Story 1: Catalan and Castilian in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s

Pilar (not her real name) grew up in Catalonia, with a Spanish-speaking father and a Catalan-speaking mother. She now lives in Sweden.

Listen to Pilar's experiences

Pilar grew up in the countryside in the border area of La Franja in Catalonia with her three sisters. She was raised speaking Catalan to her mother and Castilian Spanish to her father, who moved with his family from southern Spain at the age of 18. The girls spoke Spanish together, and while Pilar was aware that this made them different from their friends, it proved impossible to change the system they had established:

Yes, actually I tried once to speak Catalan with my youngest sister. We decided to try to speak Catalan among ourselves because Catalan was the language mostly spoken at school. We noticed a difference, and we didn’t want to stand out. So we said we were going to speak Catalan, but we lasted two minutes, because it didn’t feel as if I was talking to my sister. The sense of strangeness was huge I guess.

Pilar is satisfied with her upbringing with two languages, clearly separated with the OPOL method. She returns to the strong association she has between the language chosen and the relationship between speakers.

I think it was quite balanced because my Mum always used Catalan and my Dad refused to use Catalan, so there was no confusion. But he did understand Catalan. So it’s not like he was left out. We would speak Spanish, but as kids, we felt the difference, living in a village, where most people spoke Catalan. I didn’t normally mind, and it just didn’t come out, speaking Catalan with my Dad. Because it wouldn’t be my Dad if we spoke Catalan.

The Catalan spoken in La Franja is influenced by Spanish. Pilar thinks this has increased language mixing, in this widely bilingual population.

Well apart from the phonetics which are quite different [from standard Catalan], for the vocabulary I felt that there was a strong influence of Spanish into the Catalan that was spoken in the playground. […] In Catalan it is very easy to have influence from Spanish to Catalan and Catalan to Spanish, especially in the area where I come from. I remember learning some words I would never use, like the Catalan word for carpet, which has nothing to do with the Spanish one. […] Like in the playground, no one would use the Catalan word for carpet, everybody would use a Catalanized version of the Spanish word. […] But that would be called a barbarism. We wouldn’t drift between languages. It wouldn’t be acceptable to put a Spanish word into Catalan.

Because of her mixed family background she feels more proficient in Spanish than some of her classmates and now, living outside Spain, Catalan is not the only language she uses:

They say it makes it easier to learn other languages if you are bilingual. I don’t know to what extent it is true, but I think you have more resources. I have noticed that when learning Italian, for example. And I haven’t studied French, but I can read French if it’s not very specialized text. [I speak] Spanish and Catalan of course, English, Swedish, Italian and German. […] Sometimes I think of a word in English instead of Catalan.