Amor, emoció i artifici de la llengua catalana a la Catalunya del Nord avui / Love, emotion and artifice of Catalan language in Northern Catalonia today

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the individual processes of a few northern Catalans who have had a special relationship with the Catalan language, as it is vernacular of their territory. To date, very few people have analysed them from an introspective point of view. Personal stories of the “keepers” of Catalan in the more contemporary Northern Catalonia are eloquent to regard evolutionary processes of their languages, but also the involutionary ones. Catalan language in this context is a sign of a complex identity, confused and hard to define, experiencing uncertain moments and a time of mutation. These personal stories can help us to understand Catalan in a much more distinct manner unlike the matter-of-fact sociolinguistic surveys. In particular these stories will be complements, enrichments and new approaches to those so often cold statistics we have today. Individual life courses help to understand the mechanisms that have made possible that there are still people who speak Catalan in that area, people who actually seem to go against subjective laws of the history of languages.