L'aragonés, an Endangered Minority Language: the Case of Ayerbe
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L'ARAGONÉS, AN ENDANGERED MINORITY LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF AYERBE By MARÍA ROSA BERCERO OTAL A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Hispanic Studies College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham April 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Aragonese is a minority endangered language used in the Alto Aragon area. Ayerbe is a town found in the Plana de Uesca in Alto Aragon, and therefore it is considered to belong to a geographical area where the use of the Aragonese language finds itself in a significant state of decline compared to the use of Castilian Spanish. This study examines the extent to which this is true. The objective was to conduct a questionnaire amongst residents in Ayerbe in order to explore their language use, their perceptions of the language, their linguistic awareness and their affinity to the concept of Aragonese identity. The results suggest that the Aragonese language in Ayerbe is more widely read and understood than was previously thought. This investigation also considers the processes of normalisation and normativisation that will be necessary for the revitalisation of the language. Ta Ixeya, ta Amaya e ta Otto Ta Lewis ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a break with tradition, which always puts the family ‘last but by no means least’, I want to thank first and foremost my family. My husband Lewis has had to put up with my stress over this work and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. My daughters are too young to realize and have only noticed that mamá is always writing. I hope they forgive me for neglecting them. Everything in here is for them to learn to love Aragonese as much as I do. Also thanks to my supervisor Aengus Ward for his support and to Pat Odber de Baubeta for her ideas. Thanks are due to Francho Nagore, Oscar Latas, Fernando Romanos and everybody at the Consello d’a Fabla Aragonesa as well as those at ROLDE who offered a helping hand at the beginning. There is also a group of people without whose help proofreading and with statistics and tables I would have never finished this thesis: Robin Milner, Eugenio Barrio, Emma Parsons, Rob Sved and Jane Garton, thank you all for being there. Thank you to everybody in Ayerbe for all their help. Without my parents’ and my brother’s support throughout the years I would have never even been able to start this thesis. Gracias. Lastly, thanks to my father who has not been able to see me finish it. CONTENTS Page GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 PART I INTRODUCTION 6 CHAPTER 1 ENDANGERED LANGUAGES, RIGHTS AND POLICIES 7 CHAPTER 2 ARAGONESE IN CONTEXT 63 CHAPTER 3 THE ARAGONESE LANGUAGE 88 PART II INTRODUCTION 115 1. METHODOLOGY 124 2. THE SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE LANGUAGE 140 3. LINGUISTIC IDENTITY IN AYERBE 161 4. LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE AND USE OF ARAGONESE 182 5. LINGUISTIC PERCEPTION 200 6. LINGUISTIC CONSUMPTION 230 7. NORMALISATION AND NORMATIVISATION OF ARAGONESE 251 8. LINGUISTIC EXPECTATIONS AND DEMANDS 280 PART III CONCLUSION 310 LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1 Demand for autonomical expansion 141 Table 2 Aragonese identification of people from Ayerbe 143 Table 3 Aragonese identification of people from Aragon 145 Table 4 Self-identification of people from Spain 146 Table 5 Where are you in the political scale? – Ayerbe 151 Table 6 Where are you in the political scale? – Aragon 153 Table 7 Where are you in the political scale? – Spain 153 Table 8 Who did you vote for in the last General Election? –Ayerbe 155 Table 9 Who did you vote for in the last general election? – Aragon 157 Table 10 Who did you vote for in the last general election? – Spain 158 Table 11 Are there one or several Aragonese languages? 178 Table 12 Is there another linguistic variety in Ayerbe? 186 Table 13 Perception of language used in Ayerbe 215 Table 14 How do you consider the local variety? 226 Table 15 Readers of newspapers and magazines 237 Table 16 Institutions identified as promoting the Aragonese language 273 Table 17 The future of the Aragonese language by age group 289 LIST OF GRAPHS Page Graph 1 Male and female participants 137 Graph 2 Participants divided by age 138 Graph 3 Demand for autonomical expansion based on political party voted 142 Graph 4 Aragonese identification 143 Graph 5 Aragonese identification and political party voted 148 Graph 6 Political scale and vote 156 Graph 7 Is the language spoken in Ayerbe similar to the language in Alto Aragon? 162 Graph 8 Alto Aragon own language 169 Graph 9 Are Aragonese and Fabla the same? 172 Graph 10 Is there another linguistic variety in Ayerbe? 185 Graph 11 Do you understand it? 190 Graph 12 Do you know how to speak it? 192 Graph 13 Do you know how to read it? 194 Graph 14 Do you know how to write it? 196 Graph 15 Association of the linguistic variety used in Ayerbe 202 Graph 16 How many people speak the local variety? 205 Graph 17 How many people know the local variety? 207 Graph 18 Reasons for absence of intergenerational transmission 212 Graph 19 Vernacular language use in cultural tradition 220 Graph 20 Would you like to conserve the local traditions in the vernacular language? 223 Graph 21 Book ownership 231 Graph 22 Books in Aragonese 234 Graph 23 Aragonese newspaper and magazine readership 240 Graph 24 Audio consumption 245 Graph 25 Audio consumption in Aragonese 246 Graph 26 Have you heard of “aragonés común”? 258 Graph 27 Opinion on a common written Aragonese language 260 Graph 28 What do you think of “aragonés común”? 262 Graph 29 Have you read texts in “aragonés común”? 263 Graph 30 Have you written texts in “Aragonés común”? 264 Graph 31 Do you speak “aragonés común”? 265 Graph 32 Identification of standard Aragonese with local variety 267 Graph 33 Need for a standard Aragonese 269 Graph 34 Knowledge of institutions that promote Aragonese 272 Graph 35 Use of Aragonese in signs 277 Graph 36 Official protection of standard Aragonese 283 Graph 37 The future of the Aragonese language 287 Graph 38 Should there be papers or magazines written in Aragonese? 293 Graph 39 Presence of Aragonese in radio and television 299 Graph 40 How should the teaching of Aragonese be in Alto Aragon? 306 LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1 Dialects of Aragonese ................................................................................................... 89 Figure 2 Map of Ayerbe and surrounding area.......................................................................... 164 Figure 3 Xigantes poem ............................................................................................................. 221 Figure 4 Incorrect Aragonese spelling in signage ..................................................................... 276 GENERAL INTRODUCTION Aragon is a region found in the north east of Spain, it has borders with Catalonia to the east, Navarra and the Basque country to the west, Valencia and Guadalajara to the south and the Pyrenees and France to the north. In Aragon, two vernacular languages coexist with Spanish, which is the national language used by the majority of the population. Catalan is spoken along the longitudinal east section that borders with Catalonia and Aragonese is spoken mostly in the northern Pyrenean valleys. The geographical context of the Aragonese language is defined by the relative isolation of these Pyrenean valleys and their traditional separation from the urban environments. Aragon has not always been identified as a linguistic minority community. There are some languages in the Spanish peninsula like Catalan that have been described as a minority (and minorised), regional and national language. Aragonese on the other hand, although it is the language spoken in one of the regions in Spain, struggles first of all to be recognised as a language, cannot be fully identified as a regional language since it is mostly known and used in Alto Aragon and thus most people in Aragon would not identify Aragonese as their regional language, (in fact there would be many people in Teruel, the southern most province in the region, who would struggle to identify it among other languages) and only a few would consider it as a national language. However, it is a minority language according to the classification provided by Daoust: ‘A sophisticated concept of linguistic minority takes into account not only geographic distribution, but also ethnic, sociocultural, and political factors, as well as the resulting sociolinguistic status’1 1Denise Daoust, ‘Language Planning and Language Reform’ in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. by Florian Coulmas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 443. 1 For that reason, if all those factors are taken into account, as we will see in Part I of this study, then Aragonese can be considered a minority language. Aragonese is an endangered language. The last linguistic census in Aragon was completed in 1981 so the data is now quite old and it is difficult to know the exact number of current speakers of Aragonese. However, it is clear that many of those speakers who took part in the census would have died by now and, as we will see later in the analysis of the questionnaire, the number of young people who learn the language is very small.