The “anomaly” of THE CATALAN LANGUAGE

The key de­vice with which we com­mu­ni­cate, al­beit (luck­ily) not the only one, is lan­guage. Lin­guis­tic com­mu­ni­ties are also a proxy for na­tions, or peo­ples, with a few spread­ing through­out the globe. Fun­da­men­tally, thanks to coloni­sa­tion and im­pe­r­ial ex­pan­sions of the past, Eng­lish, French, Arab, Por­tuguese, Russ­ian and Span­ish have all at­tained a preva­lent use far be­yond their “nat­ural hin­ter­lands”. Be­cause of its plas­tic­ity and rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity, Eng­lish is the world’s un­of­fi­cial lin­gua franca today, claim­ing more than 1.3 bil­lion able speak­ers.

Cata­lan and Castel­lano, along with Por­tuguese, are West­ern ro­mance lan­guages, de­rived from the “lin­gua vul­garis”, the local prac­tice of Latin brought by the Roman Em­pire. In fact, the three had sim­i­lar ex­pan­sions, from north to south of the Iber­ian Penin­sula, fol­low­ing its re­con­quest from the Mus­lims. Then, the con­quest of the Amer­i­cas changed things, and today knowl­edge of Castel­lano, or Span­ish, is a huge ad­van­tage in al­most all of Latin-Amer­ica: twenty coun­tries have it as their pri­mary lan­guage, which amounts to more than 460 mil­lion na­tive speak­ers, or ten times the pop­u­la­tion of Spain it­self.

Most peo­ple un­fa­mil­iar with local events find it hard to un­der­stand the rel­e­vance of the lan­guage ques­tion. Cata­lans want­ing to use their own lan­guage even both­ers many peo­ple, who think it enough to be able to speak Castel­lano, which may be deemed more “use­ful” con­sid­er­ing its vast com­mu­nity of speak­ers. The in­sti­tu­tions also play their role, for Spain pre­sents it­self, at home and abroad, and with few ex­cep­tions, through the voices of a deeply na­tion­al­is­tic Castil­ian elite.

For at least 300 years, Madrid has thus put all means nec­es­sary into uni­fy­ing the State in and around the Castel­lano lan­guage, in a pat­tern that re­flects how the largest coun­tries in Eu­rope have been uni­fied via a ma­jor­ity lan­guage. One of the mot­tos of the fas­cist coup in 1936, “Si eres Español, habla Español” (“if you are Span­ish, speak Span­ish”), still has a strong res­o­nance today, even among self-anointed Span­ish lib­er­als.

Yet, against all odds, Cata­lan is alive and kick­ing, being reg­u­larly used in east­ern Spain, Va­len­cia, the Balearic Is­lands, Cat­alo­nia, a stretch of East­ern Aragon, and in one spot of Sar­dinia, the Al­ghero, and south-east France. Cata­lan is also the of­fi­cial lan­guage of An­dorra. All in all, with roughly 10 mil­lion, a few less than Dutch and Pol­ish, Cata­lan is prob­a­bly the re­gional lan­guage with most speak­ers in the EU.

By way of ex­am­ple: its ver­sion of Wikipedia has al­most 700,000 ar­ti­cles, rank­ing it 20th in the world, and one of the top four lan­guages in ac­tive ed­i­tors per capita (only some Nordic lan­guages are more ac­tive). It helps to have a strong and dy­namic civil so­ci­ety, to­gether with high lev­els of lit­er­acy, which ex­plain, for in­stance, why school re­sults on the use Span­ish tend to be higher in Cat­alo­nia than in the rest of the State.

Given all of the above, the Cata­lan case is an anom­aly, at least in the EU, for mi­nor­ity lan­guages have ei­ther a rather folk­loric role, such as Bre­ton, Gali­cian, Friu­lian or Welsh, or are in­her­ently “pro­tected” by the bor­ders of mono­lin­guis­tic na­tion-states. In this sense, al­though twenty of the EU’s twenty-four of­fi­cial lan­guages have fewer speak­ers, Cata­lan is not one, after un­remit­ting op­po­si­tion from Madrid. All in all, the ul­ti­mate fi­asco of Madrid fully im­pos­ing Castel­lano may be telling of the in­trin­sic dif­fer­ent val­ues of both so­ci­eties; for in­stance, de­mo­c­ra­tic stan­dards clearly dif­fer there, as re­cently wit­nessed with in­car­cer­a­tions and mass beat­ings under the dis­guise of law and order.