactory results. The relationship between language and social (national) identity is an important criterion to establish a distinction between language and variety. The Valencian case, however, shows us that there is a wide range of ways to understand the Valencian social identity without a consensus on a common identity. In the field of politics, the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Community does not mention the denomination and refers to Valencian as to a language. But the Valencian Academy of the Language, in its definitions of the entries valencià and català states unambiguously that Catalan and Valencian are the same language. This result is in line with the opinion that Catalan is a pluricentric language with Valencian being one of the varieties of Catalan.

References Berruto, Gaetano (2004): Linguistic variety – language (whole language, historical language). In: Ammon, Ulrich, Dittmar, Norbert, Mattheier, Klaus J., Trudgill, Peter, Sociolinguistics, An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Volume 1, 118–195. Bosong, Georg (2008): Die romanischen Sprachen. Eine vergleichende Einführung. Helmut Buske Verlag GmbH. Hamburg. Diccionari normatiu valencià (2018): http://www.avl.gva.es/lexicval/[01.11.2018].

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Edelmann, Gerhard (2015): Catalan as a pluricentric language. In: Muhr, Rudolf, Dawn Marley (eds.), Pluricentric Languages: New Perspectives in Theory and Description. Peter Lang GmbH. Frankfurt am Main, 155–168. Edelmann, Gerhard, (2018): Trilingualism in Luxembourg: The role of Letzebuergisch. upgrading a regional variety to a national language. In: Muhr, Rudolf, Meisnitzer, Benjamin (eds.), Pluricentric Languages and NonDominant Varieties Worldwide: New pluricentric languages – old problems. Peter Lang GmbH. Frankfurt am Main, 253–264. El Temps, Weekly News Magazine, Edicions del País Valencià. València https:// www.eltemps.cat/ [01.11.2018]. Estatut d’Autonomia de València (2006): (Llei Orgànica 1/2006, de 10 d’abril, de Reforma de la Llei Orgànica 5/1982, d’1 de juliol, d’Estatut d’Autonomia de la Comunitat Valenciana). http://www.congreso.es/constitucion/ficheros/ estatutos/e_79_vale.pdf [01.11.2018]. Feldhausen, Ingo (2010): Sentential form and prosodic structure of Catalan. Benjamins. Amsterdam. Ferrando, A./Nicolás, M. (2011): Història de la llengua catalana. Barcelona. UOC. Heller, Monica (2005): Language and Identity. In: Ammon, Ulrich, Dittmar, Norbert, Mattheier, Klaus J., Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Sociolinguistics, An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Volume 2, 1582–1586. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Institut Ramon Lull (2018): https://www.llull.cat/espanyol/cultura/llengua_ catala.cfm [21.12.2018] Mas, Josep-Àngel (2010): Els noms de la llengua i els models lingüístics del català a Europa. De la traducció de la Constitució europea (2004) a les eleccions del 2009. In: Revista de Llengua i Dret, núm54, December 2010, 79–100. Mas, Josep-Àngel (2012): Catalan as a pluricentric language: the Valencian case. In: Muhr, Rudolf (ed.), Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. Peter Lang Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 263–300. Ministerio de Hacienda (2018): Spanish Ministry of Finance. http://www. hacienda.gob.es/ca-ES/Paginas/Home.aspx [01.11.2018]. Ministerio de Justicia (2018): Spanish Ministry of Justice. https://sede.mjusticia. gob.es/cs/Satellite/Sede/es/inicio [01.11.2018]. Muhr, Rudolf (2012): Linguistic dominance and non-dominance in pluricentric languages. A typology. In: Muhr, Rudolf (ed.), Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. Peter Lang. Frankfurt am Main, 23–48.

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Quinto informe (2017): Quinto Informe Sobre El Cumplimiento En España De La Carta Europea De Las Lenguas Regionales O Minoritarias, Del Consejo De Europa 2014 – 2016, Ministerio De La Presidencia Y Para Las Administraciones Territoriales. https://rm.coe.int/spainpr5-esdocx/1680788433 [01.11.2018]. Sentencia (2017): Decision number 716 Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid Sala de lo Contencioso-Administrativo Sección Sexta, P.O nº 161/2016, https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/imatges.vilaweb.cat/nacional/ wp-content/uploads/2017/01/37-sente--ncia-TSJM.pdf [01.11.2018]. Simó Santonja, Vicente L. (2013): valenciano o catalán? 2ª edición, Real Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana. Veny, Joan (1987): Els parlars catalans: síntesi de dialectologia. Moll. Palma de Mallorca. Wardhaugh, Ronald, Fuller, Janet M. (2015): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.

Aitor Carrera

Pluricentrism and unity: visions and management of dialectal variation in the process of codification and standardisation of Occitan Abstract: This article briefly describes the process of codification and standardisation of Occitan, paying special attention to the treatments that, over the past century and a half, have been made of their geographical diversity with the aim of obtaining a common supra-dialectal variety. In a situation of linguistic subordination to – above all – French, the proposals have been very different according to the moment and have evolved over time. Nineteenth-century Félibrige, which came to life in Provence with an eminently phonetic and subordinate writing system, proposes a unitary literary language based on the variety of Frederic Mistral. However, later Occitanism applies a writing reform that aims to be diasystematic. In the context of Occitanism there is also the need for both a general standard Occitan and convergent regional standards for the different areas of the linguistic area.

1 The Occitan language: contextualisation The Occitan speech community is the largest linguistic minority of the French State from the territorial point of view and, probably even today, that of the number of speakers. The linguistic area of Occitan takes in most of the southern third of the Hexagon, and includes important cities such as Bordeaux, Pau, Toulouse, Montpellier, Béziers, Marseille, Nice, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence and Limoges. Occitan is a language historically used in thirty-nine French departments. In twenty-six of them, it is the exclusive traditional language, in three more it is the secular variety of approximately half of the territory and in a further six, of a smaller part of the area1. Outside the territory of the French State, Occitan is also the language of the Val d’Aran (where it has been official since 1990, sixteen years before becoming official in the whole of the Principality

1 These include the department of the Eastern Pyrenees (Pyrénées-Orientales), which predominantly pertains to the Catalan linguistic area. We owe the most recent, detailed and reliable contribution on the limits of the Occitan area to Sumien (2006:127–139), who reviews previous information, ranging from the work of Tourtoulon and Bringuier (1876) to Ronjat (1980) or Fontan (1997), among others.

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of Catalonia, at least on paper) and a series of alpine valleys that belong to the Italian Republic, aligned along the border with the Hexagon, as well as the town of La Gàrdia, in the province of Cosenza2. The Occitan language area has never formed a political unit, and much of this territory has been successively annexed to the kingdom or the republic of France in a lengthy process that extends from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. As we know, the language policy of the Hexagon, especially since the Revolution of 1789, has been directed towards spreading the State language to the detriment of other territorial languages, perceived as patois, and has thus been implemented – in the words of the famous Abbé Grégoire – to “consacrer au plutôt dans une République une et indivisible l’usage unique et invariable de la langue de la liberté” (apud Brun 1973:5)3. The results of this policy of imposing French, which may be catalogued as crude and violent in recent historical periods4, were especially visible in the 20th century. While in 1930, Ronjat (1980:26) estimated that there were about ten million speakers of Occitan, nowadays we do not even know the approximate number, since not only has the Occitan language no official status in France, but the State has no interest in knowing precisely the number of speakers of the so-called regional languages. From the extrapolation of local or regional surveys to the linguistic area as a whole, it has been said that Occitan may have anything from three million speakers (most of whom, in any case, would be elderly and live mainly in rural areas) down to just over half a million, and the most apocalyptic estimates place the Occitan community at about one hundred thousand speakers5. In spite of this dramatic current situation, it is known that Occitan had a medieval prestige that exceeded the range of its linguistic area, and also that in many aspects it was much more precocious than the language that, over the

2 As regards the enclaves of other languages within the Occitan linguistic area (Ligurian in Monaco or French in the Petite Gavacherie, near Bordeaux), as well as on the Occitan enclaves that existed until relatively recently in other parts of the world, in addition to some of the works we have mentioned, reference may be made to Carrera’s summary (2011:17–19). 3 “To consecrate the unique and invariable use of the language of freedom in a unitary and indivisible Republic as soon as possible”. 4 See our summary of Carrera (2011:19–31). 5 On these estimates, see all the data collected in Carrera (2011:28–31), as well as all the considerations added in Carrera (2013:15–17). Certainly, there are solid reasons for not believing the most pessimistic figures, although the passage of time tends to bring us closer to them.

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centuries, would settle in most of its territory in an attempt to replace it, to the point that in the Middle Ages we can already speak of Occitan forms intended for broad communication in the geographical axis. Through the texts, it may be said that “le rôle de parler directeur de l’occitan central dans les pays d’oc a précédé d’assez loin celui du francien pour les pays d’oïl”6 (Bèc 1992:33), and the presence can even be perceived of a type of literary koiné – as controversial as the term may seem – suitable for a territory that Bèc (1992:31) defines as an “ensemble socio-culturel (avec des variantes régionales) d’une incontestable maturité”7. But what is the current situation of the codification of Occitan so many centuries later? Where are the proposals for standardising the Occitan language? Occitan is usually divided into six dialectal varieties. On the one hand, three southern dialects: Gascon to the east (also used in the Val d’Aran), Provençal to the west and Languedocian in the centre. On the other, three northern dialects: from west to east, Limousin, Auvergnat and Vivaro-Alpine (which is also used in the Italian valleys of Piedmont). In a quite extensive linguistic area, in which some have seen a priori or intentionally a great dialectal atomisation, how has the question of having reference varieties been addressed? What kind of relationship do these vocationals standards or common varieties have had, or still have, with dialects? Next, we propose to briefly re-launch this question on a journey that stretches from the nineteenth-century movement to recover the language (Félibrige, with an eminently literary axis) to the early decades of the 21st century.

2 The forerunners: Félibrige; Perbòsc and Estieu Following the centuries of decadence8, the nineteenth century saw a proposal of graphisation of Occitan and at the same time the creation of a unitarist type of literary language within the framework of Félibrige, a literary renaissance movement born in Provence but subsequently implanted throughout Occitania. Converted into an “organisation minutieusement réglée”9 (Lafont 1980:33) under the aura of the poet Frederic Mistral, who also wrote a great lexicographic

6 “Central Occitan’s role as prevailing language in the Oc countries has greatly preceded that of Francien in the Oïl countries”. 7 “[A]‌sociocultural ensemble (with regional variants) of indisputable maturity”. 8 The edict of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539, which imposed French as an administrative language, is normally cited as the relevant historical milestone that would lead to only a few, very specific Occitan territories maintaining an uninterrupted and non-diglossic use of the Occitan language. However, see Carrera (2011:22) on this question. 9 “[A] meticulously regulated organization”.

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work, „Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige“, and who later became a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for works such as his renowned „Mirèio“, Félibrige will expand an eminently phonetic writing system that reproduces the language allophonically and uses conventions of the dominant language, the most visible of which is the digraph ou to represent [u]‌or gn to transcribe the palatal nasal. This writing system was created by Josèp Romanilha and described in the „Dissertation sur l’ortographe provençale“ included in Romanilha (1853). Although we know that Mistral was not an enthusiast of this writing system – something that some unsuccessfully tried to deny10  – it was he who contributed to expanding it by means of his works. While the Félibrige spelling already causes an “esmicolament dialectal” – a ‘dialectal fragmentation’ – of the language (Ventura 1991:127) insofar as the phonetic differences are reflected in the writing (a form like femma ‘woman’, for which today we accept the variants hemna and frema11, has fourteen different representations in Mistral 1979, I:1115)12, at the same time Félibrige proposes a unitarian model of literary language based on the Rhodanian Provençal of Mistral himself, destined to become the Dante Alighieri of Occitania, as the capolier – the ‘chief ’ – Devoluy has said (Abrate 2001:23). Mistral, at most, only relinquished certain features of his speech that seemed excessive to him, perhaps because, to begin with, they already represented a

10 For example, see Gourgaud (1998:13). But to confirm Mistral’s reservations regarding Romanilha’s spelling, one only needs to read some epistolary comments from the great Provençal poet, most of which have been reproduced in works such as Gourdon (1999), Barta (1970), Lafont (1974, 1980), Abrate (2001) or even in teaching manuals such as Nouvel (1975). In the post-Mistral Félibrige world, the “commodités pratiques d’une graphie à la française” (“practical comforts of a Frenchified spelling”; Rivière 1980:20) are in fact accepted without problems. While Romanilha defended “la supression de bien des lettres parasites” in his dissertation (that is, “the abolition of a large number of parasitic letters”), in 1852 Mistral was asking “quelle est la langue qui n’a ni singulier ni pluriel et qui peut établir pareils équivoques” (“what language has neither singular nor plural and can present confusions in similar words?”), referring to ama “to love”, ama “loved” and ama “you (pl.) love”, since his dialect not only mutes -r in the infinitives (as almost all the Occitan area) but also other final consonants. In current spelling, these forms are respectively amar, amat and amatz. 11 See Sumien (2006:366). 12 In other words: femo, fumo, fremo, frumo, femno, feno, feino, fenno, féuno, hemo, hemno, henno, hemne, fino. In 1853 Mistral himself said: “il n’y aura bientôt plus moyen de s’entendre? Lou cor deviendra lou couer à Salon, lou couar à Apt, lou cur à Beaucaire, lou cour à Avignon”.

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barrier with the rest of the Provençal territory13. And some felibres who did not have the Provençal of the Rhône as their first dialect, mirrored in the prestige of the great poet, used it as a vehicle of expression (like Devoluy himself or Jules Ronjat)14. The Languedocians Perbòsc and Estieu rose against this attempt to Provençalise Occitania15. These claimed to be heirs of the Limousin Josèp Ros16 and defended a return to the medieval writing conventions: their objective was “adoptar la grafia classica dels trobadors en la simplificant”17 (Perbòsc 1976:45). They replaced ou with o, or they retrieved the digraph -tz (cantatz, ‘you [pl.] sing’), but at the same time they made some not very diasystemic choices, such as the use of -b- for Latin -B- and -V- (remember that northern Occitan and Provençal know -[v]-), which means that there is a need to speak of a “codificació 13 See Bèc’s very clear summary (1977:121). A good example of this is precisely the form femna. In his dictionary Mistral places the Rhodanian fumo (with the “rh.” mark) in second place, after femo. 14 However, while outside the area that includes “Aurenja, Apte i Arle [...] leis escrivans gardèron totjorn una libertat grafica mai ò mens granda” (between “Orange, Apt and Arles [...] writers always maintained more or less important graphic freedom”; Lafont 1972:18), the unitarian proposal of Félibrige collided with the dialectal reality of the felibres themselves of other latitudes. In Gascony, for example, Romanilha’s spelling was not only significantly modified by the Gaston Febus School with the “désir d’être le plus clair possible” (the “desire to be as clear as possible”; Palay 1980:X), but Rhodanian Provençal was replaced by Bearnese. Miquèu Camelat, author of “Beline”, considered to be the “Mireille bigourdane” (Lafont and Anatole 1970:689), abandoned his dialect to write in Bearnese, specifically in “lou parlar qu’es lo mai en évidenci, valent-à-dire lou de Pau” (“the most outstanding speech, in other words, the one of Pau”; apud Abrate 2001:27). Camelat explained this in a letter to the newspaper “Prouvènço!”, written precisely in the Provençal of Mistral. 15 Perbòsc (1976:51) states: “volèm caminar, e non pas nos assietar a l’ombra de l’orme ont Devoluy e Ronjat de bada esperarán [sic] que l’Occitania [sic] se provençalize” (“we want to walk, not to sit in the shadow of the elm where Devoluy and Ronjat are waiting in vain for Occitania to be Provençalised”). 16 Ros, majoral of Félibrige and founder of “Lemouzi” magazine, of whom Perbòsc (1976:48) says that he is the “precursor de la vertadièra Renaissença occitana” (“the precursor of the true Occitan Renaissance”), proposed recovering “[l]’ortographe, dite des troubours, délaissée depuis le XIVe siècle par la faute des temps et des hommes” (“[the] spelling of the troubadours, abandoned since the 14th century because of time and men”; Roux 2010:2). He retrieved the unstressed final -a (instead of -o) or -r in infinitives, and never ceased to openly contest the Félibrige spelling: “Supprimons certaines lettres inutiles d’une langue, adieu cette langue-là” (“If we delete certain useless letters from a language, we can say goodbye to that language”; Roux 2010:12). 17 Thus, “to adopt the classic spelling of the troubadours by simplifying it”.

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del llenguadocià” (‘codification of Languedocian’; Kremnitz 1989:  168–169). Whatever the case, the reform of Perbòsc and Estieu, which must be situated in Toulouse between 1898 and 1904, is the foundation of the definitive reform of Loís Alibèrt and his grammar, published in 1935 with the support of Catalans (Alibèrt 1976). However, at this early stage, there is already a first prefiguration of a form of common language (“un poble pòt pas se contentar d’exprimar [sic] sa pensada en d’innombrables parlars”18; Perbòsc 1976:44), at least a unified literary language project (which must be “l’òbra comuna de totes los escrivans occitans”19; ibidem), but at the same time a symbol of identification of the whole community (“cal edificar la lenga nacionala d’Occitània”20; Perbòsc 1976:45). Although Alibèrt does not acknowledge it21, the truth is that “ses solutions prolongent directement celles d’Estieu et Perbosc” (Lafont 1974:204)22. As a model, Alibèrt took Pompeu Fabra’s reform for Catalan, improved in several aspects the spelling of Estieu and Perbòsc (for example, in the distinction of -b- and -v- or in the representation -s- of intervocalic -[z]-)23 and morphosyntactically systematised the Languedocian. But it must be admitted that he did not achieve the same results in the field of the lexical selection, since his Occitan-French posthumous dictionary, which appeared in 1966 (Alibèrt 1997), is only one step in that direction,

18 In other words, “a people cannot resign themselves to expressing their thoughts in countless tongues”. 19 “[T]he common work of the Occitan writers”. 20 “[We] must build the national language of Occitania. 21 “La lenga d’Oc modèrna presenta tres sistèmas de grafia: aquel de Mistral, codificat dins Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige, aquel qu’an emplegat Perbòsc e Estiu dins lors òbras e, per fin, aquel de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans, de Barcelona, expausat dins lo Diccionari Ortogràfic de Pompeu Fabra. Dins aquesta Gramatica, nos permetèm de preconizar un ensag de conciliacion” (“The modern Occitan language presents three writing systems: that of Mistral, codified in Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige, the one which Perbòsc and Estiu have used in their works and, finally, that of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, in Barcelona, set out in Pompeu Fabra’s Diccionari Ortogràfic. In this grammar we permit ourselves to propose an attempt at an intermediate position”; Alibèrt 1976:7). 22 Bèc (1977:135–136) directly refers to the “Ros-Perbosc-Alibèrt writing system”. Teulat (1985:15) has already stated that, if there is actually something of Romanilha’s spelling in Alibèrt, in any case it would be “la grafia de las diftongas [sic] e la règla estupida de l’accentuacion de las 3as personas del plural” (‘the spelling of the diphthongs and the stupid rule of accentuating the third persons plural’). 23 Curiously, one of the most commonly associated features of Alibèrt’s spelling, the use of grave accents for open-mid vowels (è, ò) came in the 1950s (Institut d’Estudis Occitans 1950).

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considering the difficult circumstances in which it appeared, its incomplete nature and its numerous mistakes24.

3 The extension of the Alibèrt’s work and the theorisation and production of a standard Occitan Alibèrt’s codification focuses on the central dialect, but the author of the „Gramatica occitana“ “parteix del supòsit que abans que res tots els grans grups dialectals haurien de sotmetre’s a una normalització semblant a la del llenguadocià” (Kremnitz 1986: 241)25. Rogièr Teulat (1985:17) also sustains that Lo fach d’insistir cada còp sus las varietats marginalas de lengadocian, pròchas dels limits coma lo gavaudanés, lo foissenc..., sembla una indicacion sus la volontat de far del lengadocian la basa d’una lenga comuna, los dialèctes periferics s’apiejant dins lor normalisacion [sic] sus las varietats marginalas de lengadocian.26

Alibèrt took the national languages as a reference of his codified language (“volèm una lenga coma lo francés, l’italian o l’espanhòl”27; Alibèrt 1976: XXXVIII), and then it is unsurprising that sometimes a “concepció francesa de normativització”, ‘a French concept of normalisation’ (Kremnitz 1989:242), has been seen in him. Based on the limitations of his work – as a certain overvaluation of purism, or a rigid viewpoint in various aspects28 – some devoted themselves to reviewing

24 See the note of the Institut d’Estudis Occitans that appears in the introduction of the dictionary (Alibèrt 1997:12). The handwritten dictionary was published thanks to the participation of Robèrt Lafont, Pèire Bèc and Ramon Chatbèrt. 25 In other words, “the presupposition is that first and foremost all major dialectal groups should be subjected to a normalisation similar to that of Languedocian”. We should not forget the 1929 letter of Pompeu Fabra, defined by Alibèrt (1997:12) as “notre inspirateur et notre modèle”, in the journal “Oc”, where he said that the Occitans – unlike the Catalans, who were able to aspire to one “gairebé uniforme” language (“almost uniform language”) – had to aim towards “la formació d’un grup de dialectes literaris” (“the formation of several literary dialects”). The text of the article is reproduced in its entirety by Lamuela and Murgades (1984:192–194) and partially by Lamuela (1995:18). 26 “Constantly insisting on the marginal varieties of the Languedocian dialect, close to the dialectal boundaries, such as Gavaudanese or Foissenc, appears to be a sign of the desire to make Languedocian the basis of a common language, with peripheral dialects that would support themselves on the marginal varieties of Languedocian for their normalisation”. 27 “[W]e want a language like French, Italian or Spanish”. 28 See Kremnitz (1986:246; 1989:173), Teulat (1985:46) or Taupiac (2001:15). The considerations of Lamuela (1994:80–81) are also interesting.

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specific issues of Alibèrt’s rules29, and others to extending them to the rest of the Occitan dialects30. However, after Alibert the need also exists to “disposar d’una forma de llengua per a l’ús general que hauria de ser el resultat d’una codificació de varietat única”31 (Lamuela 1995:19). In this regard, the contribution of Bèc (1972), which is very close  – chronologically and in content  – to Teulat’s publications that date also from the 1970s32, is fundamental. In Occitan tradition, the terms “occitan referencial”, “lenga de referéncia” or “referenciala” prevail, a type of denominations “que és explícita pel que fa al caràcter de terme de referència que ha de tenir la varietat estàndard; terme de referència en el doble sentit de guia de l’evolució lingüística de les diverses varietats i de representació o símbol de la comunitat”33 (Lamuela 1984:117). The first to use these terms was Bèc in 1968 (Bèc 1972:40; Teulat 1985:19). Concurring with other, almost synonymous denominations, it is true that there may be differences in nuances which are more or less important depending on the author34. Either way, Bèc – remember, a Gascon born in 29 Today there are linguists who complain about what they consider to be “réformisme endémique” (“endemic reformism”; Sumien 2006:70). See what Bèc or Lafont think (in Thomàs 2006:33, 49–50) about controversies that have lasted for decades, such as that of the famous “-e de sosten” (i.e.: writing *ambe or *monde in accounts of amb “with” and mond “world, people”). 30 For an overview of the issue, see Sumien (2006:60). The most notable works include those of Lafont (1951) for Provençal (redone in Lafont 1972) or that of Bèc and Alibèrt (1952) for Gascon, as well as the more general one of Lafont (1971). 31 The need “to have a language form for general use, which should be the result of a single-variety codification”. 32 Teulat is the author of two referential Occitan grammars (Teulat 1972, 1976), as well as a series of articles published during the 1970s in the “Quasèrns de lingüistica occitana” (“Occitan language notebooks”), later assembled in Teulat (1985). In fact, there is no doubt that four essential names linked to the standardisation of Occitan exist: Pèire Bèc, Rogièr Teulat, Patric Sauzet (see, for example, Sauzet 1985, Sauzet and Ubaud 1995 and more recently, Sauzet 2016, as well as other, more theoretical, publications on the role and nature of the standard) and Domergue Sumien (especially with Sumien 2006). 33 A type of denominations “which is explicit as regards the term of reference that the standard variety must have; a term of reference in the double sense of a guide to the linguistic evolution of the different varieties and of a representation or symbol of the community”. 34 There are those, such as Sauzet and Sumien, who prefer occitan larg (‘broad Occitan’), others occitan estandard (Taupiac), occitan comun (common Occitan), occitan normat, etc. On this question, see Sumien (2006:3, 23–24) or Carrera (2011:11–12). As the case may be, these terms can be applied to the general standard variety, to the standard

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Paris35 – describes a general variety de referéncia in which the Languedocian has great influence (Bèc 1972: 44): Mercé a sa posicion centrala [...] lo lengadocian a vertadièrament, dins l’ensemble occitanofòn, coma o direm mai d’un còp, vocacion de parlar director e referencial. [...] L’ensemble lengadocian es [...] lo sol dels grands dialèctes occitans que aja [sic] una frontièra comuna amb la maja part de tots los autres [...] als quals participa, sus sas airas marginalas, per mai d’un trach. Lo leng. es aladonc una mena de condensat de l’ensemble occitan, a l’un còp diacronic (de caps a l’anciana lenga, que n’a conservat plan sovent las estructuras), e sincronic (de caps als autres dialèctes). Es en fach lo sol dialècte del domèni [sic] que se dubrís realament sus los autres, e sus tots los autres36.

Bèc’s argument is diatopic and diachronic, it is based at the same time on the diasystem and the protosystem (Bèc 1972:46), and especially on a dialectological knowledge of the Occitan language. Rather than in Languedocian, the proposal rests on what Bèc calls “occitan mejan” (‘middle Occitan’) or ‘occitan central’ (‘central Occitan’), which in general would include the idioms of the central dialect that do not present notable traits of transition either to Gascon or to Catalan. Occitan would be divided into an Aquitano-Pyrenean complex formed by Gascon and these (southern) Languedocian varieties and in an Arverno-Mediterranean complex that would include Provençal and northern Occitan. Middle Occitan would be located between these two complexes, having common features with both blocks37. While this may have been seen (general and regional) varieties, to the group of codified varieties, to these varieties once they are stabilised in use… 35 See a summary of Pèire Bèc’s career in Carrera (2015a). 36 “Thanks to its central position […] in the Occitan area, as we will say more than once, Languedocian truly has a vocation as the prevailing and referential language. […] The Languedocian dialect is […] the only one of the great Occitan dialects that has a common border with most other dialects […], in which it participates, in the marginal areas, with more than one linguistic trait. Languedocian is therefore a sort of condensate of the Occitan group, at the same time diachronic (to the ancient language, of which the structures have very often been preserved) and synchronic (to other dialects). In fact, it is the only dialect in the whole linguistic area that is actually open to the others, to all others”. 37 This supradialectical classification appears in several of Bèc’s works (1977; 1972; 1973). You can see some minor differences between these works observed in Sumien (2009c:8), and a summary of possible territorial exceptions in Carrera (2011:58–61). Among the common ones with Arverno-Mediterranean we can quote the palatalisation of the group -CT- (fach < FACTU, and not fait, fèit, hèit...), a more or less prepaplatal affricate in cases where Aquitano-Pyrenean has a fricative sound, often -[ʒ]- ([lu ‘dʒuβe], lo jove, “the young one”), the absence of the phoneme /ʃ/ (peis and not peish,

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as an example of centralism38, we must not forget that this accusation has been directly refuted by those who have participated in the standardisation of the language and by those who have supported it, either following Bèc’s line or placing themselves very close. Sumien (2006:166) has already emphasised that the pattern of standard Occitan “combine les caractéristiques de plusieurs sous-dialectes languedociens tout en tenant compte du diasystème occitan dans son ensemble”39. Teulat, who starts from a central reference region for phonetics, proposes successive “ceucles concentrics” (‘concentric circles’) for the “fòrmas [sic] escrichas e la morfologia” (‘the written forms and morphology’) which even reach “l’espandi de la lenga occitana” (‘the territory of the Occitan language’; Teulat 1985:63). Lamuela (1995:19), who bases himself on Teulat to produce an inventory of codification criteria, has already said that in this case, we are facing a “solució intermèdia entre la [codificació] unitarista i la composicional” (‘an intermediate solution between unitarian and compositional [codification]’). And remember that Bèc himself (1972:48), in short, had already rejected “tant l’esbricalhament ipèr-dialectal coma l’imperialisme d’un sol dialècte”40.

“fish”), the preservation of the stressed diphthong AI (fraisse and not frèishe, hrèishe, hrèisho...), the depalatalisation or delabialisation of certain endings (fum [‘fyn] “smoke”, banh [‘ban] “bath”, alh [‘al] “garlic”) or the presence of a partitive article (avèm de pan, “we have bread”). Among those that reappear in Aquitano-Pyrenean there are the absence of the /v/ phoneme (therefore, vin is [‘bi]), the stability of certain intervocalic and final consonant sounds, among which the plural morpheme -s (vacas is [‘bakɔs], cantat is [kan’tat]), -i in the first person of the present indicative (canti, ‘I sing’) or the existence of the allophones [β], [δ] and [γ] -approximant sounds, and not occlusive- in a intervocalic position (seguir, [se’γi], “to follow”). 38 See everything that Sumien (2006:45–46) recounts and comments. 39 “[I]t combines the characteristics of several subdialects of Lengadocian while taking into account the Occitan diasystem as a whole”. 40 “[B]oth the hyperdialectal fragmentation and the imperialism of a single dialect”. We must not forget that some of the characteristics that can be found in certain Languedocian idioms of middle Occitan today would not be considered as canonical in that which is accepted as standard Occitan (certain verb endings [canton, “they sing”, some results of nasal groups [vergonja, plànger... instead of vergonha “shame”, plànher, “pity, complain”], some back vowels before nasal consonants [mont[o]nha “mountain”, m[o] ‘hand’] or cases like nuòch in place of nuèch “night”, for example), nor in a more or less implicit standard orthoepy that follows the basic correspondences between spelling and phonetics (see Fulhet 2008 in this regard).

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4 The regional standards As Sumien (2006:153) remind us, the first to refer to regional Occitan standards was Patric Sauzet (1989), for whom “es essenciala l’elaboracion d’estandards regionals que respièchen las particularitats de las regions linguisticas e istoricas d’Occitània”41. Sumien (2006:51), who explicitly follows Kloss (1978) and Clyne (1992), points out that these standards must be “estreitament coordenats e convergents” (“closely coordinated and convergent”; Sumien 2009a:837). In his opinion, it requires that to the six dialectal standards expected, a seventh regional variety of the country of Nice must be added for reasons of demographics, history and cultural identity (Sumien 2006:155). Instead, he maintains that both Aranese and Cisalpine Occitan must participate respectively in the creation of standard Gascon and standard Vivaro-Alpine, due to both demographics and the fact that the Val d’Aran or the valleys of Piedmont have neither metropolises nor a true literary tradition. Sumien (2006:161) also argues that, given the difficulty that any Occitan speaker has in simultaneously mastering the general and regional standards, “[l]‌a maîtrise pleine d’un standard régional, quel qu’il soit, devrait suffire pour la fonction discriminante”42. And he and Sauzet both advocate a distribution of spheres of use with a geographic component between the general and regional standards. The general standard “respond a las necessitats de las comunicacions per la comunitat tota” (Sauzet 1989: 10), ranging from “la part redaccionala d’una revista panoccitana” to “un jornal televisat panoccitan” including the scientific field and “un article de quina disciplina que siá”43 (Sauzet 1989:11). On the other hand, regional standards would be, for example, “la base de toute politique d’enseignement” or the varieties used by the “médias à diffusion régionale” according to Sumien44 (ibidem) and “l’ais del trabalh pedagogic (subretot dins las vilas bèlas, desoccitanizadas e ont lo dialectalisme vira 41 “[T]he production of regional standards of Occitan that respect the particular characteristics of the linguistic and historical regions of Occitania is essential”. Lafont (1984) had referred to “occitan commun normé” forms around “centres urbains gradients” that would correspond, after all, to the areas of the six major Occitan dialects. 42 “The total mastery of any regional standard should be sufficient for the discriminating function”. 43 The general variety “responds to the communication needs for the whole community”, from “the written content of a Pan-Occitan newspaper” to “a Pan-Occitan television news programme” including the scientific field and “an article in whatever discipline” (Sauzet 1989:11). 44 In other words, ‘the basis of any education policy’ or the varieties used by the “media with regional coverage”.

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a l’artifici arqueologic) e dels usatges publics, orals coma escriches” according to Sauzet45 (ibidem). In short: perhaps it may be said that the general referential Occitan would be appropriate for all situations typical of a standard language that were not geographically anchored and would require a variety by default.

5 The challenges of standardisation As was predictable in a context of minoritisation, some have wished to call into question (from without as well as within Occitanism) the need for referential varieties – which supposedly endanger the survival of the dialects46 –, even the validity of the theorisations on these same varieties (not to mention any possibility of intervention on a subordinate language)47, although the previous pages should have demonstrated that there has at least been deep reflection on this issue. If we delve into the practical facts, it is obvious that the consolidation of 45 “[T]he linchpin of pedagogical work (especially in the large non-Occitan-speaking cities, where dialectalisms tend to be an artificial archaeological exercise) and of public uses, both oral and written”. 46 In this regard, an excerpt of Lamuela (1994:150) that appears among several references to the situation of Occitan comes to mind: “La percepció exagerada de les diferències dialectals acompanya típicament les llengües subordinades, afavoreix la intrusió de la llengua dominant i sovint desemboca en el secessionisme lingüístic. L’adhesió simbòlica als trets del propi dialecte, idealització extrema del “rural intacte” – o, més generalment, del “local intacte” – sent com una amenaça a la integritat de la llengua qualsol canvi de l’estructura orientat a l’increment del valor pràctic i fins i tot la simple unificació gràfica” (“The exaggerated perception of dialectal differences is typically associated with the subordinate languages, favouring the intrusion of the dominant language and often leading to linguistic secessionism. In the context of symbolic adherence to the features of the dialect, extreme idealisation of the ‘intact rural’ – or, more generally, the ‘intact local’ –, any change in the structure aimed at increasing practical value of language is felt as a threat to its integrity, and even simple writing unification”). The same author refers to a “sobrevaloració de la càrrega simbòlica dels dialectes” (“an overvaluation of the symbolic burden of dialects”; Lamuela 1994:151). 47 For example, the ferocious opposition to the standardisation of Occitan by some of those who claim to be guardians of Mistral’s inheritance is quite well known. They often fail to apply themselves equally to questioning the linguistic subordination of this language to French and they even go as far as disputing the unity of Occitan. An especially prototypical example can be found in Rivière (1980). In any case, it is much more worrying that these types of preconception come from academic forums. For example, see Blanchet (2008) and his considerations on the work of Sumien (2006), of which a radically different and less visceral perspective can be obtained in Carrera (2008).

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the standard varieties is yet to be completed. Sumien (2006:166–167) underlines that there is much work to be done, especially concerning the morphological selection of the lexicon and the implementation of a certain thoroughness in lexicographical productions. He himself refers to the vagueness of the dictionaries and the grammars, to local practices that are “antinormistes [...] ou instables” (‘anti-rule or variable’), and offers as an example of the current situation the “langue approximative des néolocuteurs” (the ‘pidgin language of the new speakers’) or the “déficit fréquent de qualité dans l’enseignement” (‘the frequent deficiencies in teaching quality’). The fact is that, first of all, the problems that could be cited about corpus planning – to which we will return below – are very numerous:  selections and hierarchical classifications that are arguable or inadequate, abundant contradictions among publications, contributions that very often reflect personal choices and not consensual choices. We could even mention the euphemistic tendency to use the term Languedocian in works that describe a standard variety. With this scenario, it would be easy to proclaim that Occitanism (too) has failed miserably in this area48, but perhaps this is not the case. In 1975, Teulat (1985:80–81) already asserted that there was “una convergéncia entre lo referencial e lo ‘comun’ latent” (‘a convergence between the referential and the latent common [Occitan]’), and that “una mena d’occitan comun es en vam de ser fargar per de monde [sic] que créson [sic] utilisar [sic] las fòrmas [sic] mairalas” (‘a type of common Occitan is being formed through people who think they are using their maternal forms’). Recently, in a deliberately controversial volume, the cultural activist Eric Fraj (2014:111) noted that “nombre de jeunes occitanistes parlent un occitan d’origine scolaire tout à fait accepté par celles et ceux qui le tiennent de leurs parents”49. And a few years previously, Bèc did not hesitate to describe the language of a weekly magazine 48 Blanchet (2003:14), for example, refers to a “lengua unificada virtual” (“unified virtual language”) in a section entitled “El fracaso del occitanismo” (“The failure of Occitanism”) in an article where, incidentally, he maintains that the Catalan of the Valencian Country is an independent language. This reveals a very specific ideological position, where he brings together a whole series of clichés repeatedly used by anti-rule provincialists, especially from some Félibrige sectors opposed to the reform of Alibèrt. In any case, we would agree that, if Occitanism has failed in anything, it is in the fact that it has been unable to connect with large sectors of the Occitan population, perhaps due to not having conducted an adequate analysis of social and political events which go beyond the language. In view of the socio-political context faced by Occitan, we agree that it was no easy task. 49 “[M]any young Occitanists speak a language originating from school completely accepted by those who have inherited it from their parents”.

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published in the Bearn with Pan-Occitan aspirations as “occitan estandard”, with “de gasconismes que nasejan” (‘Gasconisms that show’; Thomàs 2006:33). Despite all the imperfections, inadequacies and disagreements with regard to the proposals made by the academic world for the standard variety (and the tensions that can be derived from it)50, a certain general model of language has undoubtedly spread within Occitanism (although, for obvious reasons, not to the whole of Occitan society). In fact, it is certainly no exaggeration to say that in each territory (through certain publications, teachers and schools in which Occitan is taken into account, magazines and actions of Occitan associations, the few media shows to which Occitan has access, etc.), rather than only local solutions, there are – in a possibly disorderly and obviously unplanned way – commonly accepted forms and dialectal structures that are intertwined with that more or less general language model. Sumien (2006:166–176) labels, with all the necessary nuances, the consolidation of each regional referential variety in its respective space as compositional or unitarian. And the fact is that each dialect presents a very specific situation, conditioned by numerous factors ranging from territorial literary references and the variable degree of influence of Occitanism, to the specific characteristics and location in the respective geographical areas of this same activism for Occitan or even to the existence of individual figures that opt for one or other option when prescribing51. If, for example, in the Gascon context, the important role of Bearnese is undeniable – which, in fact, is not even a homogeneous subdialect52  –, in Provence, the Rhodanian variety of Mistral 50 For example, in the “Questions de lenga” section of the digital newspaper Jornalet (https://opinion.jornalet.com/lenga), written by Domergue Sumien, some readers clash ferociously over questions of phonetics, morphosyntax or lexicon through the comments, where it is not difficult to find positions that are openly hostile to the standardisation of Occitan. However, this newspaper above all uses a perfectly calibrated referential variety which is proof of the practical operation of a general standard Occitan. 51 Sumien (2006:80) even speaks in terms of fiefdoms: “Certains notables occitanistes ont acquis une audience régionale et ont établi un quasi-monopole sur leurs dialectes respectifs” (“Certain Occitan personalities have achieved a regional audience and have almost gained a monopoly over their respective dialects”). 52 Although Sumien (2009a:840–844) speaks of “tres pòls possibles” (“three possible poles”) for the standardisation of Gascon (Bearnese, Central and Aranese), he himself stated that the lects of the Bearn are today “la matrice incontestable d’un standard émergent” (“the indisputable basis of an emerging standard”; Sumien 2006:175). However, in Sumien (2013:34), it is also notable that, in order to achieve a referential Gascon, it would be absurd for some speakers to renounce their common characteristics

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continues to influence the linguistic practices with the addition of elements from other latitudes (Sumien 2006:168). To all this we must add the administrative constraints. While Sumien himself (2006:170) complained that the Occitan of Piedmont could be codified “de manière isolée” (‘in isolation’) discarding the rest of Vivaro-Alpine, a commission for the “normalisation” of Cisalpine shows how the main objective of his work “di proporre un’ortografia e una varietà referenziale per l’insieme delle parlate impiegate nel territorio amministativo della Regione Piemonte” (Commissione 2008:13)53. In the Val d’Aran, where there are publications aimed at reintegration and with an eye on the desirable fixation of a referential Gascon suitable for the whole of Gascony (Carrera 2007a, Carrera 2011), the situation tends to diverge from the rest of Occitan as a result of isolationist practices and the dissemination of all types of inadequate solutions and forms at local level (in many cases caused by almost reckless amateurism). It is no exaggeration to say that everything that is proposed or even spread beyond the border is ignored, and that this merely speeds up the process of language shift from Occitan to – in this case – Spanish (Carrera 2015b).

6 Conclusion The problems currently faced by the standardisation of Occitan are truly numerous. On the one hand, in the corpus planning, there are not only divergent choices competing among themselves, but certain proposed and more or less disseminated solutions may not always conform with the application of reasonable codification criteria54. On the other hand, inasmuch as the dissemination with the general referential in order to adopt Bearnese ones, and that this applies to other dialects. We also spoke in these terms in Carrera (2008:90). 53 Therefore, “to propose a spelling and a referential variety for the group of idioms used in the administrative territory of the Piedmont region”. 5 4 On these criteria (of which it could be said that today they already have a certain tradition in Occitan-Catalan sociolinguistics), see Lamuela (1995), who reformulates what Teulat (1985:69–76) proposed, or the summary made by Castellanos (2000: 87–92). Taupiac’s inventory of factors (2004), which nevertheless focuses solely on writing issues, is basically not far removed from the previous ones. See Carrera (2007b) on the common points of these proposals. The fact is that we could mention more or less obvious interferences (that violate the autonomy of the language, and that would include more or less shocking cases of hyper-correction or maximum distancing) to solutions that are neither the most regular nor the most functional or viable, or that in any case fail to represent the most widely geographically distributed forms and structures, nor those with a more solid tradition from a diachronic point of view. Throughout Sumien’s work (2006), many examples of all types of inappropriate choices

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of codified forms is not synchronised (nor does it conform to any strategy of consensus between the key players of Occitanism), the fact that a certain linguistic choice is more or less successful may depend on what its speakers have available at any given, depending more upon anecdotal circumstances than on their quality or suitability (as an example, we can cite the impact of certain publications or the fact that certain forms or structures are favoured in specific areas or sectors)55. At this point, it should be remembered that Occitan today has no academy recognised by the speech community as a whole (or, at least, recognised by Occitanism) sufficiently capable of conveying and leading to the implementation of its possible recommendations56. However, we know after all that the basic problem goes further and that it cannot be detached from the social situation of Occitan or from all the factors arising from it. Its substitution at the hands of French and the shrinkage of the speech community are having an ever more dramatic effect, not to mention that this language shift is increasingly difficult to reverse. This is inseparable from the absence of a well-prepared and a viable language dissemination project (in short, a status planning of Occitan), all of which once again demonstrates the effective disinterest of public institutions in promoting it and spreading its use (these institutions, by denying the language the possibility of acquiring new functions, deny it the chance of achieving practical social attainment), a fact that hinders it – in terms of Sauzet (2008: 128) – from “tota reconquesta” (‘any recapture’), despite all the efforts that may be made in certain areas to “rendre l’occitan disponible” (‘make Occitan available’). The possible controversies about the codification of the language or even the need for a standard variety – or some standard varieties – thus contrast with the constant deprivation of access to numerous spheres that would require those varieties to are provided, in some cases directly erroneous and at times even implausible. Carrera (2015b) contains a similar analysis and inventory specifically referring to Aranese. 55 Sumien (2006:76–78; 2009b:73, 80–81) is especially critical both with the choices of La Setmana magazine – until recently, the only weekly publication printed in Occitan with a certain level of circulation – as with some forms and structures that are used in the Calandreta associative schools. 5 6 At the turn of the century, the Conselh de la Lenga Occitana was in existence. This brought together linguists from all over the territory and achieved a certain impact on the linguistic practices of Occitanists, but personal and institutional conflicts led to its closure. Despite this, its “Preconizacions” (Sumien 2007) is still a reference document. In the years following the closure of the of the Conselh de la Lenga Occitana, various organisations compete to position themselves as the regulatory body of the language (see Sumien 2017), with varying degrees of scientific success, as well as institutional and intellectual support.

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be used, leading to said controversies immediately becoming sterile. In summary:  the possible technical advances in codification are not accompanied by comparable actions in the social field that allow the codified forms to be spread or implemented solidly and seamlessly so that, in the end, we cannot talk about great advances in extending the use of Occitan, considering the large number of spaces that are excluded57. Bèc argued that Occitan, unlike Catalan, has not had a “basa economica” (an ‘economic base’; Thomàs 2006: 44), probably in reference to the fact that Occitan has not been able to accompany a cultural and political project driven – at least initially – by some elites. Paraphrasing Weinreich, Sauzet (2008) wonders whether Occitan needs a “marina de guèrra” (a ‘navy’), and comments that “[a]‌fauta d’armada o de marina de guèrra, una lenga pòt èsser portada per d’estructuras de fòrça que per èsser pas oficialas son realas” (Sauzet 2008: 119)58. What seems clear is that without effective structures with a well-defined strategy that can sustain the diffusion of the standard varieties and carry out a reasoned plan for language revitalisation, not only will these same standards have no future, but neither will Occitan have the possibility of halting or reversing the process of language shift that threatens it.

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57 Castellanos (2000:44) reached a very similar conclusion, who places Occitan as an exemplary case of an “obstructed individuation”: “la llengua occitana [...], malgrat un avançat procés de codificació i fins d’elaboració, no posseeix les condicions sociolingüístiques necessàries per a assolir una veritable estandardització” (“the Occitan language [...], despite an advanced process of codification and even of elaboration, does not possess the sociolinguistic conditions necessary to achieve a true standardization”). 58 “In the absence of an army or a navy, a language can be sustained by structures of force that, although they are not official, are no less real”.

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Bèc, Pèire (1972): Per una dinamica novèla de la lenga de referéncia. Dialectalitat de basa e diasistèma occitan. Nr. 6 (4ème série, II) of Annales de l’Institut d’Études Occitanes, 39–61. Bec, Pierre [Bèc, Pèire] (1973): Manuel pratique d’occitan moderne. Paris. Picard. Bèc, Pèire (1977): The Occitan Language. Barcelona. Edicions 62. [Catalan translation of the second French edition of 1973. First edition of 1963.] Bec, Pierre [Bèc, Pèire] (1992): Écrits sur les troubadours et la lyrique médiévale (1961-1991). Caen. Paradigme. Bec, Pierre [Bèc, Pèire]/Alibert Louis [Alibèrt Loís] (1952): L’Application de la réforme linguistique occitane au gascon. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Blanchet, Philippe (2003): Occitanismo y catalanismo: Elementos para una comparación con especcial referencia al Provenzal [sic] y al Valenciano [sic]. In: II Congres [sic] de Llengua Valenciana, online: http://www.valencian. org/comu/provenzal.pdf, 15 p. Date of consultation: 15 January 2019. Blanchet, Philippe (2008): Review: Dominique Sumien [dit “Domergue”], La Standardisation pluricentrique de l’occitan. Nr. 11 of Glottopol, 171–180. Brun, Auguste (1973): Recherches historiques sur l’introduction du français dans les provinces du Midi. Genève. Slatkine. Reproduction of the 1923 original. Carrera, Aitor (2007a): Gramatica aranesa. Lleida. Pagès Editors. Carrera, Aitor (2007b): Review: Jacme Taupiac, L’Occitan escrich. Nr. 29 of Estudis Romànics, 475–483. Carrera, Aitor (2008): Review: Domergue Sumien, La Standardisation pluricentrique de l’occitan. Nr. 43 of Llengua i Ús, 61–68. Carrera, Aitor (2011): L’occità. Gramàtica i diccionari bàsics (occità referencial i aranès). Lleida. Pagès Editors. Carrera, Aitor (2013): La llengua occitana avui. Nr. 38/2013 of Arts. Revista del Cercle de Belles Arts, 13–19. Carrera, Aitor (2015a): Pèire Bèc (1921-2014). Nr. 37 of Estudis Romànics, 730–737. Carrera, Aitor (2015b): Trenta anys de codificació gràfica. La necessitat d’implementar una normativa en l’occità de la Vall d’Aran. Nr. 25 of Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana, 251–286. Castellanos, Carles (2000): Llengua, dialectes i estandardització. Barcelona. Octaedro. Clyne, Michael (1992): Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin/New York. Mouton de Gruyter.

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Commissione Internazionale per la normalizzazione linguistica dell’Occitano Alpino (2008): Dizionario Italiano-Occitano Occitano-Italiano. Norme ortografiche, scelte morfologiche e vocabolario dell’Occitano Alpino Orientale. Cuneo. Eventi. Fontan, François (1977): La Nazione occitana: i suoi confini, le sue regioni. Peasc. Ousitanio Vivo. Italian translation of the 1969 French original. Fraj, Eric (2014): Quin occitan per deman? Lengatge e democràcia. Quel occitan pour demain? Langage et démocratie. [Mirapeish]. Reclams. Second edition. First edition of 2013. Fulhet, Joan (2008): L’Occitan de viva votz. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Gourdon, Marie-Louise (1999): La quête de la bonne graphie. Les motivations dans les choix graphiques en Pays d’oc au XIXe siècle. Nr. 45 of Lengas, 7–51. Gourgaud, Ives (1998): Sept thèses sur la graphie unitaire soumise à la discussion. Nr. 66 of Lo Lugarn, 8–13. Institut d’Estudis Occitans (1950): La Réforme linguistique occitane et l’enseignement de la Langue d’Oc. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Kloss, Heinz (1978): Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800. Düsseldorf. Schwann. Second edition. First edition of 1952. Kremnitz, Georg (1986): Fabra i Alibèrt. Nr. 13 of Estudis de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes. 231–249. Kremnitz, Georg (1989): Catalanisme i anticatalanisme de les concepcions normatives de l’occità. In: Actes del Vuitè Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes. Ed. of A. M. Badia i Margarit and M. Camprubí, Tolosa/Barcelona, 159–175. Lafont, Robert (1951): Phonétique et Graphie du provençal. Essai d’adaptation de la réforme linguistique occitane aux parlers de Provence. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Lafont, Robert (1971): L’Ortografia occitana. Sos principis. Montpelhièr. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Lafont, Robert (1972): L’Ortografia occitana. Lo provençau. Montpelhièr. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Lafont, Robert (1974): La Revendication occitane. Paris. Flammarion. Lafont, Robert (1980): Mistral ou l’Illusion. Valdariás. Vent Terral. Second edition. First edition of 1954. Lafont, Robert (1984): Pour retrousser la diglossie. Nr. 15 of Lengas, 5–36. Lafont, Robert/Anatole Christian (1970): Nouvelle histoire de la littérature occitane. Vol. 2. Paris. Presses universitaires de France.

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Lamuela, Xavier (1994): Estandardització i establiment de les llengües. Barcelona. Edicions 62. Lamuela, Xavier (1995): Criteris de codificació i compleció lingüístiques. Nr. 53 of Els Marges, 15–30. Lamuela, Xavier/Murgades Josep (1984): Teoria de la llengua literària segons Fabra. Barcelona. Quaderns Crema. Mistral, Frederic (1979): Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige. Vol. 2. Rafèla. Marcel Petit. Reproduction of the 1887 original. Nouvel, Alain (1975): L’Occitan sans peine. Chennevières-sur-Marne. Assimil. Palay, Simin (1980): Dictionnaire du béarnais et du gascon modernes. Third edition. First edition of 1932-1934. Perbòsc, Antonin (1976): Manifestes occitans. Montalban. Cocagne. Rivière, Jean-Claude (1980): Langues et Pays d’Oc. Nimes. L’Astrado. Ronjat, Jules (1980): Grammaire istorique [sic] des parlers provençaux modernes. Vol. 1. Genève/Marselha. Slatkine/Laffitte. Reproduction of the 1930 original. Roumanille, Joseph [Romanilha, Josèp] (1853): La Part dóu Bon Diéu. Avinhon. Séguin. Roux, Joseph [Ros, Josèp] (2010): Grammaire limousine. Tula. Lemouzi. Reproduction of the 1895 original. Sauzet, Patrick [Sauzet, Patric] (1985): Compendi practic de l’occitan normat. Montpelhièr. Centre d’Estudis Occitans/CRDP. Sauzet, Patrick [Sauzet, Patric] (1989): La grafia es mai que la grafia. Nr. 21 of Amiras, 35-46. Online (11 p.): http://taban.canalblog.com/ archives/2013/01/30/26288792.html. Date of consultation: 15 January 2019. Sauzet, Patrick [Sauzet, Patric] (2008): Se pòt existir una lenga sens una marina de guèrra? A prepaus de l’occitan. In: Llengua i Identitat. Ed. of M. À. Massip, Barcelona, 109–130. Sauzet, Patrick [Sauzet, Patric] (2016): Conjugaison occitane. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Sauzet, Patrick [Sauzet, Patric]/Ubaud Josianne [Ubaud Josiana] (1995): Le Verbe occitan. Lo vèrb occitan. Ais de Provença. Édisud. Sumien, Domergue (2006): La Standardisation pluricentrique de l’occitan. Nouvel enjeu sociolinguistique, développement du lexique et de la morphologie. Turnhout. Brepols. Sumien, Domergue (2007): Preconizacions del Conselh de la Lenga Occitana. Nr. 6 of Lingüistica Occitana, 1–158. Online: http://linguistica-oc.com/

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wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Linguistica-occitana-6-CLO.pdf. Date of consultation: 15 January 2019. Sumien, Domergue (2009a): L’estandardizacion deu gascon: l’ensenhament, la koinè e lo diasistèma. In: La Voix occitane. Actes du VIIIe Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes. Vol. 2. Ed. de Guy Latry, Bordèu, 837–850. Sumien, Domergue (2009b): Comment rendre l’occitan disponible? Pédagogie et diglossie dans les écoles Calandretas. In: Politique linguistique et enseignement des „Langues de France“. Ed. de Patick Sauzet i François Pic, Paris, 67–86. Sumien, Domergue (2009c): Classificacion dei dialèctes occitans. Nr. 7 de Lingüistica Occitana, 1–55. Online: http://linguistica-oc.com/ wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Linguistica-occitana-7-Sumien.pdf. Date of consultation: 15 January 2019. Sumien, Domergue (2013): L’estandardització de la llengua occitana. Nr. 38/2013 of Arts. Revista del Cercle de Belles Arts, 30–36. Sumien, Domergue (2017): La recèrca fàcia a un novèl frenèsi occitan de planificacion lingüistica (2004-2014). In: Occitània en Catalonha: de tempses novèls, de novèlas perspectivas. Actes de l’XIen Congrès de l’Associacion Internacionala d’Estudis Occitans. Ed. of Aitor Carrera and Isabel Grifoll, Lleida/Barcelona, 365–376. Taupiac, Jacme (2001): L’Occitan modèrne. Montalban. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Taupiac, Jacme (2004): L’Occitan escrich. Montalban. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Teulat, Roger [Teulat, Rogièr] (1972): Grammaire de l’occitan de référence. Vilanòva d’Òlt. Forra-borra. Teulat, Roger [Teulat, Rogièr] (1976): Mémento grammatical de l’occitan référentiel. [Sauvanhàs]. Cap e Cap ed. occitanas. 7 Teulat, Rogièr (1985): Uèi l’occitan. Bedós. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Thomàs, Joan (2006): Lingüistica e Renaissentisme occitan. Tolosa. Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Tourtoulon, Charles de/Bringuier Octavien (1876): Étude sur la limite géographique de la langue d’oc et de la langue d’oïl (avec une carte). Paris. Imprimerie Nationale. Ventura, Jordi (1991): Les cultures minoritàries europees. Barcelona. SelectaCatalònia. Second edition. First edition of 1963.

Raymond Hickey

Pluricentricity and Irish English Abstract: Pluricentricity is a major characteristic of the English language in today’s world. There are regional epicentres which have a significant influence on varieties in their orbit. However, in older Anglophone countries like Ireland there is a complex relationship between national and extra-national varieties English which is determined by history and present-day attitudes. This study examines the factors which determine language attitudes and influences in Ireland and attempts to evaluate the forces acting in this arena of Irish social life.

1 The issue of pluricentricity Traditionally, varieties of English, for instance, for teaching purposes in foreign countries, have been divided into two major blocks, British and American English. However, varieties studies, as an independent area within English linguistics, has in the past few decades heightened awareness for the plethora of forms of English spoken throughout the world. These varieties stand in a relationship of dominance and power towards each other, the most powerful being undoubtedly American English, given the economic and military status of the United States in today’s world. But the English language is now pluricentric1 (Clyne, ed. 1992) by which is meant that it consists of several regional centres, so-called epicentres (Peters 2009), in which certain varieties exist which are relatively dominant towards others in their group. An example would be South Africa whose public variety of English, based on White South African English, provides an orientation for supra-regional forms of the language in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. New Zealand English has a similar functions vis à vis varieties of English spoken in various South Pacific island nations such as Samoa, Cook Islands, Tonga and Niue. On the basis of second-language forms of English large nations outside Europe may well be achieving the status as a regional epicentre, e.g. India in South Asia (Hoffmann, Hundt and Mukherjee 2011). 1 This is also true for other languages, notably Spanish and Portuguese, which are still spoken in most of their former colonies outside Europe. It also holds for German, which has the major national variety Austrian German, see the detailed study by Dollinger (2019).

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2 Pluricentricity in Ireland In the context of Ireland,2 the regional centre for English is southern England and standard southern British English is the form of the language which Irish people associate most readily with England; the perception of Northern England and Northern English (Hickey, ed. 2105) is very rudimentary in Ireland, though Scotland, as a neighbouring Celtic nation, is perceived more clearly. The issue of epicentric orientation is quite complex in Ireland having to do with the history of English there and the current relationship to both England (the United Kingdom) and America (the United States). The next section will deal with the history of English in Ireland, the shift from Irish to English and the current identity of Irish English, particularly vis à vis dominant varieties of English outside Ireland. Languages in the history of Ireland pre-Celtic 3–5c BCE

Celtic 5–6c

Latin 8–10c CE ->

Scandinavian 12–15c

Anglo-Norman 12c –>

English

Language varieties in present-day Ireland Irish English/Scots

Northern, Western, Southern dialects Southern Irish English; Mid Ulster English, Ulster Scots

3 The coming of English to Ireland The history of Irish English divides into two periods. The first period starts in the late twelfth century with the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers and finishes around 1600 when the second period opens. The main event which justifies this periodisation is the renewed and vigorous planting of English in Ireland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the first period the Old English, as this group is called in the Irish context, came increasingly under the influence of the Irish. The Anglo-Normans, who were the military leaders during the initial settlement, had been completely absorbed by the Irish by the end of the fifteenth century. The progressive Gaelicisation led the English to attempt planting the Irish countryside in order to reinforce the English presence

2 In the current study, the bare name ‘Ireland’ refers to the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland will be referred to as just that, where necessary.

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there. During the seventeenth century new forms of English were brought to Ireland, Scots in the north and West/North Midland varieties in the south (where there had been a predominantly West Midland and South-West input in the first period). The renewed Anglicisation in the seventeenth century did not lead to the complete replacement of earlier varieties: on the east coast, in Dublin and other locations down to Waterford in the south-east, there is a definite continuation of south-west English features which stem from the imported varieties of the first period (Hickey 2005).

3.1 The early modern period At the end of the sixteenth century attestations of Irish English begin to appear which are deliberate representations of the variety of the time. These are frequently in the guise of literary parody of the Irish by English authors (Bliss 1979). Satirical writings are not the only source of Irish English, however. There are some writers, especially in the nineteenth century, who seriously attempt to indicate colloquial speech of their time. The first of these is probably Maria Edgeworth whose novel Castle Rackrent (1801) is generally regarded as the first regional novel in English.

3.2 Scots input to Northern Ireland The succession of James VI of Scotland (1566–1625) as James I (1603–1625) to the English throne led to the establishment of the Stuart monarchy. After the defeated Irish lords left Ulster in 1607, James I moved quickly and their lands were escheated. The land was reserved for Scots settlers, encouraged by their compatriot James I, together with Englishmen, mostly from the north Midlands and north of England (Adams 1958). Because of the union of the crowns in 1603 the Scottish were allowed to settle in Ireland without difficulty. The plantation settlements were to form the basis for the demographic split of the country. Due to the Scottish and English background of these immigrants the division of Ireland came to be as much linguistic as political and confessional. The success of the Ulster plantation was relative: the numbers envisaged by the English administration did not always reach the targets set nor did the landlords always have the capital to carry through the agricultural and urban projects which the government had envisaged. The uneven spread of the Scots across Ulster meant that the regions where Ulster Scots was spoken did not encompass the entire province and nowadays these are no longer contiguous because of a reduction of their size. The remaining areas are, however, regions of historical settlement. Three are located

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on the northern periphery from the north-west through the north-east to the south-east of Ulster, hence the term ‘Coastal Crescent’ or ‘Northern Crescent’. The number of speakers of Ulster Scots today is difficult to estimate, especially because there is no clear demarcation between Ulster Scots and English-based varieties. Furthermore, the difference to more general forms of English in Ulster has been overlain by the antithesis of urban and rural speech in contemporary Ulster. The figure of 100,000 offered, not uncritically, by Montgomery and Gregg (1997: 213) may serve as a general orientation but nothing more precise is available. The lexicography of Ulster Scots has been served by a large number of academic articles along with a dictionary in popular style is Fenton (2014 [1995]). A more academic work – with a broader brief – is Macafee (1996).

4 Language shift in Ireland No census before 1851 recorded language use so there is no reliable data on the language shift from Irish to English which began in earnest in the early seventeenth century and which had been all but completed by the late nineteenth century. In rural areas there was little or no education for the native Irish and this affected the language shift. The Irish learned English from other Irish who already knew some, perhaps through contact with those urban Irish who were English speakers, especially on the east coast and through contact with the English planters and their employees.3 The language shift in Ireland was relatively long, spanning at least three centuries from 1600 to 1900 for most of the country. This was a scenario where lexical transfer into English is unlikely, or at least unlikely to become established in any nascent supra-regional variety of English in Ireland. After all, English was the prestige language and the use of Irish words would not have been desirable, given the high awareness of the lexicon as an open-class. For phonology and syntax the matter is quite different. Speakers who learn a language as adults retain the pronunciation of their native language and have difficulty with segments which are unknown to them. A simple case of this would be the use of stops (dental or sometimes alveolar, depending on region) in the THIN and THIS lexical sets in Irish English. In syntax there are many features which either have a single source in Irish or at least have converged with English regional input to produce stable structures 3 After the 1830s there was primary school education for Irish, a consequence of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and this was offered in English, adding to knowledge of the latter language among the native population.

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in later Irish English. Adult speakers learning a second language in an unguided situation, search for equivalents to the grammatical categories they know from their native language. The less they know and use the second language, the more obvious this search is. A case in point would involve the habitual in Irish. This is a prominent aspectual category in the language and generally available by using a special form of the verb ‘be’ and a non-finite form of the lexical verb in question Bíonn sí ag léamh (gach maidin) [is she at reading (every morning)] ʻShe does be reading every morningʼ. There is no one-to-one correspondence to this in English, formally and semantically, so what appears to have happened (Hickey 1995) is that the Irish availed of the afunctional do of declarative sentences which was still present in English at the time of renewed plantation in the early seventeenth century to produce an equivalent to the habitual in Irish.

4.1 Attempts at reviving of the Irish language By the late nineteenth century, Irish was an endangered language. The numbers had dropped drastically, the language was no longer a living language in any Irish city and the remaining areas were discontinuous rural communities in the west and along the south-west coast of the country. In 1893 The Gaelic League/ Conradh na Gaeilge was founded. Figures such as Douglas Hyde/Dubhghlas de hÍde were instrumental in raising consciousness about the plight of the Irish language. Despite the efforts of many language supporters the numbers continued to decline into the twentieth century and the official language policy of the Irish Free State government from 1922 did little to halt this trend, indeed it may well have aggravated it. Because the vast majority of Irish people speak English due to language shift, Irish English is the only case where a shift variety, with later modifications, represents the supra-regional variety of a post-colonial country. Even Scotland, which also has language shift varieties (spoken in the west and north-west), has a supra-regional variety, Scottish Standard English, which arose through modifications of English in the lowlands and borders regions of Scotland. English here is a continuity form whose origins lie in the northern varieties of Old English (Anglian) which arrived in southern Scotland in the eighth century CE.

5 The identity of present-day Irish English Recognising an accent is easier than describing one. There are salient traits in varieties which one can point to, but the acoustic impression of a variety is composed of many features, only some of which are sufficiently discrete for them

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to be described satisfactorily. Furthermore, because syntactic structures are repeated less often than phonological ones they are less available for social assessment. Phonetic features have a strong identification function, given their frequent occurrence, and offer clear clues as to the linguistic affiliation of the speaker. Key phonetic features of Irish English which are used for accent identification and which form a central part of Irish linguistic identity are listed below. 1) Plosivisation of dental fricatives A fricative realisation of the initial sounds in the THIN and THIS lexical sets is very much an exception in southern Irish English. Instead the sounds are manifested as dental stops, i.e. [t̪] and [d̪] respectively. This applies to all but a few varieties of the south which may have alveolar stops at the beginning of such words as thin and this. 2) The dental stop realisation of /θ/ and /ð/ may well be a contact phenomenon going back to Irish where the two coronal plosives are realised dentally, i.e. /t/ and /d/ are phonetically [t̪] and [d̪] as in tá [t̪