¿Tienen un rol especial las jóvenes en la supuesta recuperación del valenciano?

Abstract

The interest in studying women's speech in situations of linguistic contact lies in the importance of women’s speech in the intergenerational transmission and, consequently, in the future of languages. Being linguistically conservative or innovative, women tend to adhere to any change involving an improvement in their social status. In this article we aim to assess if women, specially the young ones, are playing a special role in the revival or normalization process of Valencian. We base our study in the data from two works on attitude, competence and linguistic uses carried out, following a similar methodology, in 1998 and 2008 in different secondary schools of Valencia. The results show that Valencian women are not leading any sociolinguistic change mainly due to the fact that neither the prestige nor the use of Valencian has increased over the last years.