16 October 2019

Painting a picture of obsolescence: Attitudes, variation and discourse in Northern Catalonia

James Hawkey

In my presentation, I intend to give a detailed sociolinguistic overview of an ongoing situation of language obsolescence, namely that of Catalan in southern France. I adopt a broad focus, encompassing methods from social psychology, sociophonetics and discourse analysis in order to provide answers to a series of research questions that delve into the interactions between attitudes, behaviours and ideologies. This talk will present and discuss results from a language attitudes questionnaire, a wordlist translation task, and a series of interviews. I will show that attitudes can function as predictors of language variation, but will also foreground the importance of basing any empirical analysis on qualitative findings. Through the integration of quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques, I seek to offer the most holistic and accurate representation of the speech community under investigation, thus allowing us all to learn about Catalan in France today.