Dionisio Torruella Alujas' epistolary corpus (1895-1896): linguistic analysis in the framework of the teaching of spanish in Catalonia during the 19th century

Abstract

The epistolary corpus left by the Catalan soldier Dionisio Torruella Alujas, written during the war of Cuba (1895-1898), is of inestimable value to comprehend the diglossic context that was experienced in Catalonia during the 19^th century. These letters, 85 in total, portray a language filled with linguistic interferences due to the contact between Catalan and Spanish, so the aim of this paper is to identify the main phenomena regarding these transfers. As a starting point, the theoretical background will consider Weinreich’s classification of linguistic interferences (1953) and recent studies focused on the contact between both languages (Blas Arroyo 2004; Enrique-Arias 2008, 2012a and b; Sinner and Wesch 2008). In addition, this analysis presents a new approach, since the documented phenomena are compared with the content of textbooks and vocabularies that were used for teaching Spanish in the schools of Catalonia during the 19^th century. These works are of utmost importance because they were published in a context in which only Spanish was used for teaching in this territory and their content reflects some instances of linguistic transfers between Catalan and Spanish. All in all, this perspective, that combines the study of linguistic interferences alongside their apparition in textbooks for the teaching of Spanish, provides a fuller overview of a chapter in the history of Spanish in Catalonia.