Linguistic mudes: how to become a new speaker in Catalonia

New speakers of Catalan have come to represent, from a demolinguistic perspective, a substantial part of the community of speakers. Of those who presently speak Catalan as an “habitual language”, 41.6 percent are native speakers of Spanish. In this article, we shall follow up the various ways in which native Castilian speakers incorporate Catalan into their lives. This happens, as we will show, in specific biographical junctures that we call mudes, a Catalan term referring to (often reversible) variations in social performance. Our analysis is based on a qualitative study that included 24 interviews and 15 focus groups covering a total of 105 people of different sexes and linguistic, educational, social and residential backgrounds. We shall give a general overview of these mudes as we typified them: when subjects entered primary school, secondary school, the university, the job market, when creating a new family and when they had children (if they did). The study of linguistic mudes provides, in our view, a new and productive perspective on how people develop their linguistic repertoire, their attachment to specific languages and the significance of these aspects for social identity. It facilitates a processual, time-sensitive analysis that allows to contextualise and critique ethnonationalist discourses that have often saturated our understanding of language use.

Die invloed van die Mediterreense tydsbegrip op die betekenis van die dag van die Here in 2 Petrus

The day of the Lord in 2 Peter in the light of the first-century Mediterranean concept of time. In this aricle the apocalyptic expression 'the day of the Lord' in 2 Peteris understood in the light of the first-century Mediterranean concept of time. Unlike modern Western societies, Mediterranean peasant societies had the present as first-order temporary preference. Secondary preference is past, and the future comes as third choice. According to a social-scientiic model of Mediterranean time, the present and past can be understood as expeienced time, as well as cyclical and processual time. The future is viewed as imaginary time. These insights are especially crucial for understanding the day of the Lord in 2 Peter within the context of the delay of the parousia, winch is of primary concern to the author of 2 Peter. The author advocates the shiting of the parousia from the present to the far-of future of an imaginary time of God's control. As a result, his ethics for the present was sill strongly influenced by the day of the Lord. In contrast, the author's opponents' untidyethics reflected their rejecion of the relevancy of the future parousia fortheir present lives.