John MacInnes
University of Edinburgh

A people is a fact of mentality, of language, of feelings. It is a historic fact, and it is a fact of spiritual ethnicity. Finally it is a fact of will. In our case however it is in an important sense an achievement of language.

Jordi Pujol (Construir Catalunya, 1980)

Language has always been a focus of the search for the elusive "fet diferencial" that sets Catalunya apart from Spain. Catalan nationalism in the nineteenth century might be seen as an ideal type of Nairn’s model (1977). When the petit bourgeoisie and intellectuals first set about the rediscovery of a Catalan cultural tradition in the Renaixença the most important area of their activity was language and literature, as illustrated by the revival of the Jocs Florals, and such works as "La Pàtria" by Bonaventura-Carles Aribau (1798-62) or Poesies by Joaquim Rubió i Ors (1818-99). The Institut d’Estudis Catalans was established in 1907 and under its auspices Pompeu Fabra published the language’s first grammar (1918) and dictionary (1932). However the limited class basis of all this effort is indicated by the fact that it never succeeded in producing a mass circulation national newspaper in Catalan.⁽²⁾ Only after the development of cultural nationalism, did nationalism take a more overtly political form: seeking to recover the sovereignty ceded by Catalunya to Castile.

Conversely, monarchs and dictators in Madrid, have attacked the language for the same reason that Catalan nationalists have celebrated it: as a symbol of Catalan autonomy. Thus Franco’s brutal repression after the civil war (described by Benet, 1973) had historical precedents in Philipe V’s Decreto de la Nueva Planta in 1716, and the measures of Primo de Rivera in 1925. It has been said, and with some justification, that a language is a dialect with an army behind it. In those periods of its history when Catalan autonomy has been surrendered to Madrid, so too has its language been treated as a "dialect". Vernacular languages were ground down elsewhere in Europe by capitalism (the creation of a wider markets, the dominance of the towns) liberal democracy (the rights and obligations of citizenship - bureaucracy, form filling and conscription) and national education systems using state languages adopted for law and commerce. Catalan’s role as a focus for national identity and the robustness of Catalan civil society have saved it from this fate, despite attempts by Madrid to impose a Spanish national cultural order, and have made the language central to the definition and articulation of Catalan national identity, as illustrated by Pujol’s remarks quoted at the outset of this paper, and in the commonly expressed conviction in Catalunya that anyone who speaks Catalan is a Catalan. As Flaquer (1999) argues, based on research in Barcelona, to speak Catalan is to become an insider. By this means Catalan nationalists lay claim to a civic and inclusive nationalism.

Table 1 Mother tongue of indigenous Catalans by age (1996)

Source: Author’s analysis of CIS study 2228.

Table 1, based on analysis of a Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) study conducted at the end of 1996 ⁽³⁾ shows the proportion of what we might call "indigenous" Catalans - those who were themselves born there and whose parents were also born in Catalunya - who learnt Catalan as their mother tongue. If we look at the effect of age here a basic fact stands out, confirming the strength of Catalan civil society. Throughout the years of official, public repression of the language, Catalans continued to learn and use it in their private lives. Moreover, most of those Catalans who reported Castilian as their mother tongue also reported learning and using Catalan, and being able to read it too. The major legacy of Franco is the much smaller proportion of older Catalan speakers who report that they can write the language correctly: something we might expect from a population who were forced to use Castilian as the only official language.

Since the democratisation and the recognition of the new Constitution in 1979, Catalan has had joint official status with Castilian in Catalunya. However its status has faced another challenge from the legacy of the scale and nature of immigration of Castilian speakers from other parts of Spain under the Franco regime. The boom of the 1960s and 1970s brought many new industries and drew in immigrants, not only from rural Catalunya but also from Andalucía, Aragon, Extremadura, Murcia and elsewhere, to the sprawling industrial suburbs of the metropolitan belt around Barcelona. Most of this immigration was poorly planned: vast high-rise suburbs sprang up with little infrastructure, services, or much possibility of contact and integration with "Catalan Catalans". Today more than half of the population of Catalunya are either first or second generation immigrants from elsewhere in Spain. Table 2 shows the impact of such migration on Catalunya in comparison with some other areas of Spain. It records the father’s birthplace for a sample of adults (18 years plus) in different Autonomous Communities. In 1996 only two fifths of resident adults in Catalunya had a father who was born there. Almost as many had a father born in Andalucía: the region which was the greatest exporter of population in the 1960s.

Table 2. Migration in Spain

Autonomous Community of Respondent

Source: CIS 2228 Author’s analysis

Table 3, based on the same survey, shows that one result of such substantial migration is that most "national" languages in Spain are in communities where the majority of people have Castilian as their mother tongue. The exception is Galicia: the area with least immigration. However it is clear that people in Spain closely identify language and national identity: they see language as the major factor that gives an Autonomous Community the claim to be a nation (Gore and MacInnes, 1998: 11)

Table 3 Respondent’s mother tongue ("the language you learned as a child in your home speaking with your mother")

Autonomous Community of Respondent

Source: CIS 2228 Author’s analysis

Article 3 of Catalunya’s 1979 Statute of Autonomy established Catalan both as the "llengua pròpia" ⁽⁴⁾ of Catalunya, and as an official language with equal status to Castilian. It gave the Generalitat the duty to make both languages equal and to "guarantee normal and official use of both languages" (Generalitat de Catalunya, 1993: 12-13). The Statute of Autonomy also enabled the Generalitat to promote Catalan by giving it control of public education and thus allowing it to determine the language of instruction. Many of the early acts of the Generalitat aimed to "normalise" the situation of Catalan. The Direcció General de Política Lingüística was created in 1980. The 1983 Linguistic Normalisation Law, which was passed by the parliament of the Generalitat with only one abstention and no votes against, put into practice the Statute of Autonomy’s recognition of Catalan. ⁽⁵⁾

The 1983 law argued that the precarious public position of Catalan was due to four factors: its loss of official status and proscription; compulsory education in Castilian; the scale of immigration from non-Catalan speaking areas of Spain and, finally, the impact of the mass media, especially television, using Castilian. These four problems were to be dealt with by four solutions. First, the neglect and repression of the Catalan language were to be countered by its adoption as an official language, by the promotion of "normalisation" and by the requirement to know and use it where relevant: for example in the process of government, in education and in commerce too. Article 2 gave citizens the right to know Catalan and to express themselves in it verbally or in writing, including "in public acts, both official and unofficial" such as dealing with government, or commercial enterprises, or receiving education. The final section states that: "Under no circumstances can anyone be discriminated against because of the official language he or she uses". Section 1 articles 5 to 9 established Catalan as the language of the Generalitat and of local councils in Catalunya and gave citizens the right to deal with government and the judiciary in "the official language of their choice". This meant, among other things, that public officials ought to be able to speak Catalan, and the autonomous government organised courses and allocated time during working hours for civil servants to improve their Catalan language skills, or indeed learn it from scratch. By 1987 entrants to the Catalan civil service were required to sit exams in Catalan language proficiency. Article 13 of section 4 required all public enterprises to ensure that "employees having direct dealings with the public be familiar enough with Catalan to attend to any matter with normality", while article 25 empowered the Generalitat and local councils to "normalise" the use of Catalan in commercial advertising, cultural, social, sports and all other kinds of activities.

Second, compulsory public education was to become increasingly based on Catalan but separation of pupils into Catalan and Castilian schools was explicitly rejected. Pupils were to become competent in both languages by the end of compulsory schooling. Teachers should be competent in both languages but universities were left free to teach in the language of their choice. Third, those who did not know the language (such as immigrants from elsewhere in Spain) were to be offered instruction and training centres were to be established. Finally subsidies were to tackle the power of Castilian in the production of books, periodicals, film TV and radio programmes, theatre and any other media The Generalitat was to promote Catalan both domestically and abroad.

Following the 1983 law another set of government bodies and institutions were set up to ensure the law was applied. In 1983 the Comissió per la normalització lingüística was established, becoming in 1988 the Consorci per la normalització lingüística. A Consumers’ rights law of 1993 gave consumers the right to have all oral and written material about goods and services, all contracts and personal attention, in Catalan. The Pla General de normalització lingüística was drawn up in 1995 (Webber and Trueta 1991; Leprêtre 1997; Romani and Strubell i Trueta 1997)

In part because of the 1983 law, but more generally because of the counter-reaction to Francoist repression, Catalan has enjoyed a substantial renaissance. Street names and public signs have been Catalanised. Advertising, notices, menus, documents, bills, chequebooks, magazines, books, newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, public announcements in stations and so on, are all found in Catalan. The knowledge of Catalan is definitely expanding, as census figures show (Gore & MacInnes 1998: 19). An increasing percentage of the population can not only understand it, but also report that they read, speak or write it. Partly this is the result of education, with new cohorts of youngsters educated in Catalan. Younger Catalans are much more likely to be able to read and write the language as well as speak it. Census data suggested that by the middle of the 1980s well over half of school age people could write Catalan compared to only about 1 in five of the over 20s. By 1992, all Catalunya’s primary schools were required to use Catalan as their teaching language. In that year 69% of primary students and 73% of secondary students received most of their teaching in Catalan.

What is also striking is the degree to which immigrants into Catalunya have learned Catalan, even within the shadow of Franco’s repression, and despite the volume of immigration and the segregation of many immigrants into metropolitan belt ghettoes where Catalan might never be heard. In 1996, 55% of the population of Catalunya reported that Castilian was their mother tongue as a child (almost all first or second generation immigrants), but two fifths of them said they could write Catalan correctly and three-quarters read or speak it - over twice the proportion of the Basque country population claiming such competence in their national language (Gore & MacInnes, 1998, 20).Two features help explain this, as Giner (1980) and Woolard (1989) have suggested. The first is the desire of the immigrants themselves to integrate: "they want their children to learn the language because it is necessary to get on in life". The second is the class prestige of Catalan. "Very roughly … the higher one went in the status, prestige and power social scale, the more frequently Catalan was likely to be the spoken language" (Giner, 1980: 48-50). There are of course qualifications to this pattern, a section of the haute-bourgeoisie, with links to the rest of Spain, and "España profunda", continue to prefer Castilian, which in part explains the commitment of the Partit Popular to the "defence" of that language.

However although the 1983 normalisation law proposed that Catalan and Castilian should both be "official languages" this has not always undermined the dominance of Castilian. Widespread knowledge of Catalan is not necessarily the same as its widespread use. In dealings with the police and judiciary, for example, the formal legal right to use Catalan contrasts with continuing ignorance of it, or active hostility to it, by the authorities, and the right of those branches of the Spanish State and judicial system operating in Catalunya to do so in Castilian, as the sole official language of the Spanish state. Virtually all the documentation of the Policía Nacional remains in Castilian. The Department of Justice estimates that 95% of court proceedings are in Castilian. This indifference or hostility to Catalan is sometimes shared by large state companies. Recently a director of Telefónica, the state telephone company currently being privatised, compared the demand of Catalans to be attended to in Catalan to the demand of British tourists to be attended to in English.

Evidence of convivència and the bilingual nature of contemporary Catalunya comes from the 1996 CIS Study. It asked bilingual respondents (i.e. those who reported that Catalan was their mother tongue, and those respondents who said Castilian was their mother tongue, but who could understand Catalan, or speak or write it - 96% of respondents in Catalunya) which language they used in a number of situations. Table 4 shows that while people may have a clear language preference at home, at work or with friends they are more likely to report that they use both languages.

Table 4 Language used in everyday life in Catalunya

Source: CIS 2228 Author’s analysis

Catalunya has its own press, all of which, with the exception of La Vanguardia, has developed since the fall of Franco. Avui was the only national Catalan paper to be published in Catalan, but the local press, in the comarques, used Catalan more extensively and other papers would carry occasional features or supplements in the language. However in October 1997, under the advertising slogan "Tal com som / Tal como somos" ("Just like we are" in Catalan and Castilian) El Periódico launched a Catalan edition, so that it now appears in two versions, with identical copy but in two languages: around two-fifths of El Periódico’s circulation is now in the Catalan edition. Two television channels, TV3 (established 1983) and Canal33 (1988), both subsidised by the new Catalan government, broadcast full time in Catalan, as well as several radio stations, but private, commercial television is exclusively in Castilian. Support for publishing in Catalan, and for translation of works into the language, meant that by 1995 some 5,000 works were appearing annually. However a survey in October 1996 found that only 10% of those surveyed had bought a compact disc or cassette in Catalan in the last three months, 6% had seen a film or video and 22% bought a book. Some of the impressive viewing figures achieved by the stations which broadcast in Catalan are boosted by large audiences for Barça football matches; although it could of course be argued that this phenomenon is a celebration of Catalan identity in its own right.

This evidence suggests that under the linguistic policy of the Generalitat, Catalan has made a strong recovery from the repression of the Franco years. But this still begs the question of what the achievement of "normalisation" should comprise. For some observers, and this would include many close to the PSC, it means the recovery of Catalan from its years of systematic repression, but within an inevitably bilingual social context. Hence Pascual Maragall’s recent comments that "as long as the grandchildren speak Catalan, things are all right" (Avui, 29 June, 1998). For many Catalan nationalists however, in the ERC and CiU, the impressive recovery of Catalan has been "stalled" not only by the material forces of globalisation of the modern economy but also by pressure from Madrid. This means that formally equal rights for the two languages, and an emphasis only on choice and bilingualism leaves Catalan fatally unprotected, so long as Castilian remains the only official language at the level of the Spanish state and, in practice, means the subordination of Catalan to Castilian. In this view not only is Catalan condemned to perpetual inferiority to Castilian, it risks withering in the face of competition from its more powerful neighbour: bilingualism could lead to a monolingual Castilian speaking Catalunya. Josep-LLuis Carod-Rovira of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya argues:

According to this argument "normalisation" can only be achieved if Catalan enjoys the same sort of hegemony in Catalunya that state languages enjoy elsewhere, so that "living entirely in Catalan" in the same way that it is possible to use English in any context in Britain, or French in France.

In 1997 CiU brought forward proposals for a new law. This was partly to address the concerns of language nationalists who felt that that normalisation was "stalled" by impediments to the greater use of Catalan. Partly it was for political reasons: CiU’s alliance with the PP in Madrid left it exposed to criticism. Although there was substantial public consultation over the new law, and consensus that it should follow the 1983 model, the original version caused controversy. The preamble suggested that one of the factors which rendered the position of Catalan "precarious" was the "successive waves of migration of recent decades". There was a new "duty to know" Catalan (a duty which the Constitutional Court had repealed in the Galician language law), sanctions on businesses which did not use Catalan; quotas on broadcasting, and new requirements on labeling goods. It was to become the "preferred" language of public authorities in Catalunya and to be promoted further in education.

Rather than the national consensus achieved in 1983, reactions to the new law reflected divergent attitudes to "normalisation" and interpretations of "bilingualism". Foro Babel argued that while the 1983 law was genuinely bilingual the new law prioritised Catalan. They argued that "every citizen of Catalunya has the right to freely use whichever of the two languages, both in their private relations and in their relations with political institutions and with the public administration" (El País 30 April 97). L’Associació per a les Noves Bases de Manresa issued a manifesto, Per a un nou estatut social de la llengua catalana, arguing that it was necessary to move forward from the bilingualism of the past:

The Partit Socialista de Catalunya opposed both sanctions and quotas, suggesting that they might endanger linguistic convivència, queried the interpretation of the "duty to know" and condemned the way "immigrants" were portrayed as a threat to the language (although this portrayal reflected the analysis presented in the 1983 preamble).

Beneath this political heat there was less evidence of mass popular interest in the new law. In March 1997 La Vanguardia’s regular political opinion poll found that just 31% of voters thought the new law was necessary, compared to 58% who disagreed. However in the course of the year some of the activities of the PP government in Madrid probably encouraged support for the new law by suggesting that for some people, Catalan culture still constitutes a "threat" to Spain. A televised concert, dedicated to the memory of Miguel Angel Blanco (the young Basque PP politician murdered by ETA) was held. Raimon, from València, sang in Catalan, expressing solidarity for a murdered Basque and was booed. PP spokespersons, far from deprecating the audience’s behaviour, replied by citing instances when Catalans had shown "disrespect" to the Spanish state and royalty. Esperanza Aguirre, Minister for Education, unsuccessfully proposed a new "unified" curriculum for the teaching of history in Spain: an attempt to produce a "national" consciousness of Spain through an appropriately national view of the state’s history. The Catalan press saw this as a throwback to "Franco times".

The debate surrounding the new linguistic law thus intensified. The Catalan PP senator Aleix Vidal-Quadras argued that the new law would transform schools into "re-education" camps and teachers into "linguistic torturers" who would prevent children going to the toilet or having glasses of water, "until they could ask in Catalan" (La Vanguardia 21 November 1997). The PP suggested that they might vote against it. He later called for "civil disobedience" of the new law as it was passed (El Periódico 28 December 1997). These sorts of developments explain the gradual shift of popular opinion in Catalunya towards approval of the new law.

CiU was concerned to maintain the support of the PSC for the law, since its opposition would make it difficult to claim mass popular legitimacy for it. Much of the more controversial aspects of the new law were dropped, reformed or fudged; what is striking is the smallness of the substantive differences between the 1998 measure and the 1983 law on which it was agreed to base its redrafting. This did not stop both the PSC and CiU from making strenuous claims that the new law ushered in substantial changes, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons. CiU was keen to show that the new law represented a new stage in the normalisation process and proved its commitment to it. The PSC wanted to show that it had turned the CiU away from militant language nationalism to a more pragmatic approach to bilingualism. The law was eventually passed on January 7th 1998. ERC voted against it, denouncing the "big lie which only covers up a pretend peace" which left the dominance of Castilian unchanged. The PP, on the other hand, opposed it because they argued it discriminated against Castilian speakers and endangered convivència between Catalanoparlants and Castillanohablantes. Pascual Maragall, socialist candidate for Pujol’s post at the 1999 elections, declared that the new linguistic law was "a mistake" (Avui, 29 June, 1998). Conversely, several nationalists saw the new law as the flagship measure of the current parliament.

An English translation of the key passages of the new law are contained in Gore and MacInnes (1998) and so these are not repeated here. The law presents much the same list of reasons for the weakness of Catalan as the 1983 law. Education is no longer explicitly mentioned - since compulsory schooling is now in Catalan - and explicit reference to Castilian in the discussion of the mass media is dropped: instead globalisation of the culture information and communication industries is cited as the problem. The preamble has been rewritten to portray immigration in a more favourable light, so that it is now presented in terms of its social and economic origins rather than the responsibility of the immigrants themselves. A new paragraph makes a clear break with language nationalism both by insisting that Catalan culture is not synonymous with the Catalan language and by referring to those whose mother tongue is Castilian as "Catalans": a territorial rather than linguistic definition of national identity. The 1983 law is described as having produced important changes, having challenged the repression of the language and extended use and knowledge of it but "the generalisation of its knowledge has not always produced a corresponding increase in its public use". Reference is made to the changing technological, political, economic, legal and cultural context produced by the arrival of the information highway, deregulation in the culture industries, the accession of Spain to the EU and legislation passed both by the EU and in Spain.

The key "duty to know" passage is open to a wide range of interpretations:

"Duty" is implied by the "equality" of the two official languages in Catalunya. Thus if citizens have a duty under the Spanish constitution to know Castilian, and Catalan is fully equal to Castilian, then, it can be argued, this requires citizens in Catalunya to have a duty to know Catalan too. However, it might also be argued that, if use of an official language confers the right of the user to express themselves in it without discrimination, this implies that the only comprehensive "duty to know" still rests with the language of the Spanish state: Castilian. This is not the only ambiguity in the new law. It promises equality between Catalan and Castilian - implying that bilingualism is fundamental and that normalisation comprises essentially the opportunity to use Catalan - while it also suggests that such equality presupposes that all citizens of Catalunya will acquire a knowledge of Catalan - implying that they have an obligation to know and learn it.

The definitions given of "llengua pròpia" and "official" language settle few of the controversial issues in the debate over normalisation. What special treatment appears to be given to Catalan as a "llengua pròpia" is qualified by the assertion that Castilian has joint and equal status as an official language. As they stand, were Articles 3 and 4 to be taken to their logical conclusion, no citizen could be compelled to do anything in one language or the other. In practice, their interpretation is likely to follow that of the 1983 law: that the Generalitat can use Catalan, encourage other public administrations to do so, and require public officials to know and use it; but individuals will continue to be able to be dealt with in Castilian. In areas, such as the administration of justice, where the Generalitat has less influence, Castilian will continue to predominate.

Radio and TV stations subsidised by the Generalitat are required to promote Catalan culture, to broadcast at least 50% of their output in Catalan and have at least 25% of songs sung in Catalan, and there are to be quotas of cinema films too. Publications of the Generalitat and local authorities are normally to be in Catalan. The Generalitat is to subsidise Catalan publishing in various forms, including software, and to promote cultural and scientific activity in Catalan. It is to promote the development of Catalan products in advanced language technology, such as voice recognition.

The Generalitat is to promote the use of Catalan in the professions, in workplaces and in industrial relations, encouraging the participation of business, professional and workers organisations in this activity, and encourage the insertion of clauses in labour contracts about promoting the knowledge and use of Catalan. While it sets out a variety of requirements for business, there are no penalties linked to the article, so that its meaning is virtually identical to that of the 1983 legislation. Chapter 6 "the institutional stimulus" sets out in a general way how the Generalitat is to achieve some of the objectives set out elsewhere in the law, and provides for agreements on language normalisation with entrprises and an annual parliamentary report on progress. Sanctions or penalties for private individuals are not set out in the law, but are to be imposed via existing legislation on broadcasting and consumer rights. This allows CiU to argue that there are sanctions in the new law, while the PSC can claim that since the sanctions can only be applied through other legislation, and to entities rather than individuals, they are not really sanctions.

The controversy over the 1998 law, and the difficulty in moving beyond the consensus characterising its predecesor of 1983 perhaps tells us something about the changing relationship between language and national identity. Behind the debate over the 1998 law lie two, differing views of what normalisation comprises. For the first view "normalisation" is about removing the systematic oppression of Catalan and restoring its public status by putting it at the centre of public education, protecting the right and opportunity to use it in public, and defending it against the corrosive effects of globalisation in the media and information industries. However the development of its use will be driven by choice. Recognition of the diverse language background of Catalunya’s heterogeneous population and Catalunya’s relation to the wider Spanish polity mean that in practice Catalunya will always face a bilingual reality. From this persective, stronger "catalanisation" of society would inevitably threaten the civil rights of Catalan citizens whose first language was not Catalan, and make language a means of social exclusion from citizenship rather than inclusion rendering national identity itself divisive and endangering convivència . It would hark back to the "ethnic" demand of the 1892 Bases de Manresa that public appointments should be reserved for Catalans. Thus CC.OO., one of the main trade union confederations, made the point early on in the debate over the proposed new law that:

At the end of a continuum of such positions lies the PP for whom language is hardly the business of the government, so that to promote Catalan at all becomes, at a certain point, "like Franco but in reverse" to use the infamous phrase used by ABC. The essence of normalisation, in this perspective, is the creation of an equality of language opportunity. Catalan may be the llengua pròpia of the nation, but this need not stop both Castilian and Catalan being everyday tools of communication.

The second view of normalisation takes a more traditional view of the relationship between language and nation: because language is national it should be, to some extent, a complusory obligation of citizenship. Only if Catalan is the language which many people are obliged to speak, in various contexts, is it the language that people can normally use. For some this implies not only subordinating the civil rights of individual Castilian speakers to the needs of the Catalan language, but also requiring those parts of the Spanish state which deal with Catalunya to do so in the language of Catalunya. Branchadell (1997) argues that only a "strong" level of normalisation in which "all the citizens in Catalunya in fact live in Catalan" (1996: 9) would guarantee Catalan’s survival as a flourishing language, and this would in practice require a monolinguistic society:

This is defended, in turn, by the argument that each nation state should have its own language: what difference is there from people in Catalunya being required to conduct their business in Catalan and citizens of, say, France using French? We move from a "civic" to a more "ethnic" definition of nation, albeit an "ethnicity" that can be learnt. But if we argue for the right of the Generalitat to protect Catalan because it is the right of Paris to protect French, then it follows that it is the right of Madrid to protect Castilian. Such an analysis therefore implies that Catalan’s long term future requires an independent state to protect it: one people, one language, one state.

It is often pointed out that Catalan is spoken by more people - about 8.5 million - than other, better known, languages such as Danish, Finnish or Norwegian, and by almost as many as speak Swedish, Greek or Portuguese in our continent. "It is the only European language of this importance ... which is not the official language of an independent state" (Hall 1990: 9) However this comparison works both ways: if the survival of a language without a state is what is anomalous we apparently face a choice between creating a state or destroying a language. Once more the implication appears to be that only political independence might guarantee the future of Catalan. This conclusion follows from the essence of this view of normalisation: normality is achieved where there is a one to one correspondence between language and nation and monolingualism (at least in an official sense) is achieved.

Since it is hard to envisage Catalunya being able to require the Spanish state to deal with it in Catalan, virtually all those in the debate tacitly support bilingualism. Bilingualism is a positive sounding concept, difficult to disagree with. Indeed Colomer (1996) makes a compelling case for the virtue of bilingualism in itself, quite apart from more immediate linguistic considerations. However, as usual the devil is in the detail. Both "sides" in the debate over the 1998 law tend to argue that the strength of "their" language need not threaten the other while simultaneously implying that the strength of the "other" language does indeed constitute such a threat. For language nationalists promoting Catalan simply defends it against the dominance of Castilian. Given that the latter is backed by the force of Madrid and the globalisation of culture this hardly infringes the rights of Castilian speakers. Foro Babel argues that free use of Castilian will not undermine the normalisation of Catalan.

For those who are not bilingual already, the politics of language are very much zero sum. Two citizens may have an equal right to conduct their affairs in two alternative languages, but problems arrive when they have to deal with each other if the language is not the same one. To turn a formal right into a practical ability everyone has to be able to command both languages. My "right" to "use" one implies your "duty" to "know" it. The right of citizens to be served in Catalan laid out in the 1983 law, would in practice require all those in public service who did not already know how to speak, read and write Catalan to learn how to do so. If we extend the definition of "public" to include any social relations which take place in the public sphere, as some language nationalists believe, then, in effect, competence in Catalan becomes a prerequisite for living in Catalunya.

But such comparisons forget two things: first that small languages are possible because just as Swedes or Danes or Finns usually also understand English, a "world language" in which they can conduct business, so too do Catalans speak such a world language: Castilian. Ironically, the long term health of Catalan depends, at least in part, on the prosperity of the very language which often appears to be its immediate threat. Second, that the relationship between language and nation is rarely a straightforward one. Were states capable of normalising the language to be spoken in their territories, would Catalan have survived the twentieth century as robustly as it has done? This in turn raises the question of why it should be assumed that bilingualism must lead to diglossia and ultimately a unilingual state based on the language of the nation which dominates that state.

As Colomer (1996) and others have pointed out, there are upwards of 4,000 known languages (depending on how we define them) yet less than two hundred states. This fact alone should make us wary of too direct a connection between language and the state, and indeed between language and the nation. At the very least the persistence of bilingualism in most nation states (paradoxically, perhaps the most unilingual state in Europe - the United Kingdom - is also one of the most multi-national) suggests that there is no such tendency. As Colomer argues:

Indeed, it may be that it is this sort of mechanical connection that is far too easily made between language and statehood that obscures a better analysis of the evolution and future prospects of the Catalan language. What is striking, surely, is the vibrancy of the Catalan language, given that it was only finally codified, in terms of vocabulary and grammar, in the first quarter of this century and that for the following half century it was persecuted and proscribed. What is also apparent is that state sovereignty, and the relationship between different layers of government in modern Europe no longer takes the form of a collection of internally all powerful nation-states externally confronting its "independent" neighbours. This suggests that it is civil society, rather than the state, that has hitherto been responsible for the strength of Catalan and will also determine its future.