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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Catalan Sociolinguistics

subject

description

Humans learned to talk a thousand years ago, but our written abilities are more modern. Technological progress—from writing to digitalization—have crucially changed the way we communicate with each other. Yet, research about linguistic uses, which happens under the area of sociolinguistics, is only a modern phenomenon. In fact, the concept sociolinguistics was only coined in 1949. In the Catalan culture, the first sociolinguistic studies took the form of anti-Franco essays. It was only during the late 1960s that these essays took a sociological dimension thanks to Lluís-Vicent Aracil and Rafael-Lluís Ninyoles. Nowadays, in a context of increasing multidisciplinary approaches, Catalan sociolinguistic studies have become a hybrid field. For the discipline, the main challenge that lies ahead is how find its own perspective and how to incorporate theoretical and methodological tools without eroding the goal of sustaining a collective identity, which is the ultimate purpose that led to its foundation.