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Negotiating the Standard in Contemporary Galicia 5

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Negotiating the Standard in Contemporary Galicia 5 5 Negotiating the Standard in Contemporary Galicia Bernadette O’Rourke1 profesora: Vale, veña. Mellor comezamos a primeira clase, si? Abran o libro polo tema un, que é o de saúdos e . tedes un exemplo aí que pon “como está vostede, cabaleiro?” maruxa: Pero, perdoa, isto non era un curso de ghallegho? profeora: Si, claro. xosé: Usté perdoe, pero eso non é ghallegho! Ghallegho é o que falamos nós, o “de toda a vida” e iso non se lle parece NADITA! profesora: Xa pero é que, vós, empregades un rexistro así como . máis coloquial. maruxa: Coloquial, carallo! Nós falamos ighual de bien que o presidente da Xunta. teacher: Ok, come on. Let’s get started with the fi rst class. Open the book on theme one which deals with greetings and . you have an example there that says, “how are you, sir?” maruxa: But, sorry, I thought this was a Ghalician [Galician] class? teacher: Yes, of course. xosé: Excuse me but that is not Ghalician! Ghalician is what we speak, for our whole lives, and this is not like it AT ALL! teacher: Yes, but you see, you use a type of register that is like . more colloquial. maruxa: Colloquial, my ass! We speak just as good as the President of the Xunta [the Galician Government]. (Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/21254827, all translations my own) 1. Introduction This excerpt is part of a longer sketch taken from an internet television com- edy programme entitled Non saimos do lixo (literally ‘We cannot get out of trash’). The programme was put together by a group of Galician language activists whose aim is to satirise contemporary sociopolitical issues affect- ing Galician society. The particular programme from which this excerpt is taken comes from a longer series of sketches on lingua (meaning lan- guage in Galician). While to some extent exaggerated for comic effect, this sketch captures the tensions which have emerged in the context of language standardisation policies in Galicia since the 1980s. The sketch satirises the Negotiating the Standard in Galicia 85 normalisation process, where the official standard—galego normativo— often does not reflect the everyday communication practices of certain Galician speakers. This sketch sets the scene for this chapter, in which I will discuss the current metalinguistic discourse around Galician and its speak- ers in contemporary Galicia and analyse how different social actors relate to the standard. While galego normativo is used and to a large extent accepted in the area of education and the media, tensions continue to exist and can be detected in the way different social actors talk about galego normativo and how it is sometimes used to give legitimacy to some speakers and not to others. For whom then does standard Galician hold value? For whom does it not? What aspects of the standard are contested and debated by different Galician social actors on the ground? To answer these questions, I draw on data from various fieldwork trips to Galicia since the early 2000s, in which I explored what Galician means to contemporary Galicians. This field work included interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation involving a range of social actors at various fieldwork sites including schools, cultural associations and alternative bars. Questions relating to galego normativo formed part of many of the accounts I collected, sometimes emerging natu- rally in conversation and at other times through direct questioning. I also draw on non-elicited accounts about galego normativo which I observed. Certain aspects of the data have been analysed in more detail elsewhere (O’Rourke and Ramallo 2013; 2015). In this chapter, I revisit some of this data, focusing specifically on instances in which debates around galego normativo came to the fore. In what follows, I piece together select obser- vations from this eclectic set of resources to help understand the social con- sequences of standardisation in contemporary Galicia. I begin with a brief overview of the historical context in which Galician standardisation has emerged (section 2), before turning to several of the factors which com- plicate this endeavour. Considering the impacts of the standard on social actors, I examine how ideologies of authenticity compete with the authority that the standard represents (section 3) and illustrate differing perspectives among native speakers (section 3.1), new speakers (section 3.2) and adoles- cent learners (3.3). Additionally, I show how some actors continue to debate and resist standardising influences (section 4) and conclude with reflections on the future of standardisation in Galicia (section 5). 2. Language Standardisation and Normalisation in Galicia Galician, like Spain’s other minority languages, including Basque and Catalan, underwent major policy changes coinciding with Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, and these policy changes brought the use of Galician into public and institutional spheres. This, in turn, led to signifi- cant changes to the way in which Galicians came to perceive and use the language. Historically, Galician and its speakers had come to be associated 86 Bernadette O’Rourke with rurality, a lack of education and poverty. Spanish, in contrast was the language of authority, power and upward mobility and the language of the upper classes and urbanites. As Álvarez Cáccamo (1993) notes, in post- Franco Spain, political discourses on Galicianhood (re)constituted Galicians as new social subjects within the Spanish State and created new technical discourses on language and linguistic identity. In 1981, residents of Galicia successfully completed a long-standing bid for recognition as a distinct and autonomous community within the Spanish state. With the passing of the Estatuto de Autonomía de Galicia (Galician Statute of Autonomy) (1981), Galicians were granted the autonomous sta- tus that they had originally proposed in 1936, prior to the civil war and Franco dictatorship. The statute named Galician and Spanish as the offi- cial languages of the Galician Autonomous Community. Subsequently, the 1983 Lei de Normalizacion Linguistica (Law on Linguistic Normalisation) laid out steps for standardising official Galician, and recognised the Real Academia Galega (Galician Royal Academy) as the ultimate authority on the ‘correct’ use of Galician: Nas cuestións relativas á normativa, actualización e uso correcto da lin- gua galega, estimarase como criterio de autoridade o establecido pola Real Academia Galega. Esta normativa será revisada en función do pro- ceso de normalización do uso do galego. In questions related to the standard, revisions and correct use of the Galician language, the form set out by the Galician Royal Academy is seen as the criterion for authority. This standard will be revised in line with the process of normalisation of Galician language use. (Lei de Normalizacion Linguistica 1983) Galician language advocates argued that Galician was evidence of their distinct nationality and was fully capable of functioning as a modern language. They sought to facilitate this modernisation by developing a set of standardised norms which would align it with contemporary life and raise the status of the language and, in turn, its speakers. Standardisation was part of a broader process of corpus planning which involved the elaboration of terminologies to respond to expanding domains of language use (Monteagudo 1999). The development of galego normativo formed part of a new technical discourse about language linked to the larger process of normalización lingüística (linguistic normalisation), driven by its newly ascribed role as a co-official language with Spanish and its regulation by the Galician Royal Academy (Beswick 2007). The concept of normalisation is specific to the Spanish context. The term itself was coined by Catalan sociolin- guists, Aracil, Ninyoles and Valverdú (Mar-Molinero 2000), and came to be used as a model for language planners within Catalonia itself, as well as in Galicia and the Basque Country. While the concept is widely used in the Negotiating the Standard in Galicia 87 Spanish context by academics, policy makers and even among the general public, the way in which the term has come to be understood and inter- preted across and among these different groups has varied. This has led to the confusing array of technical as well as common sense meanings linked to the term. In the past, in much of Spanish linguistic terminology, the terms normalización and normativización tended to appear in discussions around the process of language normalisation. Normalización was used to refer to the extension of a standardised language to all areas of public life and as such corresponded to the concept of status planning commonly used in English-language terminology (Cooper 1989; Kloss 1969). Normativización referred to the selection and codification of a standard language and was more directly related to the concept of corpus planning in the terminology used in English. However, normalización now tends to be used to encom- pass both the status and corpus elements of language planning in line with Williams’s (1988) suggestions that language is a seamless web and that dis- tinctions between status and corpus elements are artificial. Galego normativo, particularly in the early years of language policy in Galicia, was the subject of bitter debate and led to ongoing divisions within Galician activist groups and proponents of the language (Lorenzo Suárez 2008). Much of the debate centred round two ideological camps— reintegrationists and isolationists. For reintegrationists, or lusistas, the goal of contemporary language normalisation has involved the progressive adopting of Portuguese as the standard language in Galicia. This argument is based on the idea that historically, Galician and Portuguese were the same language and that the distancing between the two was the result of language contact between Galician and Spanish. They have argued for the alignment of Galician with Portuguese on the basis that Portuguese is classified as a major world language and thus increases the potential of Galician to become elevated to that status.
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