The teaching of Catalan in the radio during the Late-Rancoism: «cursos de catalán (1969) of Ràdio Barcelona

Abstract

In the context of the attempt to recover the teaching of Catalan during the Sixties, in 1969 Ràdio Barcelona put on the air the program Cursos de catalán (Catalan courses), designed and written by the poet, grammarian and publisher Miquel Arimany, with his own voice as well as the voices of announcers Isidre Sola, Enriqueta Teixidó and Xavier Ubach, who were directed by Armand Blanch. The main aim of this program, which was cancelled after thirty-three issues, was the spreading of knowledge of Catalan among immigrant group, as a necessary condition to expand its use. This paper analyses the characteristics of the course: the alternation between Spanish and Catalan as vehicular languages; the comparison with Spanish as an educational resource to teach Catalan; the advantages and disadvantages of the radiophonic channel for language teaching; the pleasantness of radio drama as a strategy to attract the audience and to retain it; the focus on the differences with Spanish as the thread in the selection of contents; the underlying linguistic ideology in the course; the reference to linguistic authority, and the avoidance of dialect diversity.