Linguistic choices in an electoral debate: The struggle for linguistic anonymity

Abstract

This paper explores the linguistic choices of various political candidates based on a quantitative analysis of the interventions in a debate held by TV3 on the occasion of the elections for the Spanish Parliament on November 10, 2019. The linguistic ideologies of the different political parties are studied on the basis of their electoral program and the influence of other factors such as audience design, language loyalty or language convergence in order to determine what conditions linguistic choice in a highly polarized and mediated context. The results show that a turning point was reached in the use of Catalan as the hegemonic, principal and anonymous language in political debate in Catalonia with the emergence of forces that claim Spanish to be the anonymous language, rejecting Catalan as a common language.