La llengua com a espai profà, la llengua com a espai sagrat: llengua i territori en narratives del desarrelament de la Catalunya contemporània'

This article analyzes territory and language in the rootlessness narratives of contemporary Catalonia, particularly biographies of immigrants and egodocuments from Republican Catalan exiles, within the framework of sociolinguistic theories (Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004). Despite being two very different historical situations, immigration and exile are phenomena that have led rootless people to reflect on their condition, specifically their territory of origin and on occasion their language. While the witnesses of exile that I analyze attributed to the language a whole range of moral values, the witnesses of immigration silence their language of origin among the identification elements that they evoke or recall in their biographies. As a result of my analysis of these two forms of rootlesness, in the case of immigration, I propose interpreting language as a profane site, while in the case of exile, I propose interpreting language as a sacred sit