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The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration

  • Lluís Català-Oltra EMAIL logo and Clemente Penalva-Verdú
Published/Copyright: November 12, 2019
International Journal of the Sociology of Language
From the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language Volume 2019 Issue 260

Abstract

The Valencian autonomous community is a bilingual Spanish region where, alongside Spanish, a second language is officially recognized. Yet in many areas of the Valencian administration the language law is not implemented. This article explores the presence of the two official languages in the electronic communications of this region’s city and town council agencies. It combines a variety of methods (use of secondary data, content analysis and a variation of the “mystery shopping” technique) with statistical analysis of data merged into a unit matrix of 397 municipalities. A comparison of present web page data with data from 2005 to 2010 reveals that there has been advancement on the implementation of legal provisions: Spanish monolingual web pages are being replaced by bilingual portals. Evidence also shows a greater presence of Valencian in the official social media accounts and in telephone and email interactions. However, the use of Spanish on public administration websites is still prevalent. Likewise, this study confirms the significant power of the social use of language, influenced in part by the political party in power.

Keywords: electronic communication; Catalan; Spanish; language policy; local administration

Acknowledgements

This research has been conducted with funding from “Subvenció per al foment de treballs d’investigació i estudis en l’àmbit de la planificació lingüística i la lingüística aplicada”, 2017 edition, Conselleria d’Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana-Valencian regional government (Spain).

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Published Online: 2019-11-12
Published in Print: 2019-11-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2019-2046
Keywords for this article
electronic communication; Catalan; Spanish; language policy; local administration

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. A story at the periphery: Documenting, standardising and reviving Cypriot Arabic
  4. The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration
  5. Language use and intergenerational transmission of heritage Veneto in the rural area of Santa Teresa, Brazil
  6. Yucatec Maya language planning and the struggle of the linguistic standardization process
  7. Language shift and language revival in Crimea
  8. Language and religion in Central Ukraine
  9. A sociolinguistic approach to implicit language attitudes towards historically white English accents among young L1 South African indigenous language speakers
  10. A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes as slang in Amman, Jordan
  11. Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa
  12. Book Review
  13. Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter
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