The bilingualization process in Catalonia in the 20th century based on oral testimonies

Abstract

This paper presents the initial results of an investigation which includes 55 testimonies of people born before 1930, explaining in the first person their personal accounts of how and when they learnt Spanish. School became an element crucial to an understanding of the success of the process, despite a low oral proficiency in Spanish among the great majority of the informants before the rise of Francoism. Before the dictatorship, the informants considered Spanish an academic language since it was hardly ever used in their daily environment. In this respect, the interviewees illustrate how they experienced the process of bilingualism from two different parallel perspectives, either as a matter of course or by a critical look at their lives.

Keywords: bilingualization, monolingualism, school, linguistic competence, linguistic attitudes.