The influence of political changes on language policy in Spain

Abstract

Spain is known as multicultural and multilingual country: there are 17 different regions and 4 official languages. Despite the fact that in Francoist Spain there was an attemption to increase the dominance of the Spanish language over other minority languages, the country has a long tradition of linguistic diversity. Due to this great amount of linguistic variety, the government of Spain has implemented different types of language policies in order to tone down the pressure and confusion between languages in Spain. Nevertheless, in some autonomic reagions, e.g. Catalonia, the problem of dominant language as well as cultural identity is still a vivid question. Though, as times after economic crisis of 2008 were tough for Spain, the political agenda put more pragmatic problems to the first place. People started to face negative effects of crisis in their new everyday life marked by high rates of unemployment, decreasing economy and increasing taxes, cuts on education and health care, corruption in business and politics. Currently, Spain is living its new political era. The new political parties such as worldwide known Podemos (established in 2014) are trying to apply new way of doing politics. Podemos is in favour of a deeper participatory democracy and also pays more attention to previously forgotten topics. Catalonia’s seek for independence, linguistic plurality and cultural identity are the topics that can be found on party’s presentation. Thus, in view of the assumptions above, this study aims at analysing the possible influence of political changes on language policy in Spain. The analysis is based on a case study of political party Podemos. The results suggest that changes in Spanish language policy are tangible and since Podemos is in the government of Spain, more attention is being paid to cultural diversity and linguistic variety.