The presentation of Catalan universities' linguistic reality to a transnational audience

Abstract

This article seeks to explore critically the discourse strategies used by three Catalonian universities on their English-medium websites, directed at (prospective) transnational students, investigating how their higher education (HE) linguistic environments are portrayed. In recent decades, Catalan regained its status of lingua academica alongside Spanish; the use of Catalan in HE is regarded as vital for its long-term sustainability. In this context, efforts to attract transnational students jar with concerns raised about the hegemonic dominance of English as an academic lingua franca. After reviewing salient themes in the literature on the changing landscape of HE in Europe, we describe the linguistic and sociopolitical context of Catalonia in particular, and adopt Fairclough's three-stage discourse analysis framework to our text analysis. Texts are described and considered in terms of how they can be seen to either reproduce or challenge these emergent themes. Results show that the websites identify English as the world's undisputed academic lingua franca, and a linguistic gateway to international success. Simultaneously, the websites focus on the social and cultural significance of their local language to its foreign audience, trying to escape the risk of cultural and linguistic harmonisation that has been denounced in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in other comparable contexts.