The attraction of the Valencians towards Valencian: Reasons for and scope of the language shift in two middle-sized cities

Abstract

In this article we study the new speakers of Valencian in two middle-sized regional capitals: Xàtiva and Gandia. We approached the study of native speakers who learned to speak Spanish in their family home, but later decided to use Valencian in their daily lives. The existence of this type of speaker reflects the coexistence of two linguistic processes that are taking place right now in some middle-sized cities of the Valencian Country: the interruption of the transmission of Valencian that was carried out in the previous generation and its inversion or recovery through linguistic normalization. Based on four interviews with native Valencians – those of our corpus who acknowledged this language shift – we investigate the reasons for and the timing and scope of this change. We find that some of the factors that condition and facilitate the language shift are a change of school, a change of academic situation and, especially, the beginning of new social relations with Valencian speakers. The political factor, rather than the identity, favors a change in personal language that is sometimes made with the will to contribute to social change.

Keywords: new speakers, Valencian, middle-sized cities, ideologies, identity.