Bourdieu and the economics of language in Catalonia

Abstract

This article first reviews Pierre Bourdieu’s influential theory of the economics of linguistic exchanges and of the role of linguistic and symbolic capital in social reproduction. It raises questions that remain unaddressed about the theory’s universality, its emphasis on schooling as the nexus for converting different forms of capital into symbolic capital, and its failure to consider the separate effects of economic and political/institutional power on linguistic capital when linguistic markets are not fully integrated. The second part of the article brings empirical evidence from Catalonia to bear on those questions. An overview of findings of economic and ethnographic/ experimental research on language in autonomous Catalonia suggests that, pace Bourdieu, changes in language policy and individual linguistic practices appear to diminish in some concrete ways the pre-existing economic and social distinctions between ethnolinguistic groups.