The use and role of Catalan in the Gypsy community of Tarragona’s Old Town: linguistic practices and attitudes of a group of teenagers

Abstract

This paper analyses the attitudes, uses and roles assigned to Catalan and Spanish by a group of teenagers belonging to the Gypsy community of Tarragona’s Old Town. The members of this community are mainly Catalan speakers and the speech of the oldest members is characterised by the features specific to the Tarragonan subdialect of Catalan and by influences of the language of Catalan gypsies (Caló) on their vocabulary. The new generations of Catalan gypsies of Tarragona have grown up in a sociolinguistic environment marked by differences with respect to previous generations and this has affected this group’s use of languages, including a progressive loss of Tarragonan subdialect and Caló features in favour of standard Catalan, a Catalan-Spanish linguistic hybridisation, and the assignment of different roles to each of these languages. Some possible causes of the new sociolinguistic framework in which these Gypsy teenagers live are postulated.

Keywords: Gypsies, Tarragona, Tarragonan Catalan subdialect, Caló, linguistic attitudes, linguistic behaviours, linguistic change, ethnolinguistic vitality.