SPEAKING IN TONGUES

Not many peo­ple out­side Cat­alo­nia are talk­ing about or even notic­ing it, but Spain is un­der­go­ing a lin­guis­tic rev­o­lu­tion. To­wards the end of Sep­tem­ber, Gabriel Rufián, an MP for the pro-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lan Re­pub­li­can Left (ERC) spoke Cata­lan legally in the Span­ish par­lia­ment for the first time since this par­lia­ment (called the Con­gress) was es­tab­lished in 1837. Pre­vi­ous at­tempts to use Cata­lan in the Con­gress had been met with rep­ri­mands or even threats of ex­pul­sion by the Speaker. Now not only Cata­lan, but Basque and Gali­cian can be spo­ken freely in the Con­gress, where the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party (PSOE) holds sway. But not in the Sen­ate, where the ma­jor­ity is held by the right-wing Pop­u­lar Party, not known for its love of mul­ti­lin­gual­ism. Why has the PSOE, which had pre­vi­ously re­fused to make Cata­lan of­fi­cial in the Con­gress, changed its mind? Be­cause it needs the votes of the pro-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lan and Basque par­ties if the cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter, Pedro Sánchez, is to ob­tain a new man­date. Not only that, but Sánchez – at the re­quest of the above-men­tioned par­ties – has also put in a de­mand for Cata­lan, Basque and Gali­cian to be made of­fi­cial in the EU, some­thing which would in­crease their in­ter­na­tional sta­tus con­sid­er­ably: they could be used to label just about every prod­uct sold in the ter­ri­to­ries where they are spo­ken, and the local gov­ern­ments of those ter­ri­to­ries could use their own lan­guages when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with ei­ther Madrid or Brus­sels (Span­ish cur­rently being manda­tory in both cases). Cen­tral­ist at­tempts to re­strict the use of Cata­lan (or Basque or Gali­cian) in schools or hos­pi­tals or other pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions – there have been many such at­tempts and they keep on com­ing - could be re­jected di­rectly from Brus­sels. In the case of Cata­lan there is the ad­di­tional fact that it is spo­ken by 10 mil­lion peo­ple (11 mil­lion if we in­clude the di­as­pora) mak­ing it a (much) larger lan­guage than eleven of the EU’s cur­rent of­fi­cial ones. Basque, on the other hand, is spo­ken by just 632,000 peo­ple, but is the old­est lan­guage on the Eu­ro­pean con­ti­nent and surely de­serv­ing of greater pro­tec­tion for just that rea­son. But the EU is di­vided over the issue: some coun­tries, like Fin­land and Cyprus, are in favour, but oth­ers, such as Swe­den, France and Latvia are very much op­posed. Swe­den is wor­ried that the Lapps will now try and make their na­tive lan­guage, Sami, of­fi­cial. France treats Basque and Cata­lan (both spo­ken within its bor­ders) as minor pa­tois and wants to keep it that way; as for Latvia, ac­cord­ing to one of its lead­ing jour­nal­ists, Otto Ozols, it and the other Baltic States were in favour of recog­nis­ing Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence, had it been de­clared after the 2017 ref­er­en­dum (it wasn’t); the Span­ish gov­ern­ment then put enor­mous diplo­matic pres­sure on these states, threat­en­ing to veto NATO sup­port for them if Rus­sia in­vaded, and then of­fer­ing the car­rot of Span­ish mil­i­tary back­ing – as long as they for­got about Cat­alo­nia. The weak­est Baltic state, Latvia, now run by a cor­rupt right-wing party, is still toe­ing this old Span­ish line on Cat­alo­nia, per­haps be­cause the new Span­ish line – in favour of Cata­lan being an of­fi­cial EU lan­guage – is com­ing from the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party. It took two years for Irish – spo­ken by 170,000 peo­ple - to be­come of­fi­cial in the EU. The way things stand at the mo­ment, Cata­lan’s 10 mil­lion speak­ers may have to wait until the cows come home and hell freezes over. Si­mul­ta­ne­ously.

Opin­ion