Language teaching and family linguistic transmission: two correlative factors in the Valencian Region (Catalan vs. Spanish)?

Abstract

One of the last phases of the processes of language shift is the interruption of intergenerational linguistic transmission, to a large extent caused by the educational programme of linguistic submersion, which pursues the elimination of a recessive language. The inverse phenomenon to language shift, that of revernacularization (or revitalization), is also related to another educational programme, that of linguistic immersion, aimed at the recovery of the minority language. Our research work inquires into the correlation between these educational programmes and the phenomena of language loss and retrieval as manifested in the Valencian Region through a recessive language, Catalan, and a dominant one, Spanish. We can observe that education in one or another language is decisive because many parents transmit to their children the same language of schooling. Revernacularization, however, is difficult because the previous process of language shift is older (since the nineteenth century) and the immersion programme (since the 1990s) has only managed to stop the historical loss of Catalan speakers, but not to regain new ones.