Dinosaurs are out of their tombs once again over here, with someone calling himself Adam repeating one particularly hoary myth. The truth is that Franco didn’t ban Catalan but, by removing it from institutional use, reduced it to the status of Breton in France, Welsh in the UK, Low Saxon in Holland etc etc in the post-war era. That’s terrible but, as Jaume Fabre notes in his interesting PhD thesis on the 1939 transition (now apparently generally available), Franco was able to rely on strong initial support here because many Catalan-speakers regarded linguistic restriction as a price worth paying to be rid of chaos.

Categories: Splog

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