Johannes Kabatek

Universität Freiburg im Breisgau

The 'orientalization' of Northwestern Catalan and the question of the standard

When Pompeu Fabra, the father of standard Catalan, tried to convince the Catalan people that the future of their language should become what he called "el futur parlar de la futura capital de Catalònia!", he defined it as a result of a mixture between the dialect of Barcelona, the language of literature and all the other Catalan dialects, and as a result of purification from Castilian influence:

una compenetració s'aniria operant entre la llengua literària i el llenguatge de la capital - no el barceloní d'avui dia, sinó un barceloní tot altre, deslliurat de castellanismes, influenciat per tots els altres parlars catalans, enriquit, refinat (Fabra 1907/1980, 106¹).

Fabra always insisted that the basis for the Catalan standard should be a koiné between all the Catalan varieties and not the language of a certain place.

In fact, the "official" linguistic ideology defended by the IEC and other normalizing institutions such as TV 3 is to promote pluri-dialectalism and a "polynomic"² model of the standard. However, in recent years, several Catalan linguists have observed an ongoing "centralization" (or, from the viewpoint of Western Catalan, an "orientalization") of the Catalan language. Contrasting with the ideal of polynomy and linguistic pluralism (above all in the mass media), the introduction of Eastern Catalan morphology and phonetic features have been observed in Nothwestern dialects³. In fact, it seems that Barcelona is inevitably advancing and expanding its standard as a clear center of linguistic gravity. Now, the question to be treated in my paper is if the "orientalization" is just an adoption of traditional Barcelonian features in other regions or if the "New Barcelona" rather differs from the traditional dialect of Barcelona, too. Having a look at some morphological features and the so-called "vocal neutre", I will try to defend this last assumption.