«El català, llengua no decadent»: die valencianischen 'col·loquis' des 18. Jahrhunderts aus sprachlicher und soziolinguistischer Sicht - ein Beitrag zur katalanischen Sprachgeschichte der 'Decadència'

Abstract

The aim of this article is to find out whether the clear decline in literary activity in Catalan at the time of the so-called "Decadence" also meant a decline of the language. To this end, we will analyze several Valencian colloquia that will not only inform us about the sociolinguistic situation in eighteenth-century València, but will also offer us an insight into the internal development of the Catalan language at this time. Among other things, the information found in these texts about "languages in contact" are of sociolinguistic interest – many paragraphs show us to what extent the diglossic-hierarchical relationship between Castilian and Catalan marked the use of the language at that time –, while from the point of view of the history of the language these popular texts offer us a vision of the spoken Catalan of the 18th century. Besides, these texts prove that Catalan was never really in danger during the "Decadence", since as a spoken language it never lost its vitality. If we start from the fact that the spoken language is not deficient compared to the written language, because different conceptions and different communicative conditions result in different language strategies, we should be very careful to use the terms "Decadence" and "linguistic impoverishment" in eighteenth-century Catalan.