Catalan or Spanish? Language Choice from Home to School

The aim of this article is to present the results of a study carried out among a preadolescent group of students in Barcelona. We will try to quantify their daily usage of Catalan and Spanish. For this purpose, we consider dyadic interactions in both codes (between two people) as the unit of analysis. The main hypothesis is that the Catalan subordination norm (Vila 1996: 185) is not extensible to all educative centres of Barcelona and its metropolitan area. The existence of such norm is tightly linked to a) the environmental linguistic condition, b) the linguistic condition of the school, and c) the sociolinguistic composition of the classroom. We will further clarify these concepts. One of the original features of this research is the variable used to analyse the results in section 4.4 (Catalan usage through domains: from family to school). Social network studies have developed rapidly since the forties (Boissevain 1987; Li Wei 1987), but within the Catalan sociolinguistic tradition its use is still limited. By definition, social networks are the ties established by one person (ego), both with the closest as well as the most distant individuals with whom interactions are maintained. Because the quality of ties varies according to the feelings of ego towards a person, Milardo (1988) distinguishes between exchange networks and interactive networks. Exchange networks are composed of people, usually relatives and intimate friends, with whom ego exchange