Discursive constructions on Spanish languages: towards overcoming

the conflict framework1

Esperanza Morales-López
Universidade da Coruña

11-3-2019

The analysis of the different ideological constructions around the Spanish languages
shows that there are two main metaphors that support the "framework of the conflict"
experienced in the last three or four decades: the container metaphor (languages
conceived as entities that are completely independent of each other) and the ecological
metaphor (each language occupies a specific niche for historical reasons). Studies of
complexity provide new metaphors, such as the eco-sociobiology metaphor, which is
based on the assumption that what is human cannot be explained exclusively by
biological factors, but instead by communicative action in cooperation with others
above all. To illustrate these metaphors, in this paper we consider the linguistic position
of two new parties: En Marea and En Comú-Podem.

Key words: Ideological constructions, constructivism, critical discourse analysis,

linguistic ideologies, bilingualism, Catalan, Galician, Spanish, Spanish languages, En
Marea, En Comú-Podem, post-15M discourses.

“Conflict is antisocial because it always involves "a mutual negation.”

(Maturana and Varela 1991: 246).

1. Introduction

1
This paper is part of the project “The discursive construction of the conflict”, financed
by MINECO and Feder Funds FFI2017-85227-R http://cei.udc.es

1
My objective is to show how it might be useful to approach bilingualism in Spain from a
constructivist discursive perspective, contrasting the different ideological constructions
("linguistic ideologies", in Schieffelin et al. 2012) that have emerged from the discourses
on this subject in recent decades. In my opinion, a new approach to this bilingualism is
required, since these constructions have produced a constant tension between its planners
and opposing ideological groups, which is also transferred to its users. The result is what
could be called the "framework of the conflict".
According to Wiley (1996, 106), "although language planning frequently attempts
to solve conflicts over language, it can also result in creating conflicts… Some of the
more common causes of conflicts occur during periods of rapid social and demographic
change". Many things have happened in Spain in the last fifty years, including those
affecting the recognition of minority languages; this has contributed to the restitution of
historical rights. However, in most cases their implementation has not been free of
conflicts, some of which have intensified in recent years. My purpose in this research is
to approach this subject from the perspective of a constructivist and critical discursive
analysis (like other researchers, e.g. Heller 2011; Blommaert and Verschueren 2012;
Verchueren 2012; Woolard 1989, 2016), which may be complementary to the traditional
sociolinguistics approach.

2. Constructivism: Vico and White

Among others, one starting point in the constructivist perspective could be that of the
humanist Vico. In his book New Science, he justifies his interest in the study of the
genealogy of human wisdom in the following way:

“This science began from the moment when the first men began to think in a human
way, rather than when philosophers began to reflect on human ideas... For in these,
as in embryos or matrices, we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom.
And it may be said that in the fables the nations have, in a rough way and in the
language of the human senses, described the beginnings of this world of sciences,
which the specialized studies of scholars have since clarified for us by reasoning
and generalization. From all this we may conclude what we set out to show in this

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 [second] book: that the theological poets were the sense and the philosophers the
intellect of human wisdom” (Vico 1744, ¶ 375, 404 and 779).

Vico considers that there are two forms of knowledge: the original form of fables (poetic
logic) and the more abstract knowledge of philosophers (which appeared at a later stage
in human genealogy). It is typical of poetic logic to resort to the trope of metaphor, for its
function of analogy to understand new realities through other known and sensitive
realities (Vico 1744, ¶ 122 and 236). When we read Vico, we realize the debt Lakoff and
Johnson owe (1980) to this humanist.
Another important author in constructivist epistemology is Hayden White, who
studies this discipline from Vico's tropological perspective. I consider the following
excerpt to be relevant to the purpose of this study:

“In this theory I consider the historical work … [as] a verbal structure in the form
of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well)
combine a certain amount of “data”, theoretical concepts for “explaining” these data
and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of sets of events presumed
to have occurred in times past. In addition, I maintain, that they contain a deep
structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature,
and which serves as precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively
“historical” explanation should be. This paradigm functions as a “metahistorical”
element in all historical works that are more comprehensive in scope than the
monograph or archival report…
On this level, I believe the historian performs an essential poetic act… I called these
types of prefiguration by the names of the four tropes of poetic language: Metaphor,
Metonymy, Sinechdoque, and Irony” (Hayden White 1973, ix-x).

As seen above, White makes a distinction between events (data that occurred), facts (the
meaning of what happened) and plot (or narrative through the use of certain tropes). From
the constructivist perspective of these two authors, any kind of knowledge about the facts
of reality (events, in White's sense) is a construction of subjects by means of narratives
created from tropological resources; the most important for Vico is the metaphor. These
narratives offer a specific meaning of the data, thus constructing facts according to the
personal vision of the authors and their historical moment.

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 White, in his book Metahistory (1973), dedicated to the analysis of the variations
of historiography in the 19th century, shows the different variations of historians in the
face of identical events. This leads him to wonder about a crucial aspect in historical
narrative: the one of truth. Since it is not possible for him to speak in terms of truth or
falsehood in the narrative construction of history, he wonders how to avoid the relativism
to which this conclusion would lead. His solution is to rely on the ethics and aesthetics of
these discourses as a way of assessing their suitability (see also White 2017).

3. Languages from constructivism

According to Woolard (2012: 19), linguistic ideologies are explicit or implicit

representations, which interpret the relationship between language and human beings in
the social world (see also del Valle 2013). From our constructivist point of view, we could
also consider these representations, following White, as diverse narratives about
languages and their relationship with each other; in other words, as narratives that emerge
from the various discourses that have been constructed in our socio-cultural context (also
Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008: 11). Our initial hypothesis is that the following two
ideological constructions emerge in the sphere of bilingualism in Spain.

3.1. The container metaphor

According to this construction, languages are perceived as products of the “mind”; either
in the Saussurian perspective: language as a code which allows the transference of ideas
from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer (Harris 2001: 196); or understood
in terms of cognitive theory: language as a computational device; as a coupling of
different levels, internalised in the speaker's brain.
This mentalist perspective is also present in Sapir and Worf's hypothesis of
linguistic relativity, in the sense that reality is analysed in accordance with the mental
categories imposed upon it and us by our native language (Harris 2001: 208-9).
From this metaphor, bilingualism or multilingualism have been understood in our
context as the ability to have various independent “recipients”, although they may be
interconnected in some processes and/or levels. The function of communication is to
activate language’s cognitive capacity through linguistic input, and the role of institutions

4
is to contribute to its preservation and/or development (i.e. in education, media, etc.)
while always maintaining clear boundaries.
The consequence of this metaphor has finally, as mentioned earlier, the
consideration of each language as a product of the mind, a cognitive universe in itself,
which can even bring a different view of the world to its users. This position can even
date back to the hypothesis of linguistic relativism and even earlier, to the romantic
authors (Peled 2012; Escavy Zamora 2018: 145-148). With it, we approach the
ideological construction of the following metaphor.

3.2. The ecolinguistic metaphor

Languages are part of ecosystems, in the same way as cells, pluricellular organisms,
whether or not they are grouped in colonies or societies, etc. Languages (majority and
minority) are the result of groupings of individuals of the same species. And all of them
need to be preserved under equal conditions (Calvet and Varela 2000: 49). For authors
like Heller (2002: 179), this ecological perspective has replaced the nationalist ideology,
although it remains at the core (i.e. the ideal of “one nation, one language”, advocated by
philosophers such as Herder, Rousseau and Stuart Mill, according to Peled 2012: 73).
The effects of this metaphor could lead to the narrative of conflict, although these
effects would also be a consequence of the metaphor of the recipient: each language is a
container independent and well-defined with regard to the others, and therefore occupies
its own niche. There is a conflict in spaces where there is social multilingualism (this is
what del Valle, 2000, calls "the plot of confrontation").
The inevitability of the conflict leads to the argument that it is necessary to replace
one language with another: either in an undemocratic way, as happened in the Franco era
(Moreno Cabrera 2015), or through laws based on historical rights (the “language rights
paradigm”, Blommaert 2001: 134). The concept of a territory’s “own language” arises
from adherence to this paradigm (Kraus 2015: 130; Moreno Cabrera 2015: 156; Woolard
2016: 41). In the field of education, there is discussion of a “common language”, as in the
case of an official publication by the regional government of Catalonia (Generalitat de
Catalunya 2015: 7), understood as being the language that will foster the social cohesion
of students (Woolard 2016: 255). For authors such as O'Rourke et al. (2015: 14), the
discourse of linguistic rights could be considered a type of discourse of social
emancipation, running parallel to others such as the feminist or the ecologist discourse.

5
 In my opinion, these are the two metaphorical constructions that have been the basis
of many of the discourses on the defence of Spanish languages. As constructions, they
are narratives which have been used to justify the different linguistic policies in Spain;
for many they have also become topoi on which new arguments have been built (Gal
2012: 410). However, they have also been the focus of controversies and ideological
disputes between political opponents (since the beginning of the 20th century, as
explained in Monteagudo 2013). This has led to the perpetuation of the framework of the
linguistic conflict (see an update in Lagarde 2015). Due to my experience in the two
bilingual situations I am familiar with, Galicia and Catalonia, this problem has not ceased
growing. There are recent examples that demonstrate this. I am going to discuss two of
them, one in Galicia (the case of En Marea) and the other in Catalonia (En Comú-Podem).
They are part of the discourses I have called post-15M, the subject of my research in
recent years.
The 15M is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares
of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. While
the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group showed a series
of innovative features: a) a wide-ranging criticism of Spain’s two-party system involving
the Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Popular Party (PP), the two parties responsible for our
serious economic crisis due to their indulgence of financial speculation and corruption;
b) its emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy, conveyed by
innovative slogans (Pujante and Morales-López 2013; Montesano Montesori and
Morales-López 2015). When the many assemblies held during the 15M protests had come
to an end, two major conclusions were reached: some groups opted to involve themselves
in political activities in order to bring about change (new parties and citizens’ platforms
emerged on the political stage at national and municipal levels such as Podemos, En
Comú, En Marea, etc., and managed to gain political power as a result of the different
elections held since 2015). Others chose to launch economic initiatives as an alternative
to capitalism, with the aim of showing that an economy based on cooperativism, solidarity
and a balanced environment is wholly viable (Morales-López 2017).
The reason for having chosen discursive data from these two new parties related to
the subject at hand is that both parties declare themselves to be against independence, but
they are in favour of a reform of the Spanish constitution to include recognition of the
plurinationality of the Spanish state to accept other nations (with their own language) in
addition to the Spanish nation, such as Galicia and Catalonia, among others. This be an

6
important step towards resolving one of our main problems, i.e. the territorial issue.
However, in recent years, the political crisis in Catalonia after the failed declaration of
independence in 2017, led by the pro-independence parties (in the so-called Process,
‘Procés’) has also taken a toll on the new parties analysed in this study, and not only in
Catalonia (see Woolard 2016 for the Catalan context prior to this crisis, although her data
collection ends in 2007, and the crisis studied here begins in 2008).
The radicalisation of the Process took place with the rise to power with an absolute
majority of the right-wing party PP in 2011, following the defeat of the PSOE (which lost
power due to its inability to manage the economic crisis in 2008). The PP's increasingly
centralist tendency and its severe economic cuts in Spain’s various regions led to some
Catalan parties openly turning towards independence. At the same time, the debate on
social reforms in Catalonia declined in favour of the defence of identity-based positions,
so that the former issues were completely overshadowed, despite the fact that the social
demands of the 15M in Barcelona had had major social impact. Most strikingly, two of
the pro-independence parties that declare themselves to be left-wing, Esquerra
Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and CUP, voted for the investiture of the traditional
party of the Catalan bourgeois right, Junts per Catalunya, which used its vote in the
Spanish Parliament to support the biggest cuts in social expenditure during the early years
of the PP government. Likewise, after the most recent Catalan elections, ERC and CUP
also voted in favour of the investiture of the current extreme right-wing president Quim
Torra, known for his racist statements about the emigrants who arrived in Catalonia
during the Franco era. 2
This socio-political identity context has also affected the new political groups En
Marea and En Comú-Podem. This is because these parties are actually platforms of
diverse social and political groups, decided to stand for elections together after the 15M.
Some of them are clearly against independence, others are federalists (supporters of
making Spain a federal state), but there are also groups with very close links to the pro-
independence and nationalist movements. 3 This plurality has not always been well

2
Examples of these racist views about the Spanish-speaking population are available in
https://www.elperiodico.com/es/politica/20180510/perlas-quim-torra-twitter-6810969 Another case of
ideological bias concerns school textbooks in Catalonia: http://www.ames-fps.com For the position
(sometimes very negative) of the Spanish government on this issue, see Montesano Montessori and
Morales-López 2019.
3
See a 2018 article calling for the unity of En Comú-Podem after the latest disputes:
https://amp.elperiodico.com/es/opinion/20181024/el-valor-del-bien-comun-articulo-de-joan-mena-jose-
montero-felix-alonso-7108291?__twitter_impression=true (also http://www.vnavarro.org/?p=14340). This
split in fact occurred in February 2019, when the pro-independence group abandoned the coalition. The

7
managed, which has led to some degree of ambiguity in some of their speeches on the
subject that concerns us here: the management of bilingualism. This appears to suggest
that the framework of the conflict still persists within them, and could undoubtedly
diminish the innovation involved in their creation as parties. This ambiguity is one of the
reasons for their loss of support in recent elections and in opinion polls. An obvious
example is the case of Barcelona, as we will see later.
Finally, as regards bilingualism, the social class perspective must be taken into
account in both Galicia and Catalonia. In Galicia, both the bourgeoisie and a large
proportion of the working class, including in Galician-speaking rural areas, have always
supported the majority parties advocating bilingualism: the PP and PSG (Galician
Socialist Party). The PP has generally been the party of government in Galicia. Between
2005 and 2009, the Socialists gained power, supported by the left-wing nationalist party
(the Bloque Nacionalista Galego, mainly composed of intellectuals from urban areas), but
in the subsequent elections they lost power because of the language policy more inclined
towards Galician that the nationalists wanted to impose within the coalition. The creation
of En Marea gave many left-wing people hopes of being able to achieve a political change
in the regional government.
In the government of Catalonia, the right’s hold on government has been almost
unbroken since the establishment of democracy in Spain, except for between 2003 and
2010, when a left-wing coalition (PSC, ERC and IC-Verds) took power. The working
classes (mainly immigrants and their descendants) traditionally voted for the PSC
(Catalan Socialist Party), and a minority voted for IC-Verds, while the upper middle
classes and intellectuals, voted for the most Catalan nationalist and pro-independence
groups (Woolard 2016). There is therefore a clear electoral division according to social
status, which has also been apparent in the Process (more details on this point below).
Those are the details of the Spanish political context relevant to the topic discussed
here, and they can be summarized in the following four events: the great economic crisis
of 2008, the emergence of the 15M movement in 2011, in the same year that the right-
wing party took power, and the Catalan crisis with the Process between 2012-2017. Then

media report on talks with ERC to join this party (https://m.eldiario.es/catalunya/politica/sector-comuns-

sumarse-ERC-generales_0_870713235.html). The same seems to be happening in Marea
(https://www.eldiario.es/galicia/critico-Marea-resultado-primarias-juzgado_0_850415522.html and
https://www.farodevigo.es/galicia/2019/02/19/marea-frenar-listas-28-llamadas/2054145.html).

8
it is time to begin my discursive analysis, first, with data of the Galician political party
En Marea, and second with data of En Comú-Podem.
In the city of A Coruña (Galicia), En Marea gained power in the local government
in the 2015 elections with its leader Xulio Ferreiro (Fig. 1), with a very progressive and
social programme. In the linguistic sphere, they have also advocated the revitalisation of
the use of Galician in local government, after many years of rejection of this language by
the PSG and then by the PP. In terms of linguistic rights, it is therefore a matter of “social
justice” that the use of Galician in the city has been recovered in the public space, since
a part of its population uses it in their daily lives. This is what the mayor Ferreiro said at
an event in Barcelona (September 4, 2015) with the other "mayors of change" (the
followers of the ideas of the 15M):

"We are a tide, we are a tide of change, but there is still a long way to go before
high tide... We are riding a paradox, we are entering as trespassers into an institution
that had been stolen from us, and now we have a double mission there, to make
common people stop feeling like trespassers in their own town hall, at the same
time as we maintain that status of trespassers... the people are the only reason we
are here... We are not alone, we repeat it to ourselves when we are faced with the
complexity of public administration, when we come up against those parties that
neither speak our language nor want to speak it”
(http://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/politica/venido-quedarnos-unanime-alcaldes-
cambio_0_427308228.html#video, 1h. 48 min.).

Xulio Ferreiro's narrative construction is based on the idea that En Marea is the people's
party, which has taken power at a municipal level as part of the citizen's mobilization that
emerged after the 15M movement. The metaphor of the tide activates the strength of this
movement of the working classes, which according to him, also share Galician as their
language, and which have a social effect parallel to the strength and power of the tides on
the Galician coast. However, since the two metaphorical constructions described here, the
new mayor’s decision has led to the complete disappearance of Spanish from the
municipal government, a language that continues to be used by the other two major parties
– the PP and some Socialist politicians. Thus we see the substitution of one language by
another, and therefore, the survival of the conflict, in the context of a city that also speaks

9
Spanish in its daily life. Citizenship is openly bilingual, but the municipality is unilingual
as it has always been. What has changed is the specific language of the "ecological niche".
En Marea advocates this same linguistic position in Galicia as a whole, as evidenced by
the following extract from the speech of a representative of the party in the same city, in
a round table discussion on Galician language policy, in 2016:

"We have lived through two legislatures of the PP’s Government and we believe
that the linguistic policies that have been applied in those years, regarding
language, are a huge regression, and therefore violations of the linguistic rights of
people who want to express themselves fully in their language, and also a loss for
all of Galicia’s citizens, because we consider the language to be an element of
social cohesion... The latest reports mention regression in the use of the language...
or cuts in the culture budget... This gives the idea that the language and culture are
something ornamental, and dispensable in times of crisis. For Marea this is not the
case – both the language and culture [are] a substantial part of the common good,
an instrument of development that must obviously be promoted, and we must
contribute as much as possible to their development… [C]ulture is a mechanism
of transformation towards an inclusive, educated and free society, and only from
the plurality and integration of identities... [can we] put into practice what we have
talked about concerning social cohesion, of which the language is a part" (María
Dolores Candedo, May 2016, from our audiorecording).

In this discussion, while the two main parties in Galicia, the PP and the PSG referred to
the bilingualism of Galician society, En Marea once again showed a unilinguistic vision.
For Mayor Xulio Ferreiro, Galician was the language of the common people. Now his
party colleague, activating the same framework, argued that the preceding years of
government by the Popular Party in Galicia had seen a violation of the citizens’ linguistic
rights, because they had not been given the opportunity to use it in a wider context. She
also identifies the Galician language with positive values: social cohesion, the common
good, transformation towards an inclusive, educated and free society, and the integration
of plural identities. At no time does she refer to social bilingualism, as did the
representatives of the other parties mentioned, or to the fact that this bilingualism can also
contribute to the values she mentions. She overlooks the fact that Galician-Spanish
bilingualism is a socio-cultural value and also defines Galician citizenship.

10
 It is therefore apparent how the ecological metaphor can be re-activated from her
words. The Galician society that this party imagines only seems to have room for the
Galician language. The consequence that is inferred from her words is the need to
dispense with or make Spanish invisible in order to achieve complete social welfare for
the citizens.
This leads us to ask several very specific questions. What will happen if, in the
following municipal elections (May 2019), a change takes place in the mayor's office of
the city? Will there be a return to the substitution of Galician for Spanish, given that the
problem of competition and the linguistic conflict between these groups has not yet been
solved? If this is the case, we see how the En Marea policy has not made much progress
in terms of linguistic conflict, even though there have been social achievements in other
aspects of the city’s life.
To illustrate the second case, I will refer to the case of Barcelona city council,
currently governed by another of the so-called “mayors of change”, the mayor Ada Colau
(Fig. 2). As in A Coruña, we find a political coalition En Comú-Podem that emerged from
the 15M, which managed to win the May 2015 elections and is attempting to implement
very important social innovations in the city. The problem for this party arose in the last
Catalan elections (December 21, 2017) when the majority of the working classes in the
outlying districts of Barcelona decided to give their vote to Ciudadanos (a center-right
wing party, which was created in 2005 to fight against nationalism in Catalonia) and their
leader Inés Arrimadas, as a protest after the Process. As mentioned above, traditionally,
the vote of the emigrant population in the so-called “red belt” went to the PSC (the
Catalan PSOE), but after the 15M in 2011, it supported the candidacy of Ada Colau.
Finally, as mentioned above, the Process has led to another change towards Ciudadanos
in 2017, showing that they have prioritized ethnicity over social matters.
From a linguistic point of view, unlike the other Catalan parties (in which we also
include En Comú-Podem), Ciudadanos has taken bilingualism to its ultimate
consequences. Its public announcements are always in both languages, which seems to
have appealed to the working classes of Barcelona; most of whom are immigrants (or
their descendants) from Spanish-speaking areas. This electorate therefore prioritized
linguistic identity in the last elections, turning its back on the Catalan pro-independence
groups. Rightly or wrongly or not, they have also included En Comú-Podem, Ada Colau's
party, in this group. She has been accused by many people of not having been neutral in

11
the conflict, as would be expected of a leader of a party that declares itself to be against
independence (from my own ethnographic data).
A member of the En Comú-Podem coalition, Vicenç Navarro, interprets this
electoral setback in a self-critical article:

"That explains why the party that [the working classes] supported electorally is the
party that is perceived as the main adversary of this pro-independence government,
which is not En Comú-Podem, but Ciudadanos. Ciudadanos was born in Catalonia
and from the beginning it was perceived as a party opposed to Catalan nationalism,
and has made its clear hostility towards Catalan independence its trademark. It is
therefore logical and predictable that the working classes should vote for it in the
Catalan election. In electoral behaviour, "being against" counts as much as "being
in favour". And the adversary varies from one election to another…
But in this vote for Ciudadanos, there is a criticism of the non-independence left,
including En Comú and Podem (who were separate for most of the pre-election
period)... Now, the Spanish "patriotic" message, which was defence of Spanish
identity in Catalonia, was won by Ciudadanos... And there is the challenge of the
non-independence left..: to express its "Spanishism" [españolismo] without
promoting the vision of Spain inherited from Franco."
(http://blogs.publico.es/vicenc-navarro/2018/01/19/por-que-la-clase-trabajadora-
catalana-cambia-de-voto-en-las-elecciones-espanolas-y-en-las-catalanas/
Downloaded on 10 March 2018).

As indicated, identity has increased in strength since the Process, and has even been
prioritised over social issues in the working-class neighbourhoods of Barcelona. While in
2015 they changed parties within the spectrum of the left (from the PSC to En Comú-
Podem), in the elections of 21 December 2017, they opted for a party that was clearly
positioned as regards bilingualism, which ensures respect for Catalan, Spanish and
European identities (as a contrast, see Fig. 3 for Ciudadanos' logo in the last election,
which highlights its defence of the three identities: Catalan, Spanish and European).
Vicenç Navarro is one of the few members of En Comú-Podem who openly
acknowledges the defeat caused by this identity issue, and considers the dilemma that it
poses for a left-wing party to have lost the confidence of the working classes they claim
to represent.

12
 The second example of the proposal of En Comú-Podem is an extract from the
response by the deputy Joan Mena talking on a radio station to a journalist's question as
to whether there is a linguistic conflict in Catalonia:

"No way! Anyone who has lived... in Catalonia can see that there is no conflict… I
always try to set myself the same example: I am the son of the Andalusians who
arrived in Sabadell, Catalonia, in the sixties; today forty years later... they still do
not speak Catalan and that has not meant any conflict; moreover, my father and
mother, who were people linked to the school where I studied, were the most
interested in my being able to study in linguistic immersion, because they knew that
this guaranteed me equal opportunities that would otherwise be very difficult. The
only thing I want is for the next generations to have the right to be bilingual... Those
most interested in protecting this right are the Spanish-speakers... Education is a
fundamental aspect of social transformation… for correcting inequalities, it is the
basic element for social cohesion; in Catalonia, public schools are not understood
without the linguistic model that is a fundamental model of social cohesion" (4-4-
2018; http://play.cadenaser.com/audio/001RD010000004918934/).

Unlike the Galician representatives of En Marea, Joan Mena explicitly alludes to the
bilingual situation in Catalonia. He identifies this bilingualism with the immersion model,
which makes Catalan the language of instruction throughout the educational process.
Spanish is relegated to a subject on the curriculum, with the same number of hours as the
subject of Catalan (see on this topic Woolard 1989 and 2016). In his opinion, this has led
to a high level of acquisition of this language among the entire emigrant Spanish-speaking
school population. This model is also rated positively by this politician, due to its role in
social cohesion, in the same way as the representative of En Marea did. In this way, Joan
Mena thereby defends the educational status quo on the basis of the ecological metaphor,
and the historical right of Catalan to be the priority language in its territory. For this
reason, the unequal situation of Spanish teaching in education stage is not questioned (as
Ciudadanos is in fact doing).
With these two examples, I have endeavoured to show the linguistic position of
these two new parties in two different regions of the Spanish state. In both cases, we see
the persistence of the conflict framework, a consequence of the metaphorical

13
constructions that are at the base of their social action and discursive practice. We will
consider this issue again after we have discussed the last of the metaphors.

3.3. The eco-biosociological metaphor

From the constructivist perspective of studies of complexity, we can see the proposal of
new constructions capable of opening paths in this conflict framework, always based on
the preservation of and respect for linguistic and intercultural diversity. This is based on
the ideas of the biologists Maturana and Varela. Let us first consider the following extract
from Maturana:

".... we live immersed in the behavioural co-ordinations that involve words and
linguistic reflection, and therefore, and with it, in the possibility of self-
awareness... In other words, our entire human reality is social, and we are
individuals, people, only insofar as we are social beings in language.
Converse 'cum versare', 'spin around with the other'. Language as a process does
not take place in the body (the nervous system) ... but in the space of consensual
behavioural co-ordinations that are constituted in the flow of its recurrent bodily
encounters... Words are, therefore, modes of consensual behavioural co-
ordinations" (1996: 13, 19-20).

According to this fragment, the focus shifts from language as a product (“langue”) to
language as a process (“emergency”, enaction), in a biosocial and ecological process (also
Maturana and Varela 1991; Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008; Bastardas 2013;
Morales-López 2017, 2019; etc.). In this framework, the mind is the “process of living”
of an individual in communicative relationship with others – what Maturana and Varela
(1991) call “languaging”. This approach moves from the metaphorical construction of the
mind as a “container”, with clear limits, which is the position of classical cognitivism to
one with the mind as part of a comprehensive ecology (not only biological, but also
simultaneously biological and cultural), from which different cognitive processes emerge.
Consequently, what is important in this process are the networks of interaction that
individuals create through language in different social groups: “The world everyone sees
is not the world, but a world” (Maturana and Varela 1991: 245). The different linguistic
patterns emerge from the interactions; the boundaries between these patterns (languages,

14
varieties, etc.) are not insurmountable, but have fuzzy borders or boundaries. From this
perspective, bilingualism and multilingualism would therefore be perceived as a dynamic
process that can vary according to the needs of individuals and social groups. When a
conflict, competition and/or threat arises, it is because individuals create them; they are
not inherent in languages, because they are not entities in themselves, but instead patterns
that we construct in interactions.
Could this vision provide new perspectives for the construction of other discourses
that go beyond the ideological framework of the conflict in the linguistic policies of the
Spanish languages? From the eco-biosociological metaphor, we believe so, and we think
that the change should begin in the following directions:

(a) The centre should not be placed exclusively in languages as a product, but in users as
speakers or signers who need to build networks of interaction with other citizens in their
own community and/or social group, in order to coordinate their actions.
From this metaphor, the objective is therefore transferred to the dialectical
relationship between the users’ communicative actions and the linguistic patterns that
emerge from those communicative actions. From this more dynamic position, there are
no languages specific to a territory, which means the end of a “plurilingually monolingual
state”, as a legacy of the thinking of previous centuries (Peled 2012: 83). Similarly, the
distinction between minority and majority languages is not what matters, as is the case in
the ecological metaphor. All the languages that speakers use to interact with each other
will be their languages. The mutual consensus will determine which of them should be
learned by all, in order to guarantee inter-communicative richness among its speakers.
Sendra and Vila (2016: 35) cite the change that has taken place in recent years in
one of the independence parties, ERC, from nationalist ideological positions of an ethnic
nature towards a “civic nationalism” that integrates cultural and linguistic differences.
See also Kraus (2015: 139) and the very recent report by the Catalan Ministry of
Education in favour of a more intercultural approach in Catalan schools (Government of
Catalonia 2018). However, as mentioned above, the alliance of ERC with the traditional
Catalan right in the Catalan government (even bordering on the extreme right in the
current president Quim Torra) seems to prove that this civic nationalism is more a strategy
of political tactics rather than any real change of position.

15
(b) This consensus must be based on one of the basic principles of human evolution,
according to Maturana and Varela (1991): cooperation.
The conflict framework has been based on competition between languages. Hence
the obsession, as Heller (2002: 179) says, with “demolinguistics” – the study and
evolution of linguistic groups based on quantitative surveys to determine the vitality of
languages (Vila i Moreno 2004; Pradilla Carmona 2017).
In the eco-biosociological metaphor, what makes us human is our ability to
coordinate our actions through language (languaging). The “human” therefore does not
have an exclusively genetic or biological character (as in other living beings). It is instead
a way of living and coordinating our actions, feelings and emotions with others; the
human is of a biological-cultural nature (Dávila Yáñez and Maturana 2008: 47). In this
coordination, cooperation has played a fundamental role.
When moving towards a new era based on cooperation, it is necessary to cast off
certainties as the first step towards reflection on one's own life and as the second step, on
conscious ethical action based on respect for oneself and for others. Feminist and
environmentalist discourses would fit perfectly into this new metaphor. I do not think the
same is true of language policy based on the framework of conflict. Conflict is antisocial
because it always involves “a mutual negation” (Maturana and Varela 1991: 246). This
is the citation with which we started this paper.
From the eco-biosociological metaphor, as a first step, a reflection and revision of
those linguistic practices based on competence are necessary, and especially those with
effects that imply the invisibility (or exclusion) in the public space of other groups of
users and their languages. This is the case of Spanish in the Catalan educational model,
which is excluded as a working language, despite this running counters to the opinion of
a majority of the population. Branchadell (2017) shows how in a supposedly independent
Catalonia, a co-official status for both languages would be the desired alternative for the
majority of the population in favour of independence.
Returning again to the description of the eco-biosociological metaphor, I believe
that revealing the metaphorical construction of our actions and discursive practices is the
first step in the proposal advocated by Dávila Yáñez y Maturana (2008): to doubt our
certainties, as part of an ethical process of respect for ourselves and others.
In the examples analysed above (from En Marea and En Comú-Podem), the mayor
of A Coruña is right when he states that his predecessors in the local corporation did not
want to speak the language of the common “people”, Galician, because they were

16
traditionally part of the city’s bourgeois elites. However, today the social situation no
longer applies to the traditional image he describes. The children of these working classes
also speak Spanish and this language is part of their identity, as well as the Galician
language. Why should it be dispensed with when it is already part of their everyday life?
At the same time, resolving the dilemma in which En Comú-Podem now finds itself
means recognising that the innovative social programme it advocates, and which received
the support of Barcelona’s working classes, must also be able to be expressed in a
bilingual way, because it also addresses a working class population that accepted the
Catalan linguistic context as a situation that adds to its Spanish identity, and not as an
identity that substracts.
Only one of the four politicians selected for the analysis, Vicenç Navarro, has
warned of the dilemma his party faces: that of reconciling different linguistic and cultural
sensitivities, as some of the right-wing parties are already doing in Catalonia, in particular
Ciudadanos. This position is also defended by Podemos, the political party that also
emerged from the 15M movement, which in Spain as a whole calls for the recognition of
our plurinational status in the Constitution. In another Montesano Montessori and
Morales-López (2019), we analyzed the concept of “people” in its speeches. Podemos
clearly falls within the last of the different metaphors outlined above: the eco-
biosociological metaphor. On this specific issue, Podemos is in line with the most genuine
spirit of the 15M movement, as a civic movement that defended and claimed the rights of
citizenship (with its great diversity) over the political and financial elites.
However, from the linguistic-cultural point of view, their political allies, En Marea
and En Comú-Podem, seem still anchored in more exclusive ideological constructions
and therefore have not resolved the dilemma of the diversity of linguistic and cultural
identities in their regions, entirely compatible with their defence of social values.

4. Conclusion

We began this article with the aim of investigating the Spanish linguistic conflict based
on a constructivist discursive analysis (inspired by Vico and White's proposal),
considering that every discourse, including the ideological one on languages, constitutes
a framework of interpretation (a concrete narrative) on those languages, their users and
their socio-cultural context. We have provided examples of two political groups, which

17
are heirs to the emancipatory 15M movement, but which have not resolved the
contradiction that emerges from their political programmes on this specific issue: their
advocacy of new social proposals, which are nevertheless socio-culturally anchored in
the frameworks of the ecological and container metaphors. These two frameworks have
led us to conflict because they render usable the multilingual and intercultural aspects of
Spanish citizenship because they are based on territorial competition between social
groups (the nationalist paradigm). Of the examples analysed, only one of the political
actors, Vicenç Navarro (a renowned researcher, and a great expert on social inequality),
explicitly alludes to the contradiction of his party in Catalonia (left-wing, but not voted
for by the working classes) and to the need to find new ways to resolve it.
We appeal to the wisdom of these new political parties, heirs of the 15M
movement’s creative ideas, to resolve these important contradictions. This will
undoubtedly be a significant step towards solving this great problem of today's Spain.

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