Abstract
Recently, in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia of Spain, a large flow of 'new migrants' has raised many questions, among which language related issues in particular have emerged as major concerns. In a society like Catalonia, where two languages of different status - Castilian, the official language of the whole Spanish state, and Catalan, the autonomous community's own and official language - coexist, how do the immigrants use languages? This study explores Catalonia's sociolinguistic situation through a case study of language choice by Japanese residents in Catalonia. In this multilingual society, do all the Japanese residents show the same pattern of language use? Starting from this question, this study attempted to verify the hypothesis that Japanese residents in Catalonia are not homogeneous in terms of language use, but are made up of several subgroups, by analyzing the data through principal component analysis. As a result, three subgroups in terms of language use were identified. It should be noted that we found no subgroup of Japanese residents who use mainly English. Additionally, the patterns of language use and some variants related to subjects' social profile, such as length of stay in Catalonia and motivation for stay, were analyzed through analysis of variance. As a result, some correlation between these factors was identified.
