Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the community of Majorcan-descent Catalan heritage speakers in San Pedro, Argentina. An initial historic approach to the community is presented which retraces the immigrational process of Majorcans to San Pedro, Argentina, starting in the mid-1850s and spanning over the course of seventy years. This is interpreted within the broader context of San Pedro immigrant communities (e.g., Italian, Polish), ultimately focusing on Catalan-speaking ones. These communities hail primarily from Majorca, but also from rural or coastal Catalonia (e.g., Lleida province and Costa Brava, respectively) and—to a lesser extent—other geographical areas in the Balearic Islands (e.g., Ibiza). This topic constitutes a research gap in the sense that it has received little to no attention, either in scholarly or general-audience terms. Three research questions are presented. The first two cover the (1) anthropological underpinnings and (2) current sociolinguistic status of Majorcan Catalan in the community under study. Research question number 3 provides a case study of how language change operates in contexts featuring a minoritized language. This goal is approached by exploring how Catalan past tenses perfet perifràstic and perfet compost might present unique variation in the community due to the influence of Argentinian Spanish. A literature review follows that focuses on the basic anthropological and sociolinguistic mainstays as applied to minoritized communities of speech. While a few previous works on the community do exist, a sizeable number of them are rather brief and anecdote-based, failing to raise awareness of minoritized speech communities, in general, and the Catalan presence as a heritage language in the Americas, in particular. As a Romance language currently spoken by approximately 10 million individuals, the fact that Catalan is still spoken beyond the European borders is largely unknown and even startling to multiple European Catalan speakers and scholars alike. The presence of Catalan in San Pedro, Argentina, as well as the swift process by which the minority language is yielding to the prestige of Spanish, appear to provide yet another example of how language loss operates in bilingual-asymmetric settings, in addition to the pivotality of speakers’ sociolinguistic attitudes toward the heritage language.