Fluency Before Accuracy
Some thoughts on passive bilingualism in Barcelona
"Barcelona" by K_Dafalias is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A recent survey captured headlines in Spain. It showed that 55.9% of Barcelona residents have Spanish as their language of choice, compared to just 36.5% for Catalan (a new low for the minority language). Spanish is more popular than Catalan in nine of the city’s ten districts. The only exception is Gràcia, a former village that only became part of the city proper in 1897.
Digging deeper into the survey revealed an interesting result. Although 93.9% of the city’s population say they understand Catalan, only 74.7% speak it. Linguists call being able to understand a language you don’t speak “passive bilingualism.” It is very interesting that 19.2% of the city’s population fall into this category - nearly one in five people. There is around one passive bilingual resident for every two people who prefer to communicate exclusively in Catalan.
The survey resulted in lots of fretting among Catalan nationalists and supporters of the independence movement. This week’s essay will seek to reframe their concerns: the presence of a large passive bilingual community is a massive asset if the Catalan language is to thrive and grow in the future.
To set the scene, though, let me tell you a story about my three-year stint trying to teach English to Madrid-based business executives in the early 1990s. More than 30 years later, I still have very clear memories of one poor guy, who had been stuck at the lower-intermediate level forever. His boss had told him that he might get the sack if he didn’t improve drastically.
My student was a middle-aged family man, who felt the pressure of being the breadwinner. He was also an introvert. His boss’ threat obviously terrified him. He was much too scared to make any mistakes in English, so stayed resolutely stuck at lower-intermediate level and never gained much fluency.
Around the same time, I went from being a complete beginner in Spanish to getting qualified as a translator in three years. It is true that I was living in Madrid, so could immerse myself in my new language; and it is also true that I was in my early 20s, rather than my 40s. I am also an extrovert. Even so, the contrast with my unhappy student stuck in my mind. I gleefully went around making mistakes every time I opened my mouth for the first couple of years. The number of mistakes gradually went down as I gained fluency, although it has never hit zero.
For me, there was a clear lesson: nobody can learn a new language while feeling scared and threatened. Mistakes are inevitable. Encouraging learners to tolerate mistakes in the short term will lead to good results in the long term. The trick seems to get fluent first and then work on accuracy. Trying to do it the other way around simply doesn’t work.
Turning to Barcelona, we can see that linguistic fines - an illiberal policy promoted by Catalan separatists - will always tend to backfire. Spanish-speaking people in Barcelona’s service industry will feel tense and uneasy every time a Catalan-speaking client opens his or her mouth. Will the encounter lead to a fine? Or the sack? Needless to say, this tension is exactly the wrong frame of mind if you want to convert passive bilinguals into active speakers of a language.
Meanwhile, José Montilla was the Socialist First Minister of Catalonia between 2006 and 2010. He was born in 1955 in Andalucia and moved to the outskirts of Barcelona at the age of 16 as part of a wave of migration from the south of Spain to the country’s industrial cities. He learnt excellent but imperfect Catalan.
There was lots of sneering in some of the more snobbish corners of the Catalan media whenever Montilla messed up some of the more esoteric grammar in his adopted tongue. This attitude is also a big mistake - although admittedly not as bad as questioning the very humanity of Spanish speakers who don’t learn decent Catalan, as one of his separatist successors, Quim Torra, would later do. Why should migrants go to the trouble of learning a language if they think that the natives will sneer at them despite their best efforts?
The patio
Catalan nationalists sometimes joke: “We won the classroom but lost the patio.” During Barcelona’s population boom, when Montilla and many other Spanish speakers were moving to the city from the south of Spain, the Catalan language was discouraged in the classroom. Most of the kids would rush outside and speak to each other in Catalan away from the earshot of their teachers.
In 1975, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. Spain’s new democratic Constitution of 1978 maintained the Spanish language (Castilian) as the country’s official language and said that everyone in the country had the duty to know it. However, regional languages like Catalan were given a protected status and described as part of Spain’s “cultural heritage.”
By 1983, Catalan had gained a central place in the region’s education system, despite the fact that the numbers of teenagers from Spanish-speaking homes was increasing fast. Controlling the education system has proved a mixed blessing. Although 4% to 5% of the region’s population come to prefer Catalan after growing up in Spanish-speaking homes, there is also a backlash.
Many teenagers come to associate the Catalan language with boring teachers and homework, while Spanish is seen the language of the street, of Latin pop and of Netflix. As a result, some percentage of the population effectively stop speaking Catalan when they leave the education system. Quite simply, Catalan isn’t seen as cool.
There is a clear parallel between the CEO telling a middle-aged executive to learn English or face the sack and the Catalan nationalists who want to fine Latin American waiters, sneer at migrants with an imperfect understanding of Catalan grammar and associate the language they love in the minds of non-native teenagers with boring homework. In both cases, they are trying to promote linguistic skills, but without much emotional intelligence about how their message will be received.
People who want to promote Catalan should pull new speakers in rather than being bossy, while being aware that learning a new language is a big commitment that takes many years of work. The language needs to be associated with an attractive and vibrant culture, rather than with a grumpy political movement. Catalan nationalists should drop the siege mentality and try to break Barcelona’s notorious glass ceiling to show that the city can be a welcoming place to newcomers. Building identity politics around native speakers of a minority language has always been a terrible strategy.
The promotion of the Catalan language should be based on creating a non-judgmental and encouraging atmosphere, which enables passive bilingual citizens and immigrants to develop fluency without worrying too much about inevitable small mistakes. The people who want to save the language should relax when it comes to new forms of Spanish-influenced Catalan (“català amb castellanades”) that emerge in the process. Any linguists or nationalists interested in social engineering might want to step outside and take some deep breaths of fresh air at this point!
Finally, the Catalan-language television channels controlled by the regional government should stop just preaching to the converted. Researchers have shown that the Catalan-speaking citizens who got their information from these channels in the 2010s entered into an “information bubble.” It would be healthier if these channels had many more programmes aimed at the passive bilingual community. How about game shows with prizes for Spanish speakers who are working on improving their fluency in Catalan?
The comments are closed, as always when we discuss Catalan issues. And, no, I am not a fascist or a Spanish nationalist! If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Linguistic hysteria in Catalonia
Spanish democracy and critics of nationalism
Further Reading
Reframing: The art of thinking differently by Karim Benammar
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