Sport radio live broadcasts and their contribution to the Catalan linguistic standardization process

Abstract

On September 5, 1976, the journalist Joaquim Maria Puyal did the first live football radio broadcast in Catalan (on Radio Barcelona) after 40 years of the Franco dictatorship. That event was the beginning of a new model of live sports radio broadcasts in Catalan, which was followed by broadcasts by other Catalan sports journalists. The aim of this paper is to analyze the contribution of those pioneers to the process of the Catalan linguistic standardization. We approach the use of narrative writing as a method, considering nine experiences of those journalists. On the basis of this research, it may be understood that these journalists made a big effort to recover genuine Catalan linguistic structures and habits, in order not to follow symmetric parallelisms with the Spanish language structures when they narrated a sports event.

KEYWORDS: oral history; live radio broadcast; Catalan; sport; linguistic normalization; linguistic habits.