Episode 31: Catalan Language Normalization with Guillem Belmar

URL: https://fieldnotespod.com/2021/08/29/episode-31-Catalan-language-normalization-with-guillem-belmar/

[Intro music]

Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello, and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Guillem Belmar. Guillem is a friend of the pod. He came onto Field Notes last season in episode 14 to talk about fieldwork in the time of COVID and what we thought, what our thoughts were on whether people should be doing fieldwork. At that time, nobody knew how this pandemic was going to stretch out, so if you want to listen to a bit of a moment in time from language documentation in COVID, you can check that episode out. Guillem is a PhD researcher at UC Santa Barbara, and he obtained his BA from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and his MAs at the National Distance Education in Spain and the University of Groningen, and he’s just someone I really admire. He’s really an activist for Catalan. He’s a Catalan person, and he’s done a lot of work with researching, language policy, translation. He also does quite a lot on social media, and he runs a #europeminoritylanguages project. So yeah, I’m really excited to share this episode. The last time Guillem came on the pod, we didn’t really have a chance to speak much about his own language and how his identity as a minority language speaker has influenced his work as a linguist. So yeah, I’m excited to share this with you. And just an announcement before we dive into the episode. I will be taking a very brief podcast sabbatical next month in September 2021, so there will not be an episode being released September 2021, but there will still be a bonus Patreon episode, so if you have already listened to all the Field Notes episodes, you can check out the Patreon. I post one mini bonus ep each month, and next month will be no exception, so there will still be a bonus ep for Patreon supporters. And if you’re interested in checking out the Field Notes Patreon, it’s at patreon.com/fieldnotespodcast. Thank you so much.

[Music]

MTB: Hi, Guillem. How are you doing?

Guillem Belmar: Hi. Doing fine, thank you.

MTB: Oh, great. Well, thanks so much for coming onto Field Notes again. So to start, can you just share with some of our listeners who maybe haven’t heard our first episode with you, episode 14, just a bit about who you are, and where you are, and what work you’re doing in linguistics?

Guillem Belmar: Sure. Em dic Guillem i ara mateix visc a Califòrnia a Santa Bàrbara però vinc de Catalunya, de Girona, i estudio, estic estudiant lingüística, un doctorat en lingüística, i em dedico sobretot a estudiar doncs documentació, processos de minoritació, i revitalització lingüística. So my name is Guillem Belmar, and I am now in Santa Barbara in California doing my PhD in linguistics, although I come from Girona in Catalonia. And I, my studies, I focus in revitalization, also in documentation, and I study mostly processes of minorization, how we can contest them and fight them.

MTB: Awesome. So can you give some background to your experience with Catalan? Like you’re a Catalan person, Catalonian person. Which is it?

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, I’m not entirely sure in English how you would go about it. I mean, in Catalan the word is the same for both a person and the language, and…

MTB: Okay.

Guillem Belmar: … so, like, I don’t know. I would go maybe Catalan. But so yeah, I was born there. Catalan is my first language. It’s the language that I always spoke at home with my parents and with my grandparents. I did have like… I do have a couple of uncles with whom I, or who would speak Spanish to me. I don’t always speak Spanish to them because it’s very normal to just mix everything, but yeah, back home, so Catalan is the language that I spoke with my parents or with my grandparents, with my sibling, with most of my friends. My grandparents, so the only grandparents that I ever socialized with were my father’s parents, and they come from the south of Valencia, and they speak also Catalan, but their own variety of Catalan, but they have been living for so long in Girona that now they have kind of like a mix of different varieties of Catalan. But I’ve always spoken Catalan at home. So yeah, it’s kind of like… It’s a very important part of who I am, and my identity, and how I choose to identify myself and to present myself, and also I think it’s a very important part of what led me to study linguistics, and especially like focusing on minorities.

MTB: Yeah. Can you tell us more about that, about how your experience as a Catalan person has influenced your work as a linguist and like how you got into linguistics?

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, sure. So because Catalan is my first language, I think I grew up very aware of the fact that I was part of a minority because it’s also a very common topic of discussion back home, how Catalan is minoritized, how we have to do something to normalize Catalan, etc., etc. So this is so… It’s such a mainstream discourse that if Catalan is your first language, you grow up very aware that you are part of a minority and there’s something that needs to be done. On top of that, there was also, there’s also the issue of my name. Like when I was growing up, there were not a lot of people with my name, and it’s… So it’s also a name that like it’s Guillem [gi’ʎɛm], and for a lot of Spanish speakers, it’s difficult to pronounce some of these sounds, or maybe not like the… It’s not like an m is a problem for Spanish speakers, but ending a word with an m is a problem, so there’s a few issues there for Spanish speakers that makes it very easy for… Like for me growing up, it was easy that my name was mispronounced or that people would for, like for their comfort, would change to the Spanish version of my name instead of the Catalan one. And I remember, growing up, this was something that made me very, very angry because it wasn’t my name. So, you know, like even the issue of my name already, like as a very young kid, made me realize that there might be something there that needs to be addressed.

And then growing up and getting more interested in other minorities around the area, such as like the Basques, which a lot of Catalans that get interested in minorities kind of like at some point study Basque or want to know something more about the Basques. And then from that, well, so I learned a bit of Basque and I learned that their situation was different, similar enough, but still like different, so you start saying that not everyone is in the same position, right, even minorities, like in this spectrum of whatever you call minority, there’s so many different things. And then you… So I continued investigating a bit more about the issue and like researching and reading and seeing that actually, like I come from a minority that in the category of minority is quite well off in comparison to others, and then what that meant and trying to understand how that was and if these, if some things from one minority can help the other, or… You know, like trying to understand how is that there’s this thing that is this, the same process of minorization, but why is it so different in so many different places? And of course, so there’s so many reasons, like there’s historical reasons. There’s also the fact that a lot of… So in the, in the case of Catalans for example, we just… I’d just say for most traditional minorities or ethnolinguistic minorities in Western Europe, you are a minority because you speak a different language from the dominant language of the nation state and also because you have some certain cultural expressions that are different from what is mainstream in the nation state, but you’re not a minority because of race, for example. So there’s a layer of minorization that doesn’t apply to you. In other words, you can kind of pass as the majority if you want, right, whereas that’s not the case everywhere. And so, you know, like from my own experience of minorization, then you realize that there are so many other experiences of minorization, and that’s something that I found fascinating and that led me to, yeah, study linguistics, but from this perspective of minorization.

MTB: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to talk more about Basque, for sure. I’m also interested in Basque, like I think so many people are, but first, can we talk a little bit about what is the language context of Catalan? Like you said that, you know, it’s quite a large language for a minority language. Can you just give some more context about like what the situation is?

Guillem Belmar: So the context of Catalan, as I was saying before, is, it’s quite a large language in terms of numbers if we compare it to other minority languages. If we are very, very optimistic with numbers, we may say that there are around 10 million speakers, and that is everyone who can say something in the language. Native speakers, it’s probably four and a half million, something like that, that’s more or less, but that’s still like quite a large number. It’s also spoken in different areas, and therefore the sociolinguistic situation is very different in different administrative regions. So I grew up in Catalonia, which is currently nowadays still an autonomous community of Spain in the northeast, and it’s also, it’s the place also where most of the speakers live, and then it’s also spoken in the autonomous community of Valencia in Spain and the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands in Spain, as well as in one small region of the autonomous community of Aragon which is neighboring Catalonia. It’s also spoken in the small country of Andorra in the Pyrenees, where it’s the only official language in the country, so that’s the only country in the world that has Catalan as the official language. And then it’s also spoken in a small area in southern France that we call Northern Catalonia that was historically part of Catalonia, part of the lands controlled by the Count of Barcelona until I don’t remember exactly what year.  In one war between Spain and France, they just redrew the border and it became part of France. And then it’s also spoken in a small city in the island of Sardinia, in a small city called Alghero in the island of Sardinia, which is now in Italy.

So yeah, it’s spoken in very different regions, and the language policy, the situation of the language is very different in all of these areas. For example, in southern France, in Northern Catalonia, intergenerational transmission stopped maybe a couple of generations ago, so what they have to, like what they’re doing now to revitalize the language is completely different from what Catalonia is doing, for example, and where the intergenerational transmission, they didn’t really stop in Catalonia. Like it stopped in some places for some families like in cities and maybe some people that reached some upper classes stopped transmission, but like it didn’t stop as a whole. It was more a thing of all of a sudden there’s so many new people that came from other places that don’t speak the language, so how do we do this? So it’s a completely different story from Northern Catalonia, for example. So, of course, the situation of the language is very different. And when I… Like in this episode, we’re talking about language policies and issues that come up with the organization of Catalan, what I’m most familiar with is what is happening in Catalonia.

MTB: Of course, like you can speak best from your own experience. So when you were doing your linguistic research, did you work with members of your own family? Like did you collect data within your own community, or can you just like tell us a little bit about like the data collection aspect of your work? Because I know you’ve also done work with Frisian and then Basque, of course, as well. Like how has that all compared?

Guillem Belmar: I’ve done… So most of my data collection, per se, let’s just say maybe the biggest experience was Frisian because most of my research on Catalan and on Basque has been more of an observational nature and like reading and seeing what the media is saying and more of like, yeah, more of like an introspective maybe kind of.

MTB: Oh, like an autoethnography?

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, kind of like an autoethnography, but also, yeah, kind of like an observation of what is happening, and in terms of what we know about the language policy, and what we know about, there is the results of this language policy, what is happening, what is not working, and how do people, as in like, how does the discourse in general shape this? Whereas then when I did my work in Friesland, I did focus a bit more on people’s motivations, people’s attitudes, and therefore like I did interview people, whereas for most of my work on the situation in Catalonia, more, rather than interviewing people, I’m trying to see what the bigger discourse is. So in the case of Frisian, I did that. I did interview people, and that required me… So it depends, like I use interviews and surveys. Those surveys are easy if you want to reach a lot of people because you can just send them out, you can… Typically, you will get more responses, but also easier to process generally the responses because people just have different choices and therefore you just like A, B, or C. The problem with surveys is that you have to, like the design of the survey has to be very good, otherwise then when you’re processing this, maybe you don’t get what you actually wanted to get. So that’s a big problem with surveys, whereas if you do interviews, you will get what you want to get. It’s just that you will probably not get as many answers, and it takes a long time to process them because you have to like listen to them again and transcribe them and all these things. Right? But yeah, and I was lucky enough when I was in Friesland, and I was also volunteering with Afûk, which is an organization that they have there for the promotion of the Frisian language and creation of materials, etc. And so because I was volunteering there, I had access to the teachers that were teaching Frisian, and because one of… Like my main research question when I was there is, why do adults that don’t speak Frisian want to learn Frisian? So what I did is, I used that network to get surveys and to get people to interview as well.

MTB: Can I ask you about the creation of your survey? So like you said, surveys are good for reaching lots of people, but then if you don’t have a well-made survey, then you can kind of go to all this work for, all for naught. So did you have someone help you create the first survey, or was it like trial and error? How did you decide like how to design the survey?

Guillem Belmar: Yeah. I’m going to explain, I’m going to explain two things. Like, well, first, I’m going to explain something about a survey that didn’t actually work out, and then I’m going to explain the one that actually worked out. And I have recently been working on this data, but so I made a survey. This was after first year in Friesland and after my first research in Friesland. We started a whole new project in which we were trying to also study the ideologies that go behind automatically switching to the dominant language (right?) and then on this idea that it is impolite to speak the minority language outside the group that you think speak it. And the main, the idea at first was to have a lot of workshops and a lot of people participating in them, and so we thought that because it was targeted to so many people, we thought, “We need surveys, and we need a survey that can be easily quantifiable.” Now, we don’t know if the survey would have worked in that context, but what happened is that I got accepted here in Santa Barbara, and everything had to be rushed in one month and a half before I left, and so we ended up having 15 participants instead of like the 50 that we thought we would have. And what happened is that it was designed to have 50 or more participants, so the results of the survey were almost impossible to process from a data perspective because you didn’t have enough points. And we were lucky that at the end we decided to add a couple of open-ended questions in the survey, which is what gave us actually the information, which is like a very mini-interview with the people that were there. So that’s one thing. You need to know how many people will answer the survey to get, like to design the survey even, because if you want to compare like… In this case, we wanted to compare things between different groups and we wanted to compare before the workshops and after the workshops, so there’s a lot of comparison to be done, but if you only have 15 people, this is not going to work because you’re cutting the groups too small. So that’s one thing that happened. And then my, so in my first research in which I was looking at new speakers of Frisian, that was my MA thesis, so in that case I did have my supervisor with me, Eva Daussà, who is in the University of Groningen, and she helped me design the survey with other surveys that she had used before, and then we also looked at other literature that talked about the issues of new speakers. And then basically there was this thing of every question and every possible answer that I can think of for this question, if I can justify it with previous literature that has said that this may happen, so that kind of gives you an idea of what you can ask and what you may expect. You also try to be open, and sometimes you will limit your responses. So what I mean is, sometimes you would have six different responses to a question, but you decide to… only for three because there’s a previous document that only asks for three and you actually want to compare. So that’s also something to take into account. So it is a long process. I think like designing the survey was most of the time for the MA thesis.

MTB: Yeah. Yeah, and that was on Frisian, you said?

Guillem Belmar: Yes, that was on Frisian.

MTB: Yeah. Yeah, I feel a little bit intimidated about surveys, actually, because for some reason, I just have this feeling like, like you said, like most of the work is just creating the survey, and then I feel like once you’ve given that to someone, like once you’ve released it into the wild, then you kind of like can’t stop it, like that, it is what it is, and you can’t get it back to make changes. So yeah, so I really haven’t done too much with surveys because I just, yeah, like I said, I think I’m intimidated of them.

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, I mean, definitely, it is, it has been intimidating, because it’s true that you, as you said, that once you launched it, it’s there, and you cannot change it because you cannot have different surveys for different people; it has to be the same. Yeah, it is a bit intimidating, and of course, like when you start processing your survey, even if you did it well, you will see things and be like, “Oh, maybe I should have asked this other thing,” or… Because also, like you don’t want to overwhelm the participants, so it should never be… Like it’s normally two pages both sides, so like four pages. No more than that, because nobody’s going to answer more than that — I mean, unless you actually pay for their time, but then you also have to think about people getting tired, and it gets complicated if you ask a lot of questions. So you have to keep it as simple as possible as well.

MTB: Yeah. Absolutely. So you mentioned briefly about your work where you were studying the motivation behind new adult speakers, so people who didn’t grow up speaking Frisian, but then they decided to learn Frisian for some reason. Can you share a bit about the findings of that paper that you wrote?

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, so this was actually a follow-up of this MA thesis, and what we did was with a couple of colleagues from Groningen and from Amsterdam. We carried out some interviews with people that were learning Frisian, both in Afûk in this organization for the promotion of the Frisian language, in which they have these official courses where you actually go to class, and it’s like a normal, any normal second-language-learning environment. And we also interviewed a couple of people that are in the Frisian organization at the University of Groningen, and they are not Frisian speakers, but the organization offers some sort of, let’s just say it’s language courses as well, but it’s kind of more informal because it’s like between students. Right? So it’s a language course, but it’s not the same as actually going to a class with a textbook and with a teacher.

So we interviewed these people, and we kind of expected from previous literature that people would talk about personal motivation. So in general, there’s these distinctions and motivation of like instrumental motivation, meaning like you learn something because you want to improve maybe your socioeconomic status, so you want to improve your job, and that’s mostly why people learn things like English or big languages.

There’s integrative motivation, so if you want to learn… If you learn a language because you want to be part, become part, of a community, maybe even like if I move to Finland, maybe I want to learn Finnish for integrative motivation, because I probably can live in Finland without Finnish in English and work, but there’s a part of me that will not be, like I will not be integrated in part of the Finnish sphere. Right? So that’s one thing.

And then there’s also personal motivation, which, this is a bit tricky because this can range from, “Oh, I think it sounds beautiful,” to, “It’s the language my grandmother spoke, and I want to reconnect to that,” so this has a lot of a lot of different things under the umbrella of “personal,” but in general, other authors have found that minoritized languages, in general, people learn them for personal motivations (right?) for these speakers because they like it, or because there was somebody in their family that spoke it, or because their new boyfriend speaks it, whatever, and they want to do that. What we found is this, is that normally people start because of this, so the first… Going to the first Frisian lesson was because you had some personal reason, but you only stick to it and continue if you actually want to integrate, if you actually want to become part of this Frisian community that… Maybe you grew up in Friesland in the city and you didn’t even know that was happening, and then you get in touch to it, through your personal motivation you discover that there’s actually something else that you want to be part of, and then that integrative part also existed. There was a little bit of instrumental part, yes, because at the end of the day, it’s a language that is also used in some of the administrative levels, so there might be some people who actually need it to improve a little bit their job, but it tends to be mostly the personal integrative parts, which is in general what you found for minoritized languages.

MTB: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So it’s almost like there’s like a hook, and then to like keep you learning, though, to keep you like on the path, you need like more than that initial spark.

Guillem Belmar: Yes, exactly, and it’s kind of also what… So in schools in the province of Friesland, there’s not a lot… Like they don’t have to teach Frisian, but there are some schools that are what they call trilingual schools, and what they’re doing is, these schools, like they’re public schools just like the others, but they decided to teach kids with Dutch, Frisian, and English. And what they’re doing basically is like hooking people from English (right?) being like, “Oh, you know, if your kid comes here, they will learn more English. They will better at English, but we also teach them Frisian,” and then after that, if the kid happens to also get like inside the bubble and wants to like, then they will continue and they will learn more Frisian, but there’s this first hook of like, “We need to catch you first.”

MTB: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Okay. Well, I can’t let you go without telling me more about Basque. So I don’t really know that much about Basque, but like it just seems like a really interesting language, like it’s an isolate, right? Can you tell us more about your work with Basque?

Guillem Belmar: Well, I got the Basque fever when I was 9 or 10 or something like that that I started being interested in Basque, and then when I started university, I started taking some classes in Basque. And yeah, I mean, one of the things that make it so interesting for linguists as a whole is the fact that it is not Indo-European, that it’s an isolate, that it’s an ergative language surrounded by so many non-ergative languages. Like, it works so differently from the languages that surround it that it’s a bit of a mystery why is it there, why it became this way, and why it survived, actually. That’s one of the big mysteries. I personally, like I’ve been… Like I’ve studied Basque from different perspectives, like I’ve studied… So one of my first research, like scholarly research, was on trying to understand the role that translation had played in the normalization of Basque. That is because in the 1980s when Spain transitioned from a dictatorship to democracy and then languages like Basque, Catalan, and Galician were made co-official in their territories and then legislation was passed to make them also languages of schooling, at that moment in time, all these languages were like, “Okay, and now we need to translate a huge amount of literature for these languages to actually be successfully used in schooling according to the curriculum that the Spanish government had in school.” Right? And so there was a huge effort in translation that was put, and it changed the Basque language quite a lot, because, you know, when you translate, you end up creating new models, also, of how to use the language, etc. So that was one of the things that I was looking at. And then more recently, I’ve looked at Basque from a more quote-unquote “structural linguistic” perspective. So one aspect of Basque that is quite fascinating is the so-called allocutivity, and that’s the fact that in certain contexts, certain social linguistic contexts, the verb in Basque will take different endings depending on who I am talking to, even if that person is not part of the sentence.

MTB: Who you’re talking to?

Guillem Belmar: Exactly. So if I say, “It’s raining,” I can say it’s raining and that’s it, but I can also say, if I’m talking to somebody that I’m very familiar with and I’m using a very colloquial language, I can say, “It’s raining,” and then the verb will change if I’m talking to a man or a woman, if it’s familiar, if it’s less familiar. Like that’s different, there’s different possibilities there, and that’s one aspect of Basque that is quite interesting and that I’ve been looking at recently and how it works and how it’s been used in literature, in corpus, etc.

MTB: That’s cool.

Guillem Belmar: That’s some things that I’ve been looking at in Basque, yeah.

MTB: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Does it work across like vertical and horizontal distance? Like if you don’t know someone well, or like if you know them well but they’re like just higher status to you, does that affect it?

Guillem Belmar: Actually it’s also, like it’s one of those things that is disappearing, right? Because it’s disappearing because, like most Basque speakers nowadays learn Basque at school. Right? So, and they learned the formal language of like the school language, and school language does not include that necessarily. It’s also a trait that it was already kind of disappearing because it’s a very, like you can use it for a lot of things, but it’s normally something that only manifests in very colloquial speaking, which means that, you know, like in general when a language starts to die out, this is one of the first things that that gets lost, because it’s seen as a bad thing. Right? Like even parents would tell their kids not to use it because it’s a bit too much for some speakers. So it’s something that is kind of disappearing also because if you are a new speaker of Basque, these forms, like the Basque verb is super complex already as it is, and if you have to add this, it kind of like exponentially multiplies everything that you have that you have to learn in every paradigm. So it is complex, and that might be one of the reasons why it’s disappearing. However, at the same time, it is something very…

So that was, that’s a bit linked to what I was doing with translation at first, because one of the problems with translation into minoritized languages is that when the minoritized language becomes standardized (which happened with Basque, with Catalan, with Galician), there is a point in which you, the translator is kind of like forced to use a standard language to a point in which then the translation is weird. Like I’ve seen it myself. Like I remember this whole interest came because I remember my father was reading a book about some thieves and the police and whatever, and it was a book that originally was in Swedish. He was reading the Catalan version. I’m not sure… I will assume that the Catalan version was translated from English, not from Swedish, but I’m not sure about that, but I remember him telling me like, “I like the book, but it’s difficult to read because like, you know, these thieves speak like they are professors, and that’s weird.” Yeah? And that’s something that a lot of, that it happens in a lot of minoritized languages, and it makes people kind of like even speakers themselves be like, “[exhausted exhale].” It kind of becomes like an effort to read in your own language because it sounds weird, but of course, the translators then have the whole thing of, “Well, yeah, but I cannot use… Like, you know, like there’s this whole idea that translation has to be monolingual, and so I cannot start doing code switching or whatnot.” And in the case of Basque, I mean, there is like, all these languages do have a way of doing it internally, just the way that it’s been dying out. In the case of Basque, there’s allocutivity that marks such a low, quote-unquote, “low” register of the language. It’s an informal colloquial register of the language. It’s something that it’s very, that could be very useful for this thing, and it’s something that is also, it’s also very interesting from a linguistic point of view. So it’s one thing that maybe, you know, like should be kept. And what I found in my recent paper is that it’s actually still something that it’s used in literature, so that people that write in Basque or people that translate into Basque are actually using it, and there’s other authors that have been talking about how the fact that this was used in the Basque dubbing of the Japanese cartoon Dragon Ball gave it a little bit of push among some young people as well, right? So there is some conscious effort of using it in some, again, like in some books for young people or in cartoons, so there is some push of using it and trying to revitalize the use of it.

MTB: That’s really interesting. So I think what I’m seeing and what you’re saying is like some stylistic shrinkage in Basque, whereas because it’s now in the schools and it’s been standardized, like the quote-unquote “high” registers are being used, but then like the low registers are kind of falling out of use. The opposite thing is happening in Amami, in the language that I work with, where the home domain, so like the low registers, are still being used among families and friends, but then the way you would speak at work or in like official contexts is like completely gone. So it’s very difficult to find these kind of like quote-unquote “high” registers. That’s so interesting, though.

Guillem Belmar: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting, because like, you can observe it also in minorities around Europe, like before, like if they’re not standardized, it’s exactly what you said, like the high domain is difficult to find. People don’t know how to speak in the high domain, etc. But the moment that they become standardized and they become used in the public sphere and they become used at schools, especially, there’s this thing like towards the language of school. Right? Like there’s a lot of… I think this is something that is improving now in Catalonia, but when I grew up… So I was born in 1991, and the normalization of Catalan started like in ‘83 or so, so I was born in the middle of the first big effort of normalizing it and in schooling, it had already been like established, but it was established, it was this effort of trying to standardize it, of trying to teach everyone the standard to a point that there’s a lot of words that my mother says that I don’t say anymore because school told us that those words… And it’s not like those words were bad words or even, it was not even that those words were Spanish words, which, yes, I mean, of course, that’s one other topic that a lot of the low register includes a lot of code switching, but it’s just normal. It’s like, because in everyday life everyone is code switching. So there’s this thing of trying to go to the standard, and there’s also this thing of, in things like translations or dubbings or whatever, this pressure of, the product has to be monolingual. And in a society that is not monolingual, that’s always a weird thing. At the end of the day, like you will switch, you will mix, and… Like I understand the pressure of the monolingual product, but that also makes it weird then to consume because it’s not how you would normally speak.

MTB: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. Well, Guillem, thank you so much for sharing your work and your experience with us. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your research or find you online?

Guillem Belmar: I’m very… I’m quite active on Twitter, so Twitter is a good start. So it’s just GuillemBelmar. That’s my Twitter. In there, I also have a link to my website, and in my website, there’s my email as well, so, you know, feel free to contact me via Twitter or email and I’ll be happy to talk to anyone interested in minorization as a whole.

MTB: Awesome. Thank you so much, Guillem.

Guillem Belmar: Thank you.

You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have a question or a fieldwork experience to share, you can email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an Apple Podcast review. Thanks for listening!

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