Joan Pujolar

New speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity – Foreword

In this special issue we examine and reflect upon the emergence of “new speak ers” in the context of some of Europe’s minority languages. The “new speaker” label is used here to describe individuals with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual educational programs, revitalization projects or as adult language learners. The emergence of this profile of speaker draws our attention to the ways in which minority linguistic communities are changing because of globalization and the new profiles of speakers that this new social order is creating. The concept also focuses our attention on some of the fundamental principles which had for a long time been taken for granted in much sociolinguistic research and in particular, language planning associated with linguistic revitalization (O’Rourke and Pujolar 2013). The authors of the eight articles included in this issue engage with these issues through their analyses of new speaker communities across a variety of European contexts including the Basque Country, Brittany, Catalonia, Corsica, Galicia, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Occitania.

Linguistic mudes: how to become a new speaker in Catalonia

Abstract New speakers of Catalan have come to represent, from a demolinguistic perspective, a substantial part of the community of speakers. Of those who presently speak Catalan as an “habitual language”, 41.6 percent are native speakers of Spanish. In this article, we shall follow up the various ways in which native Castilian speakers incorporate Catalan into their lives. This happens, as we will show, in specific biographical junctures that we call mudes, a Catalan term referring to (often reversible) variations in social performance. Our analysis is based on a qualitative study that included 24 interviews and 15 focus groups covering a total of 105 people of different sexes and linguistic, educational, social and residential backgrounds. We shall give a general overview of these mudes as we typified them: when subjects entered primary school, secondary school, the university, the job market, when creating a new family and when they had children (if they did). The study of linguistic mudes provides, in our view, a new and productive perspective on how people develop their linguistic repertoire, their attachment to specific languages and the significance of these aspects for social identity. It facilitates a processual, time-sensitive analysis that allows to contextualise and critique ethnonationalist discourses that have often saturated our understanding of language use.

New speakers and processes of new speakerness across time and space

The theorizing and conceptualization of the new speaker label first emerged from discussions amongst a small group of researchers working on some of Europe’s lesser-used languages including Catalan (Pujolar 2007; Pujolar and Gonzàlez 2013), Galician (O’Rourke and Ramallo 2011 and O’Rourke and Ramallo 2013) and Irish (O’Rourke 2011). These are languages which were revitalized with some measure of success as a result of more favourable language policies, but which faced the consequent problem of social differentiation between firstand second-language speakers, and tensions over ownership of and legitimate language rights. While these problems have often tended to be unforeseen by language advocates and policymakers, they have been encountered so often in different minority language revitalization contexts, that there came to be an underlying recognition amongst many researchers, that they should be theorized and examined more schematically. This discussion was extended to include other minority languages in Europe such as Breton, Occitan, Manx and Corsican, leading to a full special issue relating to new speakers of minority languages (see O’Rourke et al. 2015). In all these contexts, there was a growing awareness amongst sociolinguists and policy makers that the success of language revitalization initiatives was having contradictory and paradoxical effects within the community. These effects were based on long-held assumptions and ideologies about language, identity and authenticity in which the concept of the “native speaker” played a pivotal role. The airing of the new speaker label as a research concept at international fora also led to connections with scholars working in other multilingual