Education, language and identity

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as is the capacity of public bodies to intervene in it. In 1983, the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, along with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia we show that respondents who have been exposed for a longer time period to teaching in Catalan have stronger Catalan feelings. The effect also appears to be present among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins; in addition the reform affects political preferences and attitudes towards the organization of the State

Education and political behaviour : evidence from the Catalan linguistic reform

This paper studies the relationship between schooling and political behaviour in ethnically divided societies. It draws on survey data from Catalonia to investigate how the introduction in 1983 of a bilingual education system affects political behaviour. Using within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, we find that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to declare to have voted in 1999 regional elections and to have chosen a Catalanist party

La geolingüística catalana, ahir i avui

After surveying a number of books on geolinguistics which have completely or partially focused on the Catalan language from the seventies, this paper points out the importance of continental atlases and linguistic research groups to the development of linguistic cartography. They have done so by means of tables of summaries and comments about dialectal data classified and presented in maps with structural, onomàstic and motivational criteria. The second part of this paper updates geolinguistic work done on the Catalan language in the last decades from a renewed geographical, thematic and social dimension

Separatism does nothing for Catalan identity

ANC & Co. should focus on making a stronger case in Madrid for the Catalan-language regions of Spain. It’s not just about Catalonia

Identity and language policies

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as it is the capacity of public bodies to intervene on it. In 1983 the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, together with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia and exploiting within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, results show that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to say that they feel more Catalan than Spanish. Interestingly, the effect appears to be present also among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze how policies affect individual identity