L’evolució del català en la premsa escrita de Terres de l’Ebre

Abstract

One of the most enduring linguistic problems in Terres de l’Ebre is the speaker’s lack of knowledge of the standard of the occidental variety of Catalan. Nowadays it is very common to see a speaker of the occidental variety switching into the oriental variety due to a disregard of its prestige and correctness in formal contexts. This issue is not only present in the daily usage of the language but also visible in both regional press and media. The purpose of this research is to analyse the linguistic evolution of Catalan in the press of Terres de l’Ebre in two different times in history by studying the selected corpuses and by extracting and comparing their model of language usage. Therefore, the paper seeks to determine which Catalan standard variety (the oriental or the occidental) has been employed in the chosen press articles and in each period, according to the detected linguistic features. Both periods, the first comprised from 1915 to 1935 and the second focused on the span between 2016 and 2018, are characterized by the influence of the publication and establishment of official orthographical and grammatical norms of Catalan. The results of this research show that, nowadays, the oriental standard has a greater presence in the press than the occidental standard. However the results from the first period expose an opposed situation in which the occidental and regional varieties are chosen over the oriental one. The causes of this major change can be found on the lack of exposure of the occidental standard, on the misinterpretation of the official linguistic norms and, finally, on the educational system as it fails to foster the adequate standard variety in the context of Terres de l’Ebre.