In responding to the challenge of managing linguistic diversity in Spain, it has been argued that the ideological struggle for the legitimization of certain visions of the linguistic world must be explained in order to be able to have a position on the playing field. From the perspective of the study of linguistic ideologies, linguistic anthropology examines the issue of how a language is legitimized in the eyes and the ears of the members of a community. In the modern Western world, we find two linguistic ideologies that frequently sustain linguistic authority in this sense. We could call them the ideologies of authenticity and anonymity. Each of the two naturalizes a type of relationship between a specific language variety and a specific state of society. The distinction may prove useful in analyzing, on the one hand, the attempts to define Spanish as a "postnational" language, and on the other hand, the situation of the Catalan language today. This article outlines the two contrasting ideologies and briefly illustrates them with some examples from Europe and the United States. It then applies this theoretical framework to the current situation of Spanish and Catalan in Spain and Catalonia. In conclusion, it considers the possibilities of new ideological formations in the sociolinguistic field.
