The Adoption of Electronic Media in the Struggle for Minority Language Rights in Spain

In Spain, new digital technologies first popularized in the mid-1990s have played an increasingly important role in the articulation of national, regional, and anti-national identities, which have been the subject of constant debate since the end of the Franco Regime in 1978.  Over the last decade and a half, electronic communications media have been, in particular, used as channels for the mobilization and organization of groups advocating the revival and legal protection of minority languages.  These linguistic revival movements, closely linked with local histories of regionalist and nationalist agitation in parts of Spain, have adopted this emerging electronic public space as a way to circumvent traditional public outlets such as newspapers, radio, and television. 

Thus, digital communications media have been eagerly embraced by the advocates of minority language rights as a natural evolution of older methods of alternative news circulation such as newsletters, pamphlets, stickers, graffiti, and protest music.  Internet news portals, blogs, social media sites, and the websites of activist organizations have come to serve as a means to re-circulate the collected political scrapbooks of nationalist and regionalist militants, actively writing an alternative history of Spain and its relationship to its authoritarian past.  Organizational forums and websites have also been used as points of contact for organizing political protests associated with the various nationalist and linguistic movements.  The combination of limited bilingual or minority-language print media and relatively uncontrolled access to the internet has spurred a proliferation of minority-language online forums and social media, creating the first mass forum in which several recently-standardized written languages and dialects are used on an everyday basis.  Thus, electronic media have been critical not only to the political defense of minority language rights, but also have served as an important vehicle for the continued popularity of alternative linguistic and cultural identities in Spain.