Is it official?

Last month, an ini­tial draft of a pro­posed Cata­lan con­sti­tu­tion (for a fu­ture in­de­pen­dent Cata­lan Re­pub­lic) was re­leased to the pub­lic. Con­sist­ing of 149 ar­ti­cles drawn up by a team of 17 peo­ple, in­clud­ing at least one for­eign legal ex­pert, it has also taken into ac­count 3,400 con­tri­bu­tions made by cit­i­zens through the In­ter­net. The idea is to now en­cour­age a wide-rang­ing de­bate about the con­tents, even if this means - as one of the team of 17 put it - 'rip­ping them to shreds'. One po­ten­tial con­tender for being thus sav­aged might be the draft con­sti­tu­tion's pro­posal that Cata­lan should be the only of­fi­cial lan­guage of the new state (to­gether with Oc­c­i­tan, in the small seg­ment of the Cata­lan Pyre­nees where it's spo­ken). This, it is claimed, would fi­nally pro­vide a safe fu­ture for Cata­lan, which has been un­of­fi­cial - and often banned - for 240 years out of the last 300. Spe­cial care would be taken to pro­tect the lin­guis­tic rights of Span­ish speak­ers, but Span­ish it­self would not be of­fi­cial. (And the ex­ist­ing mul­ti­lin­gual­ism of Cat­alo­nia - where over 300 lan­guages are spo­ken - would be re­spected). Those who back a unique legal sta­tus for Cata­lan could point out that in those areas where it has had least of­fi­cial back­ing, it has the small­est per­cent­age of speak­ers (51% in the Va­len­cian area and 35% in French Cat­alo­nia), and in those areas where it has had more sup­port, such as Cat­alo­nia it­self, that per­cent­age is much higher, al­beit not enough to en­sure its long-term sur­vival (80.5%). They might also point to coun­tries like Latvia and Es­to­nia, where up to 35% of the pop­u­la­tion are na­tive Russ­ian speak­ers, but where Russ­ian is nonethe­less not of­fi­cial. Those who balk at the idea of Cata­lan being the sole li­censed tongue, could point to Fin­land, where only 5% of the pop­u­la­tion are na­tive Swedish speak­ers, and yet Swedish has of­fi­cial na­tional sta­tus, to­gether with Finnish. Or they could refer iron­i­cally to An­dorra, where Cata­lan is the only of­fi­cial lan­guage but where Span­ish and Por­tuguese are more widely spo­ken. In fact, the ar­gu­ment about whether Cata­lan should be the only of­fi­cial lan­guage of a Cata­lan Re­pub­lic could go on until the cows come home. For­tu­nately, there is an al­ter­na­tive: to not have any of­fi­cial lan­guage at all, like the UK, the US, Chile and Mex­ico, for in­stance. After all, it's easy to imag­ine that in an in­de­pen­dent Cat­alo­nia, once the Span­ish lan­guage laws were off its back - Madrid passed 64 dif­fer­ent ones to make Span­ish oblig­a­tory in var­i­ous sec­tors, such as prod­uct la­belling, in 2014 alone - and its air­waves no longer ham­pered by Span­ish re­stric­tions, and Madrid's in­ter­fer­ence in Cata­lan school­ing staunched for good, plus the psy­cho­log­i­cal im­pact on the local pop­u­la­tion as soon as they wake up in a brand new re­pub­lic, would surely en­cour­age the nat­ural use of Cata­lan more than oblig­ing judges and a hand­ful of other func­tionar­ies to learn the lan­guage in order to keep their jobs. Just say­ing.