The ideological construction of legitimacy for pluricentric standards: Occitan and Catalan in France

Abstract

In Bourdieusian theory, the use of so-called ‘legitimate’ language serves to maintain dominant power structures, with ‘legitimacy’ determined by an array of economic and social conditions inherent in speech communities. Standard languages function as normalised products and are imbued with a greater degree of legitimacy than non-standard varieties due to the Standard Language Ideology (SLI). This leads us to question what happens when a non-dominant language seeks to acquire greater legitimacy and prestige. Can standardisation increase legitimacy for varieties subjected to centuries of political and ideological subordination? What then happens to minority languages when there is not one clear standard, but rather a pluricentric situation with competing solutions? We examine speaker testimonies regarding the standardisation of Occitan and Catalan in France. We show that the discursive construction of legitimacy for standard varieties is contingent on the ideological creation of linguistic difference. We conclude that the application of the SLI to non-dominant language varieties results in the complex renegotiation of value in the Bourdieusian ‘linguistic market’, which is clearly attestable at the individual, discursive level. We recommend that attempts to subvert existing hegemony and challenge social order need to address underlying ideologies held by minority language speakers.

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