How is the Catalan language treated in the Spanish and Catalan press?
Last Tuesday 25th of April, a report funded by the Càtdera Pompeu Fabra and done from the UOC and the Càtdera UNESCO de Polítiques Lingüístiques per al Multilingüisme where the speeches about multilingualism in the Spanish media were analyzed was presented at the Pompeu fabra University. The two speakers and authors of the report were Vicent Climent-Ferrando and Albert Morales Moreno.
In this report, the speeches about subjects related with the Spanish language and its relation with the other languages spoken in Spain of 7 different newspapers have been analyzed. A corpus made of thousands of words used in a 7 year period of time have been done in order to see which words are the most used in every newspaper and what the differences between them mean.
The context has been very important in this report, specially the social and political one, because of the situation with the presence of a separatist movement in Catalonia and the judicialisation of the language policies about the presence of the Catalan language in the education system of the region. This specific situation influences in how the newspapers treat the news related with the coexistence of Spanish with the other official languages, depending on where their ideology is situated in the political spectrum.
Both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis have led to preliminary conclusions that have highlighted the differences in the treatment of news on multilingualism in Spain between the Catalan and Spanish press. While the Catalan press covers almost exclusively news related to Catalan in all of the Catalan-speaking territories (Catalonia, the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands) and does so in a way that is generally defensive of the policies adopted by the autonomous governments, the Spanish press generally covers only news related to Catalonia (and more frequently those related to the presence of Catalan in education) and does so with a point of view in which Spanish is considered as the common and cohesive language and co-official languages such as Catalan or Basque are considered as "imposed" languages due to the linguistic policies of promotion and use of these languages.
However, the research should not end at this point, because the speakers have finished their presentation stating that it is necessary to continue with the research and having a systematic and permanent analysis in order to have a clear image of what happens in our society and how it can influence the people exposed to this news.
To learn more, you can check the original report made by the Càtedra Pompeu Fabra in the following link: