French and Spanish political discourses on linguistic and cultural plurality: the Catalan example

Abstract

Divided between North and South since the Treaty of the Pyrenees, Catalonia is a multilingual region, where French, Spanish and Catalan languages coexist. The purpose of this article is to show how the representations of linguistic and cultural plurality in the two "Catalan spaces" (French and Spanish) differ from one political discourse to another. Moreover, we want to show that everything is played out in a "mise en scene" whose sociolinguistic and political aspects are fundamental to understand the conditions of production of these discourses. Our corpus is made of the programs of French and Spanish political parties, respectively for the 2017 presidential elections in France and the 2016 Cortés elections in Spain.