BRAVO XAVI

Well, I’m spoilt for choice when it comes to con­tent for this month’s col­umn. Not only have I just re­turned from 18 days in Brazil, in­clud­ing a trip to the Ama­zon, which has given me plenty of ma­te­r­ial for cul­tural com­par­isons, but my cho­sen spe­cialised sub­ject of foot­ball (see Mas­ter­mind) has been all over the news this past month fol­low­ing Span­ish Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion pres­i­dent Luis Ru­biales’ very pub­lic gaff and kiss-gate. I can quite imag­ine him quot­ing a char­ac­ter from Spinal Tap: “What’s wrong with being sexy?”

How­ever, rather than adding my own, rather pre­dictable, grain of sand to the Ru­biales de­bate, if we can call it that, other than to ques­tion why any­one would be sur­prised ei­ther at Ru­biales’ ini­tial be­hav­iour, his sub­se­quent re­ac­tion and the sub­se­quent re­ac­tion of the men at the Span­ish Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion, given what we al­ready know about both Ru­biales’ his­tory and Span­ish men of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion and bent, I would like to focus on an­other as­pect of the Ru­biales af­fair that went rel­a­tively un­no­ticed. Namely, Barça head coach Xavi’s state­ment on it and the lan­guage issue that fol­lowed.

I have a lot of time for Xavi, who I see as a straight-talk­ing, no-non­sense and forth­right com­mu­ni­ca­tor, to un­nec­es­sar­ily use three syn­onyms to­gether. And so it proved when he was asked about the Ru­biales in­ci­dent. He gave a clear an­swer in Cata­lan to the as­sem­bled press along the lines of “First of all, I give all my un­con­di­tional sup­port to Jenni [Her­moso, the re­cip­i­ent of the now world-fa­mous kiss] and the women’s foot­ball play­ers for what they are going through at the mo­ment. Sec­ondly, I con­demn the be­hav­iour of the pres­i­dent of the Span­ish Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion, which I find to­tally un­ac­cept­able. And fi­nally, I’d like to ex­press my sor­row and sad­ness that there is no talk of the women’s world cup, which I be­lieve is a his­tor­i­cal mile­stone… that this be­hav­iour is talked about in­stead I find in­tol­er­a­ble.” He then added: “I hope I’ve been clear. Now let’s talk about other is­sues. Thank you”, to which a Ca­dena Ser jour­nal­ist re­sponded: “Can you re­peat what you just said in Span­ish?”

I hon­estly have no idea what the eti­quette for using dif­fer­ent lan­guages in press con­fer­ences is, but Xavi’s re­sponse is worth not­ing. “You trans­late it into Span­ish, I’ve made a won­der­ful speech in Cata­lan, which is a won­der­ful lan­guage. Just trans­late it” (Eng­lish trans­la­tion my own).

So what can we learn from all this? I’ve ar­gued be­fore in this col­umn that Cata­lans should avoid using Cata­lan as a means of ex­clud­ing out­siders, which I have seen done and I hear non-Cata­lan res­i­dents com­plain about. But here I think that if we could fol­low Xavi’s prag­matic lead and get away from all the po­lit­i­cal wran­gling that sur­rounds the use of lan­guage in this coun­try, then we’d all be a lot bet­ter off. A lan­guage is an ex­pres­sion of a peo­ple’s iden­tity, and en­dan­gered lan­guages should be en­cour­aged and helped to sur­vive, not per­se­cuted. So as Xavi said, just trans­late it your­self, Span­ish jour­nal­ists.

Opin­ion