Dominant and non-dominant varieties in Catalan: past, present and future

Abstract This article attempts to answer the question “How did educated Catalan-speaking young people and adults from Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country rate the central Catalan, north-western Catalan and Valencian standard modalities between 2015 and 2024?” The hypothesis was that speakers of central Catalan and those of Balearic, north-western Catalan and Valencian still considered central Catalan to be the dominant variety but did not hold any especially negative views of the other varieties. To check that hypothesis, we analysed the data from a sample of 197 educated speakers who answered a survey designed using the open-guise technique. Grouped by the components of status, solidarity and dynamism, the results were compared to those obtained from five previous works (2015–2023), so we now have a broad, diverse state of play in terms of methods and results that could prove useful for future studies. In accordance with the aim of the special issue, and after contextualising our results within previous literature and explaining the situation regarding the standardisation of Catalan (codification, implementation and functional elaboration), we compiled a considerable number of proposals for reducing the linguistic insecurity felt by non-central Catalan speakers. This feeling has undergone a long process since the beginning of the codification of Catalan (1913–1933), with a monocentric and only incipiently compositional and pluricentric codification. The Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), for the sole fact of prohibiting the use of Catalan, slowed down the development of compositionality and pluricentrism. With the recovery of the autonomy of the Catalan-speaking territories of the Spanish State (circa 1980), the Institute of Catalan Studies claims it carries out a monocentric codification of and the Valencian Academy of the Language a pluricentric one. The challenge of a intralinguistic justice is now the pluricentric implementation and elaboration.