Mind the gaps: A comparison of pronominal forms of address in the Spanish and Catalan spoken by students in Barcelona

Abstract

While there have been several influential studies over the past few decades regarding university students' use of formal (V) and informal (T) forms of pronominal address, a thorough review of the literature has revealed that no studies to date have compared bilingual Catalan-Spanish university students' pronominal address usage when speaking Catalan vs. when speaking Castilian Spanish with interlocutors of specific ages and social positions. The present study aimed to address this research gap by distributing a questionnaire to 61 bilingual Catalan-Spanish students of philology at the University of Barcelona. Results showed that, although the pronominal systems of Castilian Spanish and Catalan are different in theory (two forms vs. three forms of address), address pronoun choices were generally similar in percentages and in trends in both languages, even in spite of the fact that several students did not use Castilian Spanish or Catalan with certain interlocutors. This suggests that a process of linguistic convergence between Catalan and Castilian Spanish is taking place, even though the languages do not always share the same speakers.