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Kathryn Woolard1
Department of Anthropology University of California, San Diego kwoolard@ucsd.edu

with Aida Ribot Bencomo

Department of Anthropology University of California, San Diego aribotbencomo@ucsd.edu

and Josep Soler Carbonell

Institute of Communication Tallin University Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics University of Tartu josep.soler-carbonell@tlu.ee

Whats So Funny Now? The Strength of Weak Pronouns in Catalonia

John Gumperzs foundational analyses of linguistic convergence and of code-switching in bilingual and multilingual settings continue to inuence work in interactional sociolinguistics, where these phenomena are seen as systematic mobilizations of the bilingual repertoire to cue interlocutors to the ongoing construction of situated meaning. However, the utility of Gumperzs approach is not restricted to interactional, micro-social questions. As Gumperzs own earliest work showed, varying patterns of code-switching and of linguistic convergence can reveal signicant macro-social differences in communities across space as well as changes within a community across time. In earlier work, I have used code-switching and convergence as tracers to help gauge sociopolitical change in Catalonia across several decades, particularly by examining the changing patterns of mixed-language practices that make people laugh. In this article, I analyze new Catalan mass-media data (20062013) in order to assess the evolution of the serio-comic situation of Catalan three decades after I rst investigated it as a student of Gumperz at the moment of the return to Catalan political autonomy. [Catalan, bilingualism, language ideology, language change, social change] Introduction ohn Gumperz indelibly marked the study of language in society by focusing analytic attention on nonstandard, hybrid linguistic practices in multilingual communities. Looking closely at speech that was regarded, in popular and even expert views, as ill-formed, incompetent, or careless, Gumperz convincingly and inuentially proposed that these were in fact linguistically systematic and socially meaningful strategic practices. He gave us foundational analyses of code-switching and of convergence among linguistic varieties in settings as diverse as Norway and India, and his conceptual framework continues to inuence work on linguistic repertoires today.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 23, Issue 3, pp. 127141, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12024.

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Although Gumperz is most often appreciated as a founder of interactional sociolinguistics, the utility of the analytic approach to bi- and multilingualism that he developed has never been restricted to the micro-interactional scale, as his own early work shows. Gumperzs perspective can also allow us to shed light on issues more often seen as belonging to the larger social order, not only the interactional order. Particularly through his early comparative work, he pioneered the linking of what we now refer to as different scalar phenomena. For example, in a comparison of the verbal repertoires in the two communities of Khalapur (India) and Hemnesberget (Norway) (Gumperz 1964), Gumperz showed that different patterns and degrees of linguistic compartmentalization found in interaction in the two communities expressed the different social structures, particularly the difference in ritual barriers to interaction in the two societies (1964:148). Susan Gal further demonstrated the utility of the Gumperzian approach to code-switching for understanding politicaleconomic conditions in her comparison of varying patterns of code-switching across European communities (Gal 1987). As Gumperz and Gal showed, nuances in the way the bilingual repertoire is organized, and particularly in tolerance for hybridity, can reveal telling detail about how groups of speakers place themselves in the larger social order. In my own work, I have tried to apply this insight not in synchronic comparisons across different social settings, but diachronically, tracking changing patterns in the mobilization of the Catalan and Castilian languages within Catalonia across time. In tracking change in the sociolinguistic and ethnopolitical situation over more than thirty years of Catalan political autonomy, one gauge that I have found useful is the kind of linguistic forms that people laugh at. In question is both what is considered to be funny about language and, at least where mass-mediated humor is concerned, what is permissible to poke fun at publicly. The answer has been that people often laugh at code-switching, convergence, and other forms of linguistic hybridity, but the hybrid forms that draw attention in the media are different in different periods. Humorous performances are not direct reections, but rather distorted refractions, of actual community speech practices; as such, they offer metapragmatic commentary on contemporary language practices and policies. Such linguistic jokes can point out social jokes, that is, contradictions in the social structure, as Mary Douglas wrote long ago (cited in Woolard 1995). Changes in the bilingual practices that people laugh at publicly can be one indicator of changes in the social-structural alignments of languages in contact, and of speakers own alignments not only to these languages but also to each other, commenting on how they see themselves in a sociolinguistic world (Woolard 1995:225). In this article, I address some changes that have emerged in public linguistic humor in Catalonia over the past 30 years of political autonomy within Spain.

Three Moments in Catalan Linguistic Comedy In the wildly popular comedy of the code-switching Catalan performer Eugenio in 1979, the very fact of code-switching and convergence was what many people explicitly found funny. You cant tell what language hes speaking, one informant told me, even though Eugenios use of Catalan was actually limited and judicious (Woolard 1988). The ritual barriers between the Catalan and Castilian languages were quite high at that time, as Catalonia and Spain emerged from the repression of the Franco period. Except to accommodate interlocutors from different linguistic backgrounds, conversational code-switching was rarely found in the everyday speech of the Catalan-speaking community at that time, and interference and mixing were negatively sanctioned. I argued then that Eugenios code-switching was welcome because, at the same time that it publicly pointed to the language problem that worried many Castilian speakers during the return to Catalan political autonomy (would everyone have to speak Catalan tomorrow?), the distribution of the languages

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across the information structure of Eugenios jokes made them accessible to a broad audience. This easy cross-linguistic communication provided a comfortable reassurance about the anxieties of potential language problems. This effect is related to what Ben Rampton (1995) later dubbed language crossing, in that Eugenios bilingual comedy acknowledged ethnolinguistic differences at the same time as it transgressed their boundaries. It publicly enacted a claim to cross-group understanding that Eugenio represented metaphorically in one of his most acclaimed stories, which he called a fable rather than a joke. In that fable, he humorously depicted the warm cross-linguistic, cross-species friendship of a man and an urbane pigeon. This boundary-crossing social effect was in a sense the opposite of the social effect that Gumperz saw in Kupwar, where structural linguistic convergence was masked by lexical/morphophonemic distinctiveness at the surface level. Such surface linguistic differentiation enacted an assertion of social difference and an observance of ritual barriers to communication that were crucial to preserve in that caste society. After a decade of Catalan political autonomy and language-policymaking, much more extensive and radical code-switching could be found in mass-mediated comic performances in Barcelona. In a study of linguistic humor in the late 1980s, I proposed that greater political security for the language and its speakers had made Catalan a less sacred language and allowed its public profanation in more hybridizing performances. Paradoxically, because it was more secure in its public status, Catalan was also less inviolable (Woolard 1995). The mediatized (Agha 2011) linguistic humor that I have found in 21st-century Catalonia is distinct from both earlier moments. Here I will discuss two themes of current comedy, touching only briey on the rst and focusing closely on the second. The rst theme is the parodying of non-native speakers of Catalan, a new development in public humor. The second theme echoes Gumperzs studies in that it plays on morphosyntactic convergence and divergence. The two themes are intertwined in some media comedy, as examples will show. The speech of second-language (L2) speakers of Catalan can now be treated publicly as a source of amusement, although there are still not many distinct cases in mainstream media humor. Castilian-inuenced Catalan was parodied across the decades, but the parodies that I found in earlier periods were all of native (L1) speakers, or what might be called autochthonous heritage speakers, of Catalan.2 The emergence of public comedy about L2 Catalan speakers can be traced most directly to the parliamentary selection in 2006 of an immigrant-origin, Castilianspeaking politician, Jos Montilla, as the president of a coalition government of Catalonia. Montilla himself acknowledged that he was a very poor speaker of Catalan, despite his 30-year career in Catalan politics. Although there was debate about the seemliness of ridiculing a non-native speaker, Montillas linguistic shortcomings were treated as fair game for comedy because he was a politician and, as president, the public face of Catalonia. The permissibility of this humor may also owe to the fact that Catalan education policies of the past several decades have made competent L2 Catalan a relatively routine expectation and nonuent Catalan marked as a result. (See Ribot Bencomo 2012, 2013; Woolard 2012; and Woolard and Ribot Bencomo 2012 for detailed consideration of the ambiguous social meaning of comedy at the expense of L2 speakers, nonuent and uent.) An extremely successful weekly Catalan television program of political satire, Polnia, regularly treated Montillas poor control of Catalan as fodder for hyperbolic linguistic humor. Many of its skits about Montilla illustrate not only the L2 speaker as target, but also the second frequent trope of linguistic humor, the morphosyntactic forms that will be the focus of the rest of this article. They are an extensive set of cliticizing unstressed object and adverbial pronouns called the pronoms febles, weak pronouns. Linguists have described the weak pronouns as the most intricately exacting aspect of Catalan grammar (Wheeler et al. 1999:167). In standard Catalan,

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there are multiple allomorphs of each pronoun, depending on their combination and their position in relation to the verb. In a running gag across many episodes of the show, Polnias faux Montilla recurringly tries and fails to produce weak pronouns, creating long strings of preposterous combinations and nonlinguistic sounds. In Ex. 1, Montilla appears before the Catalan parliament, shown in stock footage from the actual parliament, to propose the abolition of the weak pronouns in order to make Catalan a more efcient language and allow him to get work done.
Ex. 1: Montilla abolishes the weak pronouns3 (Polnia, Episode 35; DVD 9.3) (skit may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnGgjife1N8) Bones tards. ((laugh track)) La moci que presentar avui al plenu s una mesura que Catalunya necessita com l'aigua de maig. Es tracta de la derogaci ad eternum dels pronoms febles. ((laugh track)) De manera que un President de la Generalitat Que li digui a la seva secretria que el dia de ahir Va demanar un informe No es vegi obligat a fer-se la pixa un lio Amb elocucions del tipu: Vaig demanar-li-lo-la? ((laugh track)) O per exemple: Vaig demanar-li-sho-lo-ho? Hi? ((loud laugh track)) Comena la votaci. Vots a favor? ((camera shift to stock footage of stone-faced members of real parliament, none voting in favor; laugh track)) B, ja veig que no els shi-ho-um-als-la-s-f-th-rur-tehk-l'he-ho convenut. ((laugh track overlaps)) B, era el meu deure intentar-lo-shho-lo-qu-ho-l'hi-li. ((loud laugh track)) Veuen com shan de . . . abolir? Moltes grcies! ((laugh track throughout)) Good aftnu. ((laugh track)) The motion Ill present today to the Congressu is a measure that Catalonia needs like the spring rain. It is about the derogation ad eternum of the weak pronouns. ((laugh track)) So that a President of the Generalitat Who tells his secretary that yesterday he asked for a report Doesnt nd himself obligated to tie his prick in a knot with locutions like Did I ask him that it? ((laugh track)) Or for example: Did I ask him his that it that? There? ((loud laugh track)) Begin the vote. Votes in favor? ((camera shift to stock footage of stone-faced members of real parliament, none voting in favor; laugh track)) Ok, I see that I havent you-them-it-that-um-them-her-s-f-th-rur-tchk-it-I-it convinced. ((laugh track overlaps)) Well, it was my duty to try that sh-there-that-it-what-it-there-him. ((loud laugh track)) You see how they have to . . . be abolished? Thank you very much! ((laugh track throughout))

It is obvious that the skit makes fun of Montilla, but it also lampoons a feature of standard Catalan as so unduly complex and absurdly difcult that it gets in the way of work. The faux Montilla depicts standard Catalan pronouns as inefcient and unsuited to the managerial ofce, in a humorous echo of the familiar criticism about

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minoritized languages that they are not modern and not suited to modern life.4 Comedy such as this makes aspects of the Catalan language itself a target of humor and even ridicule, and the weak pronouns are often in the bulls eye, for reasons that will be examined here. The Weak Pronouns The Catalan weak pronouns are the frequent focus of sociolinguistic stereotyping, prescriptive commentary, and linguistic-complaint-writing, and of mediatized parodies and humor as well. The intricacy of these pronominal clitics is well illustrated in the tables typically provided to describe or teach the prescriptively correct forms, even in basic second-language learning materials such as Teach Yourself Catalan (Yates 1975). These tables array up to 169 cells (in arrangements of 13 13 units) to show the proper forms for combining two object pronouns, varying according to position in the clause. (A somewhat simplied example from an online teaching source appears at http://usdepronomsfebles.wikispaces.com.) The didactic charts follow the norms set by the modern standardizer of the Catalan language, Pompeu Fabra, in the early 20th century. Fabra generally claimed to base his decisions about a literary standard on the language as it is spoken now (DiGiacomo 1999:112), but that was a stretch in the case of the weak pronouns. As an engineer by training, Fabra had a strong logico-semantic bent (Segarra 1985). He held that the only forms admissible in a clear literary language were those not in conict with the universal laws of thought, and he strove for a one-to-one relation of form to logical function (ibid.:182183). Fabra was so motivated by logical criteria that he was willing to combine elements from different spoken dialects to make his written standard; thus, it may have been the language as spoken today, but not by any one speaker. Segarra argues that the consequences were those to be expected of such hybrid prescriptions: rejection by speakers and difculties in learning, and thus in application, for the written as well as spoken language (ibid.:186). Despiteor, more likely, because ofthis difculty and ensuing colloquial rejection of the weak pronouns as prescribed, they are treated by many commentators as emblematic of the Catalan language. Occasionally, a commentator still celebrates Fabras linguistic logic, as shown in Ex. 2, from a blog in which a linguistic critic complained that a front-page headline of the Catalan edition of the principal newspaper of Barcelona, La Vanguardia, hurt his eyes.5 The blogger reproduced the headline as El TC pren un regidor a CiU i LHI dna al PP (The Constitutional Court takes a city council position from CiU [Convergence and Union party] and gives it THERE to PP [Popular Party]), capitalizing the offending HI (there/to it/to them) to highlight the error. While some might have been concerned by the political news, what bothered the author was a linguistic solecism; the hi should have been suppressed as redundant with al PP (to PP).
Ex. 2: Miquel Colomer: Pronoms febles I admit that Im in love with the system of weak pronouns that Fabra established. . . . There are few things that t logic more perfectly than this impeccable system. And few things, then, that help people more to structure their minds in a logical manner. Who knows if its not the bad use we make of the weak pronouns that explains the illogical and poorly organized behavior we have for a country, a nation, that aspires to freedom. (Colomer 2011; translation mine)

An ironic representation of the weak pronouns as the terrible essence of Catalan appears in the blog of Isabel Sucunza, a Castilian-speaking former journalist for TV3, the Catalan government-sponsored channel on which Polnia appears. Sucunza draws on the trope of the weak pronouns to epitomize her Madrid friends unshakeable conviction that Catalan is forced on everyone associated with TV3, despite her repeated denial of this. Sarcastically voicing her Castilian friends fears, Sucunza writes that babies in Madrid will grow up with their mothers telling them

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how the Catalan government bloodily forced the weak pronouns into the little heads of pure little Castilian children (Sucunza 2012).6 Another illustration of the negative iconization of the weak pronouns comes not from the electronic media but from one of my most Castilian-oriented informants, Josep, who in 2007 discussed his own linguistic biography:
Ex. 3: Josep: Archaic, unlearnable Catalan The Catalan turns of phrase, the- the weak pronouns . . . A Castilian is never in his life going to master those. The- the weak pronouns, this is mother-freaking complicated. Because on top of it, Catalan has- its archaic, its very archaic, and it has some phrasings that are very complicated, they have a complicated resonance for a Castilian speaker.7

Joseps view of weak pronouns as complicated and archaic echoes the presidential comedy sketch in Ex. 1. His claim that the pronouns are impossible for a non-native speaker to acquire is also not very far from the view offered by the faux president in another Polnia skit, in a rather literal rendering of the idea that grammatical forms are inscribed in the bodily habitus (Bourdieu 1991). In this episode, while speaking to his vice-president, Josep-Llus Carod-Rovira, the Montilla character compares the weak pronouns to circumcision:
Ex. 4: Montilla speaks Catalan in private (Polnia, Episode 34, 22 December 2006) (skit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t0Sn9huwmU) Carod-Rovira: Pepe, remember what we said. You have to work harder on your Catalan, eh? Montilla: Carod, buddy, I do work hard. Its just that I have a problem with the weak pronouns, you know? Its like circumcision. If its not done to you when youre young, then when youre older . . . ((grimaces, shakes head))

This is not the rst instance of media humor that plays on the weak pronouns as a source of physical pain. Susan Frekko has already shown very well that they serve as a trope for a popular representation of the Catalan language as inordinately difcult (Frekko 2009:82), characterized by an arcane fussiness in the language itself and also in the language professionals who protect it. As an example, Frekko discusses a Catalan parody of the CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) television shows, in which a series of murders is perpetrated by a punctilious and not incidentally unattractive Catalan philologist who sets verbal traps for the victims. When they respond to his questions by trying to produce combinations of weak pronouns, the effort causes their heads to explode. One recent effort to counter this negative image of the weak pronouns promoted a view of Catalan, and specically of the weak pronouns, as both decidedly modern and learnable. Internet publicity for a workshop on the weak pronouns in Barcelona in March 2013 asserted that these linguistic devices make Catalan uniquely well adapted to that most late-modern of communication systems, Twitter:
Ex. 5: Weak pronouns make better tweets Our language has a linguistic mechanism that other languages dont have, the weak pronouns, which allow us to condense words and write and tweet ideas using fewer characters. (Catal UGT 2013)8

Whereas the Polnia Montilla represented the weak pronouns as demanding a lot of superuous linguistic forms (in implicit contrast to his native Castilian), this Twitter-oriented campaign asserts they are actually more streamlined than other languages, by which surely Castilian is also meant. The exact basis on which the author projects this claim is not clear. It perforce involves as much erasure of the obligatory insertion of adverbial forms not found in Castilian as it does iconization of orthographic contraction. The claim that the mechanism is not found in other languages also involves erasure of very similar French adverbial pronouns, with which many Catalan speakers are familiar.9

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The salience of the weak pronouns in prescriptively oriented linguistic complaints can be seen in running Twitter commentary on the televised debate among candidates for the presidency of Catalonia in the November 2012 parliamentary elections.10 Catalans are prolic tweeters, and there was a record-breaking number of tweets about that event. Amid the political comments, prescriptivist viewers monitored the candidates solecisms, singling out weak pronouns. Progressive or conservative, L1 or L2 speaker, Catalanist or anti-Catalanist, all candidates could be subjected to criticism. However, the Catalonia-born, Castilian-dominant candidate from the conservative Popular Party, Alicia Snchez-Camacho, was the prime target. Her use of the prescriptively nonexistent -lis, apparently in place of the third-person-plural direct and indirect object -los, drew the most frequent and biting criticism. (In the following English glosses, thim approximates the solecism lis.)
Ex. 6: Tweets on the Catalan presidential debate Marc Arza: Joan Herrera assassinant pronoms febles a tort i a dret. Joan Herrera [progressive/Green party candidate] assassinating weak pronouns right and left. Franc Lluis: Cada cop q un candidat a la presidncia de la Generalitat de Catalunya es menja un pronom hi ha un follet del Montseny q es mata. Every time a candiate for president of the government of Catalonia eats a pronoun, a fairy in Montseny kills himself. Muts i a la gbia!: La secci lolgica de lIEC ja estudia la combinaci de pronoms febles dalguns dels candidats. The philological section of the [Institute of Catalan Studies] is already studying some candidates combinations of weak pronouns. Marta Tonisastre: #SanchezCamacho premi lletres catalanes per joies com: les deutes i traslladarlis [Alicia] Snchez Camacho prize for Catalan literature for jewels like the [f.] debts [m.] [error in gender agreement] and move thim [lis] Ganyet: trasladar-lis ha dit TRASLADAR-LIS move [CS form] thim [lis] s/he said MOVE [CS form] THIM [LIS] @ PepSurroca: Cada vegada que lAlicia fa servir lis pensant que s un pronom feble es moren 10 gatets. Every time that Alicia [Snchez Camacho] uses thim [lis] thinking that its a weak pronoun, 10 cats die. Josep Braut: Alicia Snchez Camacho maltracta els febles, els pronoms febles. Alicia Snchez Camacho abuses the weak, the weak pronouns. AhMerc Kozlov: @josepruana: Jo vull dir-lis #debatTV3 #lamortdelPronomFeble I want to tell-thim [lis] #debateTV3 #thedeathoftheWeakPronoun Guillem Clua: CiU diu fem-ho possible, per ning no em sap dir qu vol dir aquest ho. Mai un pronom feble ha estat tan feble. CiU [Catalan nationalist party] says Lets make it possible, but nobody can tell me what this it is. Never has a weak pronoun been so weak.

The Strength of Weak Pronouns It may seem an ironic accident that a feature literally labeled weak should be treated as emblematic of Catalan and Catalanness, not just by antagonists, but also by Catalan writers. However, the label is actually resonant with other such emblems. A certain kind of weakness is part of the strength of the Catalan linguistic and cultural prole as rened, victimized, and economical (in multiple senses), in contrast to an image of Castilian and the Spanish as crude, bullying, and bombastic. Catalan commentators themselves often poke fun at the fact that Catalonia celebrates as its national holiday the date in 1714 when it fell to centralizing forces and lost its distinct political identity. Catalan renement is part of a recursive pattern of stylistic opposition between that

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which is canonically Catalan and that which is Spanish, similar to the recursively stylized contrasts that Gal and Irvine describe for Wolof nobles and griots, or for German-speaking craftsmen and farmers in Hungary (Gal and Irvine 2000). Another manifestation of this stylistic recursion is the contrast of stereotypical national-dance forms. Whereas the emblematic dance adopted by politico-cultural Hispanism is the passionate, seemingly unbridled amenco, the Catalan national dance is the sardana, whose dainty, mathematically precise steps are counted out for the group by a leader (Brandes 1990). Similarly, in recent years, the Catalan nationalist cause has been symbolized by the small Catalan burro (ruc), which is an endangered species. This is in self-conscious contraposition to the hyper-muscular and masculine image of a black bull that has evolved from commercial origins in roadside billboards for Osborne alcohols (a brand based in southern Spain) to become an emblem of assertive Hispanism across Spain. The burro and bull icons now signal Catalan vs. Spanish political sympathies on bumper stickers and high-schoolers cellphones. Corresponding to the Catalan images of delicacy, various studies have shown that, since political autonomy, the Catalan language has become increasingly enregistered as formal, rened, and even nicky, elegant but lacking in the rude force of life (Pujolar 2001; Frekko 2009; Woolard 2009). In the simplifying ideological play of stylistic oppositions, the weak pronouns resonate with this distinctly Catalan prole in their smallness, precision, and complexity of form as well as in their name. As suggested in some of the examples given above, the weak pronouns are not only prescriptively intricate, they are an area of maximal morphosyntactic distance from Castilian. For this reason, they have become a principal focus of language purists efforts to resist linguistic convergence, resulting in the critical scrutiny exemplied in the comments about the presidential debaters in Ex. 6 above. Prescriptivist complaints focus particularly on the two impersonal adverbial pronouns en and hi, which are prescriptively obligatory in some Catalan constructions, such as partitives, but have no counterparts at all in Castilian. These distinctive pronouns are precisely the ones that were singled out for the Twitter workshop of Ex. 5: The activity, which will be very practically focused, addresses cyber-activists and everyone who wants to learn and practice the weak pronouns at a basic level (especially the pronouns en and hi) (Catal UGT 2013).11 Anxiety about linguistic convergence and resulting loss of these most divergent pronoun forms is explicit on the website El catal com cal (Catalan as it should be) (2008), which asks, Do you speak Catalan or do you translate Castilian literally? The kind of word-for-word calquing and syntactic convergence that Gumperz found in Kupwar is here explicitly rejected as not Catalan. Not surprisingly, the topic of the page is the weak pronouns that are most distinctive from Castilian:
Ex. 7: Catalan as it should be One of the most serious problems that Catalan is currently suffering is the loss of the weak pronouns en and hi, owing to literal translation from Castilian, which doesnt use them.12

Even among sociolinguists, the term pronoms febles is sometimes used to refer only to these two maximally distinctive pronouns that have no Castilian counterparts, rather than to the entire combinatorial set of pronominal clitics, elements of which overlap with Castilian. As occurs in many situations of cultural-linguistic boundary marking, only that which is contrastive is salient; shared areas are overlooked.13 The ideological salience of the divergent weak pronouns to Catalan defenders, critics, and humorists is noteworthy given Gumperzs work on convergence. In Gumperzs classic analysis of convergence and creolization in the Indian village of Kupwar (Gumperz 1971), syntactic convergence and word-for-word calquing between languages that were originally grammatically distinct generally escaped the speech communitys notice and opprobrium, as long as lexical and morphophonemic distinctions were intact. For the Catalan authors of the Web page in Ex.7, however, syntactic convergence crosses a red line, effectively reducing the bilingual repertoire

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to a single language. Calquing from Castilian means that one is not speaking Catalan, in this representation. Divergent syntactic forms are treated as a last redoubt for language defenders, who feel that, if Catalan is to be kept alive, it is necessary to maintain the few places where it is syntactically distinct from Spanish. In this rst look, then, the degree of tolerance of syntactic convergence in Kupwar and Catalonia seems quite different. Should we attribute this to the considerable differences in patterns of social distinction and ranking encountered in the two communities? Or is it more likely to owe to the narrow linguistic distance between the languages in Catalonia and the broad swath of lexicon they share, in contrast to unrelated languages in Kupwar? Or is it simply a matter of the researchers analytic focus? Whereas Gumperzs evidence for tolerance of convergence came from everyday speech practices, my evidence of censure and hilarity comes from metalinguistic, and particularly, mediatized, commentary. All of these factors are likely to be in play. But I suggest that what may have been an underground translinguistic battle in Kupwar is brought into the spotlight in Catalonia through language policys emphasis on formal instruction and, in particular, through mass-mediatization. Whats So Funny about Weak Pronouns? The media humor around the weak pronouns insistently calls attention to differences between Catalan and Castilian and sometimes mocks those who do not control those differences. But it also ironizes the prescriptivist criticism with a Bakhtinian doublevoicing (Bakhtin 1984) whose ultimate evaluative stance can be difcult to pin down. At least as much, and probably more, of the humor also aims mockery at those who insist on preserving the weak pronouns and who defend the formal differences that others see as nicky. Frekkos example of a CSI parody, discussed above, shows this clearly, and there are more such examples in recent media data. For example, another Polnia skit spoofs an ofcial announcement that the Catalan police (Els mossos) will crack down on the urban-squatter (Okupa) movement, depicting it as a crackdown on misuses of the weak pronouns (Ex. 8).
Ex. 8: Els mossos seran ms durs amb els okupes (Polnia, Episode 33, DVD 9.1) Okupa (Squatter) youth spray-paints grafto, incorrectly using the informal imperative+weak pronoun Diguem (Say to me) instead of the inclusive imperative form Diguem (Lets say): DIGUEM NO A LA ESPECULACIO Police: Okupa: Police: Okupa: Police: Okupa: Police: Okupa: Police: Eh eh eh. Aturat! Vine cap aqu. Qu fas? Res. Mira. Este s desodorante, mira! ((sprays paint under his arm)).14 Per tu qu thas cregut? Et penses que em mamo el dit? Nooo. Aix est mal escrit! Per qu? Com s que diguem porta apstrof? s pronom feble, no? Aqu lunica cosa feble que hi ha s el teu catal! ((hits Okupa))

The Catalan police will crack down on squatters SAY TO ME NO TO SPECULATION Police: Okupa: Police: Okupa: Police: Okupa: Hey hey hey! Stop! Come over here. What are you doing? Nothing. Look. This is deodorant, see? ((sprays paint under his arm.)) Who do you think you are? Do you think I was born yesterday? Nooo. This is written wrong! Why?

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Police: Okupa: Police:

Why does Diguem [Lets say] have an apostrophe? Its a weak pronoun, no? The only weak thing here is your Catalan! ((hits Okupa))

In one nal example, Polnia (DVD 7.3) ridicules the conservative Catalan nationalist partys proposal to reward foreign immigrants for efforts to assimilate to Catalan culture and society by issuing points toward a Catalan identity card. In this skit, the nationalist presidential candidate Artur Mas is shown deducting points from an immigrants citizenship application as a penalty for including one superuous weak pronoun within a chain of them in an elaborate, hypercorrect syntactic construction. It is not only Polnia that mines the weak pronouns as a source of humor. In her analyses of a recent situation comedy on TV3 (Dues Dones Divines 2011), Ribot Bencomo (2012, 2013) highlights a running gag about an immigrant-origin L2 Catalan speaker, Rosario, who is caricatured as having an obsession with correct use of the weak pronouns. In one episode, Rosario mounts a 24-hour hotline to Save the Weak Pronouns, which she wails are in their death throes all over Catalonia! (Dues Dones Divines 2011, Episode 3; viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du _1I_yjf-s&list=ELEEIHlVOBo7U). In another episode, Rosario attempts to teach Catalan to immigrant textile workers in a crowded sweatshop. Completely ignored by the harried workers, Rosario dwells absurdly on the details of the weak pronouns written on a makeshift blackboard (Dues Dones Divines 2011, Episode 6; viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjFnEQnyRoc&list=ELEEIHlVOBo7U). Discussion Why do these morphosyntactic elements repeatedly appear as a trope in mass-media humor? One reason is that language-internal patterns as well as contrasts with Castilian place the weak pronouns at one of those uneasy points in the sociolinguistic system that Mary Douglas might have called a structural joke. As examples above have shown, their structural distinction has made the weak pronouns emblematic of Catalan and Catalanness (in contrast to Castilian language and character) in the eyes of serious commentators as well as humorists. Thus the jokes are often as much about Catalan and Catalanness as about whether a particular speaker controls a grammatical form. The weak pronouns are probably also an irresistible target of humor for television scriptwriters because the editorial policy on the regimentation of style has made them unavoidably salient in the writers own professional practice. (This was an impossibility at the time of Eugenios popularity in 197980, before there was a Catalanmedium television channel.) The section of the TV3 style manual that treats weak pronouns distinguishes four registers (formal, colloquial, markedly informal colloquial, and subtitles) as well as the category never acceptable for determining the acceptability of a given form for a particular media use. (The manual indeed categorizes as never acceptable the -lis form used by the candidate Snchez Camacho and ridiculed on Twitter.) Applying these ve categories, the manual presents fourteen complex tables displaying the acceptability level of different forms and combinations of weak pronouns, as well as a list of further questions about specic forms (CCMA 2013; see http://esadir.cat/entrades/txa/node/pronpersfebl). The complexity of the manual suggests that the weak pronouns are a shared professional nightmare and thus a professional joke for scriptwriters. A Catalan sociolinguist has pointed out to me, based on personal experience, that weak-pronoun jokes bring a laugh not just from language professionals and struggling L2 speakers, but from almost anyone who has attended school in Catalonia since autonomy and the restoration of Catalan teaching.15 Despite the faux Montillas conviction that the weak pronouns are less painful if acquired early, L1 Catalan speakers as well as L2 learners feel hectored about them by teachers. A heritagelanguage but Castilian-dominant Catalan speaker from Mallorca once described the

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prescriptive pronoun charts to me as pure science ction. According to Wheeler et al. (1999:167), it is in part the discrepancies between widespread colloquial habits and formal, written conventions that make this the most exacting aspect of Catalan grammar. Indeed, one study (Argenter i Giralt et al. 1998) found that young speakers from urban areas, regardless of whether they were L1 or L2 Catalan speakers, did not control the obligatory adverbial pronouns as well as rural speakers of either language background did. However, rather than showing higher frequency of incorrect forms of the pronouns, the urban speakers appeared to avoid using them altogether in challenging contexts by substituting circumlocutions that are likely to have a one-toone correspondence with Castilian. In this sense, then, there is selection for, and tolerance of, syntactic convergence, as Gumperz would have predicted, based on his Kupwar data. However, the avoidance of circumstances of error suggests a much higher level of metalinguistic awareness and anxiety about the prescriptively correct forms in Catalonia than was documented in Kupwar. Native Catalan speakers own lack of control of the weak pronouns, rather than that of L2 speakers, is actually the principal target of the broad linguistic humor in the television program that Ribot studied. The character Rosario, the martinet who mounts a 24-hour hotline to save the weak pronouns and who attempts to instill them in immigrant sweatshop workers, is an improbably hypercorrect, immigrant-origin, working-class, L2 Catalan speaker, who is represented as acquiring the language through assiduous formal study. She repeatedly mounts verbal attacks on the native Catalan speakers around her for their careless participation in what she calls, taking the language-death trope a step further in anthropomorphism, genocide against the weak pronouns (Ribot Bencomo 2013). In one episode, she holds an apocryphal book suitably titled The Genocide against the Weak Pronouns, and the graphic design of its cover is a visual joke easily recognized by those who have tried to master standard Catalan through bookish diligence. The cover design clearly (but falsely) places it in the well-known Pompeu Fabra Collection of pocket guides to linguistic correctness from Editorial Claret, along with actual titles like Speak Catalan Well: Vocabulary of Incorrect Forms; Speak Catalan Better; and The Catalan Verbs Conjugated.16 This ridiculous running joke plays on the fact that when it comes to the genocide against the weak pronouns, the average urban native Catalan speaker is as much or more of a (natural-born) killer as the Castilian-origin language learner. As a ritual linguistic barrier, the weak pronouns are a social leveler. The different linguistic constituencies in Catalonia sometimes get the weak pronouns wrong in different ways, sometimes in the same ways, but most ordinary speakers do get them wrong, one way or another, at one time or another. 17 As hilarious as the faux Montilla and the real Snchez-Camachos inability to produce weak pronouns may be, the insistence on getting them right is represented in the media humor as equally hilarious. The televised comedies suggest that a campaign to abolish the weak pronouns is absurd, but so is a campaign to save them as if they were an oppressed people or an endangered species. The meaning indexed by the humorous troping on the weak pronouns is arguably a more socially and linguistically sophisticated version of the effect that I posited for Eugenios code-switching in 1979. The more detailed linguistic humor refracts social and sociolinguistic changes and considerable movement of the goalposts in both elds over recent decades. The threshold of Catalan linguistic competence in the general population has been raised (albeit precariously) through thirty years of political autonomy and language-policy making.18 A signicant proportion of the citizens and denizens of Catalonia who are not native Catalan speakers have moved well beyond incomprehension, and even beyond receptive competence, to active production of Catalan. This changed pattern and higher standard of expected linguistic prociency leaves those longtime residents who have not acquired Catalan liable to mockery if they step into the public limelight as Montilla did. Yet, at the same time, the comedy suggests ambivalence about this higher standard. At the rigorous

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standard of production represented by the weak pronouns, public humor once again suggests, as it did in Eugenios time, that native Catalan and Castilian speakers are in this together, and that perhaps one really shouldnt be too troubled about demands of and for the language. Coda In fall 2012, as I was rst drafting this article, Catalonia broke into the international news with an effervescent movement for sovereignty that enjoyed surprisingly broad support across the population, which now includes more people of immigrant, Castilian-speaking descent than of autochthonous Catalan origins. Whereas only about a third of the population is of Catalan-speaking ethnolinguistic origin, 50% to 80% supported Catalan sovereignty in the rst months of the movement (depending on how the question was asked). In December 2013, as I nish revisions, Catalonia has again appeared in international headlines. A broad coalition of parties in the Catalan parliament has approved a question and a 2014 date for a referendum on independence, in the face of intransigent opposition and bald threats of punitive action from the Spanish government. Polls show that 75% or more of the voters of Catalonia now support the demand for a referendum and the right to decide. Varying widely with the polling agency, actual support for an independent state currently runs at about 45%, higher than the rate that would vote against independence (36%) (El Peridico 2013). The strength of the current Catalan sovereignty movement has caught almost all observers by surprise. For those who understand nationalism in primordialist terms, it has been especially bafing, given the ethnolinguistic makeup of modern Catalonia as well as ongoing efforts of the conservative Spanish governing party (and smaller parties within Catalonia) to paint Catalan nationalism and linguistic policy as illiberal and oppressive to Castilian speakers. How to understand this? Clearly, the upwelling of the sovereignty movement responds to the European economic crisis and a sense of economic and political grievance in a region that consistently gives considerably more in taxes than it gets back in government services from the state. The cultural and linguistic grievances that have long motivated core supporters of Catalan independence are not the primary motivations for relatively broad-based current support of the Catalan right to decide on this issue. However, the Spanish governments intransigence on linguistic, cultural, and social matters, and a number of its recent moves to trim back Catalan autonomous powers over language, culture, and education, contribute to backlash support for the referendum. The linguistic humor that I have discussed may seem trivial in light of the ambitions, animosities, and anxieties of the intersecting crises of the Catalan nation, the Spanish state, and the European Union. They do not motivate this broad-based Catalan independence movement, but I propose that the larger linguistic patterns and changes agged by this humor do enable the political movement and defuse potential fearful resistance to it. As in earlier eras, mediatized linguistic humor is a metapragmatic refraction of social conditions. The humor surrounding the weak pronouns recognizes, but also ironizes, the conceptualization of Catalan and Catalan nationalism as archaic, backward-looking, and belonging only to those who come by it natively. Catalaninitiated jokes about the awkward joke in the Catalan linguistic system play on the continued desacralization of the Catalan language, which has become less of a ritual barrier to social interaction across groups. This linguistic stance parallels a similarly more open stance toward the possibility of being Catalan within a late-modern world, a stance that some of my formerly resistant Castilian-speaking informants have grown to take up over the last two decades (Woolard 2011). These kinds of sociolinguistic, social, and personal changes make Catalan sovereignty thinkable among a surprisingly broad constituency.

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Notes
Acknowledgments. Data collection for this article began while I was a visiting researcher afliated with the Department of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona. I thank the Agncia de Gesti dAjuts Universitaris i de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya (grant #2005PIV2-31) for its support, and Professor Joan Argenter for sponsorship. I am also grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation (grant #7563), to the University of California, San Diego for support of the eld research, and to Adrianne Saltz for helping me gather television data. The paper was completed with support from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and enhanced by my participation in the theme group on The construction of local identities through language practices (Leonie Cornips and Vincent de Rooij, organizers). I have discussed some of the video data and benetted from comments in several forums, including the 6th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics at the University of Arizona, 2012, and Sociolinguistics Symposium 19, Berlin, 2012. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the panel Gumperz at 90: The Ethnography of Communication and Its Legacy at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 2012. Many thanks to Sandro Duranti for his discussion of the presentation, to two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions, and to Susan Frekko for thoughtful comments on the rst draft, unfortunately not fully reected in this revision. 1. Kathryn Woolard is the authorial I of this article and is responsible for the analytic assertions advanced, particularly any errors in those claims. Aida Ribot Bencomo collected and analyzed the data from the recent situation comedy that is discussed here; the other data were collected by Woolard. Josep Soler Carbonell assisted in the analysis of the video data from Polnia, supported by the la Caixa USA Fellowships Program. 2. E.g., the petit-bourgeois gures of the radio personalities Pere and Ricki in the late 1980s (Woolard 1995), or the comedienne Lloll Bertrans spot-on parody of an upper-middle-class Catalan pija (preppie), Sandra Camaca, in the mid-1990s. 3. Underlining in the original indicates notable phonological, lexical, and idiomatic transfers from Castilian, as well as hyperbolic syntactic errors in the faux-Montillas Catalan. Underlining and solecisms in the English gloss approximate the most glaring solecisms in the Catalan. Double parentheses (( )) enclose contextualizing added comments. 4. Criticisms of Catalan and Catalan language policies as un- or even anti-modern have indeed been launched by Castilianist partisans in the past decade, despite Catalonias longstanding leading role in the industrialization (and post-industrialization) of Spain. 5. La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper of conservative Catalonia, was traditionally published only in Castilian. Since May 2011, there has also been a Catalan edition based in automatic translation, which more than half of the overall readership chooses. 6. cmo la Generalitat meta con sangre pronoms febles en las cabecitas de pequeas criaturas puras y castellanas. 7. No- los- los giros del cataln, el- los pronoms febles . . . Un castellano no te lo va a dominar nunca en la vida. Los- els pronoms febles, eso es complicao como la madre que los pari. Porque encima, el cataln, tiene- es arcaico, es muy arcaico, tiene unos giros en el lenguaje muy complicados, tiene- una sonoridad complicada para un castellanoparlante. 8. La nostra llengua disposa daquest mecanisme lingstic que no tenen altres llenges, els pronoms febles, i que ens permet escurar paraules i escriure i piular idees fent servir menys espais. 9. Some readers will note, as did a reviewer for this article, that the distinctive weak pronouns en and hi correspond to French rather than Spanish. There is general awareness of this relation in the educated adult Catalan population, especially among those over age 45, since French was the principal foreign language studied up until the last decades of the 20th century (as well as the medium of instruction in one of the most elite private schools). Early in that century, some Catalan philologists stressed grammatical resemblances to French and grouped Catalan in a linguistic subfamily with French rather than Castilian. However, the relation of Catalan to French has not been a live issue in the professional or popular imagination in Catalonia in the last several decades. 10. Examples cited here were found through searches of the Twitter website for pronom OR pronoms OR feble OR febles #DebatTV3 for the day of and the day following the debate, 1819 November 2012. 11. Lactivitat, que senfocar duna manera molt prctica, sadrea a ciberactivistes i a tothom que vulgui aprendre i practicar els pronoms febles a un nivell bsic (especialment els pronoms en i hi).

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12. Un dels problemes ms greus que est patint el catal actualment s la prdua dels Pronoms Febles EN i HI, a causa de la traducci literal del castell, el qual no els fa servir. 13. It is conceivable that this also owes, in part, to further connotations of the label weak, which may suggest vulnerability to loss under language contact, rather than the original meaning of phonological reduction of unstressed syllables. 14. The squatter character speaks a mix of Catalan and Castilian here; the latter is indicated by underlining, and bivalent elements are italicized. 15. Eva Juarros-Dauss, personal communication, April 2012. 16. The book Rosario holds depicts it as volume 7 in this series, but the actual volume 7 is Escriviu B el Catal (Write Catalan Well). 17. Native speakers do not necessarily simplify the system in a way that converges with Castilian. Colloquial patterns show as much divergent overuse of hi as convergent loss of it, as seen in the news headline that set off the complaint in Ex. 2. Roughly comparable phenomena might be prescriptively incorrect uses of whom or of conjoint nominative pronouns in object position in American English. 18. At the same time, there is a generalized perception that the quality of Catalan among native speakers has degraded in this same period.

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