title: Collective language self-management: agentive responses to the minoritisation of Catalan on Facebook
Creators: name: McNulty, Stephen Joseph
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: language policy
subject: language management
subject: Catalan
subject: self-management
subject: social media

description: In recent years, the field of Language Policy and Planning has increasingly shifted focus away from the decision-making processes of traditional, powerful organisations and institutions and towards the actions of “ordinary” individuals, and the various means by which they exercise their agency within the language policy process. Much has been written about the role of individuals and groups at the grassroots level of society reacting to, or influencing, the implementation of higher order policies (e.g. Johnson and Freeman, 2010, Johnson and Johnson, 2014), or creating policies for their immediate local context (e.g. Baldauf, 2006, Liddicoat and Baldauf, 2008, Drackley, 2019) – including studies of language advocacy and activism (e.g. Sallabank, 2005, Hatoss, 2006, 2019, De Korne, 2021). Comparatively less, however, has been written about the agency of individuals over their own linguistic repertoire – a concept referred to by Spolsky (2019b, 2021) as self-management – and its deployment as an “agentive response” (Vennela and Kandharaja, 2021) in resistance to higher order language management. Moreover, Spolsky (2021)’s assertion that such individual self-transformative processes could be collectivised to greater net effect is yet to be explored. This thesis builds on Spolsky’s assertions by introducing the concept of Collective Language Self-Management: proposed as a mechanism by which individuals lacking the power and authority of traditional language policymakers can nevertheless engage in language policy processes and activities, and tackle more wide-ranging issues, most commonly associated with the macro-level. It draws on a case study of two focal Catalan-language groups on Facebook, who share a belief in the decline and decay of the (authentic) Catalan language as a result of Castilianisation, and who are united in a concerted effort to collectively raise awareness of perceived Castilian interference and to eliminate it from the speech of each member. The movitations for doing so stem from a belief in the mismanagement (and even disdain) of the language and culture by French, Spanish and Catalan authorities, and a general misuse by contemporary Catalan speakers: all of which engender a need for “corrective” action. Utilising a combination of netnographic methods, and an analytical framework incorporating social movement framing theory, critical discourse analysis and positioning theory, this study examines the activities carried out by group members to redefine ideological and linguistic standards, to be adopted by each member. Through these activities, these groups are able to bypass the need to appeal to the authority of official language managers – such as national and local governments – and, by growing their membership base, can aim to achieve wider language change from the centre out, one individual at a time. This study contributes to the growing literature base on agency in language policy and planning, and acts as a response to the call for consideration of both structural and agentive forces (Johnson and Ricento, 2013) through its analysis of the interface between collective action and individual linguistic choices. It also contributes to Pérez-Milans and Tollefson (2018: 735)’s request for further study of the affordances of new and social media: specifically their ability to allow “ordinary” people to “serve as policy practitioners and as policy analysts, in some cases replacing official actors”. Finally, the thesis offers an expansion of one of Spolsky’s latter theories relating to the collectivisation of self-management (Spolsky, 2021), while also challenging his assertion that language advocates lack the power and authority to influence language change directly (ibid., 2019b).