U.S. English Foundation Research

SPAIN

Language Research

The plenum of the Parliament of Catalonia approved on March 29, 2000 three resolutions addressed at reiterating the presentation before the Congress of Deputies of three white papers referred to the use of official languages other than Spanish in personal documents and paper money. The proposals are the following ones:

• Proposal of resolution according to which there is an agreement on the submission to the Spanish Congress of Deputies of a white paper on the use of the official languages in the issue of bills and the metallic coinage of euros (270-00025/06)
• Project of resolution according to which there is an agreement on submission to the Spanish Congress of Deputies of an organic white paper on the incorporation of the official languages of the Spanish state into passports and national identity cards (269-00001/06)
• Project of resolution according to which there is an agreement on the submission to the Spanish Congress of Deputies of a white paper on the incorporation of the Spanish official languages into driving licenses for both cars and motorcycles (269-00002/06).

These are all proposals from the Board of Reiteration of Submissions to the Congress of Deputies

The official languages of the indigenous communities will be able to be used in the Senate throughout the next legislature, according to a motion submitted by the Catalan nationalists group last April 10, 2000. The motion will probably depend on the consent from the rest of the groups, including the Popular group in the government. The modification of the current regulation, which after an amendment approved by the Senate would only allow the use of these languages once a year, will now make possible the unlimited use of Catalan, Galician and Basque by the representatives of these communities who wish to do so.

In June 2000 the Spanish minister for Public Administration, Jesús Posada announced that the Madrid government is studying a formula to allow Spanish regions to participate in the EU decision-making processes. Representatives of the seventeen autonomous regions of Spain could even be allowed into Council of Ministers meetings, according to the Minister, who was addressing one of the regular bilateral meetings between the central government and the regions. If implemented, the move would represent a victory for the regional governments in Spain, who have long been calling on Madrid to allow them to participate at least in the decisions that affect the areas of government, which have been transferred to them. According to Catalan newspaper “Avui”, the Minister said that the participation of regional governments in EU decision-making was “essential”, which has been taken as an important sign of change on the part of the Madrid authorities.

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Updated (January 2001)

CATALAN

Catalonia keeps leading the editorial market in Spain. In 2000, Catalan companies sold books for 57,4% of the total book sales business in Spain.

Apart from printed books, the Catalan language has good news in the daily papers field. In January, a new sports paper appeared in kiosks and bookstores in Catalonia. Its name is “El 9 esportiu de Catalunya” and it is written entirely in Catalan. The new daily has been created by a coalition of local Catalan newspapers, called “Comit”, which will enclose the new product in all newspapers of the group. Following this, Comit ensures a sale of up to 60,000 copies of “El 9”.

However, the goal of Comit is to sell up to 80,000 newspapers every day. After a six-month period to consolidate the project, the new sports newspaper will launch a local edition in the Balearic Islands, and another edition for Valencia is being studied. “El 9” is the first sports newspaper in Catalan since the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). At the moment, there are two other sports papers made in Catalonia but both are in Spanish. Both sell around 85,000 copies per day and both also have, curiously, detailed projects to make bilingual editions of their papers. Maybe now, with a direct competitor in the streets, they will carry these projects to reality.

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Updated (June 2001)

VALENCIA

The parliament of the Valencian autonomous region has approved the creation of the Valencian Academy of Language (AVL) after three years of intense political and cultural debate. According to the law, the new institution's task is to “establish the linguistic rules of Valencian language”, which is a variant, or dialect of Catalan. Many Catalan language authorities in Barcelona and Valencia do not support the newborn academy because there is another scientific institution, Barcelona-based Catalan Studies Institute (IEC), which is officially considered as the main authority in linguistic matters since 1920.

However, if the AVL shows a willingness to co-operate with the IEC in a joint effort to preserve Catalan language, the Barcelona based institution “will of course collaborate on a scientific basis”, said Manuel Castellet, IEC President.

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Updated (October 2001)

On October 23, 2001, the first court sentence in the Aranese language (the official language of the Val d'Aran, together with Catalan and Spanish) was passed in city of Lleida. This was a historical precedent as regards the use of this language in the administration. Official sources claim that more than 5,000 forms and documents exist already translated into this language thus inhabitants of Val d'Aran may exercise their right to address to the local administration in Aranese.

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Updated (December 2001)

One of the oldest and most used Internet companies, “Yahoo!”, is to create a Catalan 'portal' (www.encatala.yahoo.com) with the intent to boost the language in the on-line business world. The project has been seen as a major opportunity in Catalonia and therefore has received major political and financial aid. The new project should be ready by next February.

The cost of the operation will be 100 million pesetas (601,000 Euro), of which 60 millions will be given by the Catalan administrations. The rest will be paid by “Yahoo!” itself and other communication companies. The contents will be elaborated in Barcelona and Madrid, but also in the United States. Unlike other similar initiatives, in this case it was the Yahoo! company which had the original idea two years ago and proposed it to Catalan authorities. The multinational company argued that Catalan has enough Internet presence for them to consider this option and it will be the first experience of this kind for them.

According to June 2000 official figures, Catalan is the 19th most used language on the Internet, with 443,301 designed web pages. At that time, the 20th place was occupied by Turkish, with 436,996 web pages on the net. Taking into account that Catalan has only about 7 million speakers, and Turkish has almost 60 million, it gives an idea of how healthy Catalan is on the net. More recent figures, still to be confirmed, say that Catalan has risen to the 18th place, with 750,000 web pages. That will mean that Catalan has advanced over Hungarian, which kept the 18th position until today. With these figures, Catalan is the most used non-official language on the Internet, although other small languages, like Danish or Finnish have its major presence. This intense Catalan activity on the net is also demonstrated by Spanish official figures, which show that Catalonia is the part of Spain with a major Internet use: up to 24,8% of Catalan population uses the web regularly in comparison to 22,8% in Madrid or 20,7% in the Basque Country.

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Updated (September 2003)

THE LEGITIMACY OF CATALAN IS A CLAIM, ACCORDING TO THE CATALAN NATIONALIST PARTY LEADER

On November 16, the autonomous government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) will elect its new president. These elections are important since the current president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol, has already announced that, after 23 years in the Catalan government, he will not stand for this post again.

Most of the opposition political parties have already started a campaign for the presidency, focusing on the need to reform the current Catalan Autonomous Statute (Estatut d'Autonomia) as well as on the issue of language, which plays an important role in the electoral campaign and the parties' political programs.

On September 16, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC),¹ the left-wing nationalist party, held a conference in Brussels where its members presented their proposals for the future of Catalonia.

The candidate and ERC Secretary General, Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira, apart from stressing the importance of creating a real foreign affairs policy in Catalonia, also centered his speech on the need for better policies on immigration in order to integrate newcomers within a framework of social cohesion.

The conference also focused on the question of language. Carod-Rovira outlined that Catalan has to be restored as the language of Catalan citizens, and that the presence of the Catalan language and culture must be reinforced all over the world, thus clearly referring to the Institute Ramon Llull (the cultural institution representing Catalonia overseas). The leader of ERC also pointed out that a coordinate action of the Catalan-speaking territories is needed in order to carry out these proposals. He believes that the model adopted in Quebec is suitable for Catalonia and its institutions. Catalan must be associated with progress, welfare, modernity and democracy and not perceived as a language required only from Generalitat's civil servants.

However, Carod-Rovira's most important proposal in terms of language policy was to raise the status of the Direcció General de Política Lingüística by placing it at the same level as the Catalan Presidency Department. According to Carod-Rovira, by promoting the language, Catalonia will have a major impact on all the domains and the language will become a social phenomenon.

Source: Eurolang News, Brussels, September 18, 2003, by Alexia Bos Solé, http://217.136.252.147/webpub/eurolang/pajenn.asp?ID=4393

¹ Most polls show that Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) has gained an increased number of votes since the last municipal elections. It is very likely that the ruling party in Catalonia (Convergència i Unió) will face a backward trend and this will force the political coalition to start negotiations with other parties. Therefore it is possible that the ERC will have more decision making power, since it is the third most important political force in the territory. The need to reach an agreement among all parties, except the Popular Party (PP), to form a majority may have a positive effect on the Catalan language promotion.

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Updated (November 2003)

CATALAN LANGUAGE ISSUES A KEY POINT IN ELECTION CAMPAIGN

On November 16, Catalans elected their government for the next four years. All parties highlighted linguistic policies in their manifestos, knowing that for many citizens it may be a vote winner.

• Convergència i Unió (CiU), the nationalist coalition that ruled Catalonia for the last twenty-four years, summarized its linguistic policy in the sentence: “We will guarantee the right of all Catalan speakers to live their lives fully in Catalan.”

  CiU's policy was to increase the use and presence of Catalan in all aspects of life. Their electoral program included a plan to teach the language to newcomers and a series of regulations to boost the use of Catalan in cinemas and on product labeling.

• The Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) manifesto also highlighted linguistic policies. It suggested five main projects to advance towards full linguistic normalization:
  1. to use the Catalan language as the main language in schools and in the autonomous and local administrations,
  2. to promote its social use, especially among private companies and media corporations,
  3. to encourage immigrants and newcomers to learn Catalan as soon as they arrive, so that the language would become a major tool for integration,
  4. to achieve is a full recognition of the multilingual character of the country by the Spanish government in Madrid,
  5. to stress the cultural ties with the other territories of Spain where Catalan is spoken, such as the Illes Balears and the País Valencià and to increase the budget of the Institut Ramon Llull, an institution that promotes the Catalan language and culture worldwide.
• Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) was the only party that defended economic sanctions and fines for those companies and stores which do not use Catalan on their signs and information boards.

  ERC also recommended that the Spanish administration in Catalonia should be completely bilingual, as the law says. This party highlighted the lack of Catalan in the administration of justice.

• Regarding the conservative Popular Party (PP), its electoral program did not pay much attention to this issue.

  This party, which rules the Spanish government but has little support in Catalonia, thinks that the current situation is good enough. Therefore, the PP does not want to make any important legal changes or modifications, only encourages the Catalan population to use its language in everyday life.

• Finally, Iniciativa per Catalunya – Verds (ICV), a small green leftist party, also focused a part of its electoral program on the linguistic questions. This party wanted to achieve a full implementation of the 1998 Linguistic Policy Law and to obtain a bigger budget for the Catalan language normalization process.

  ICV also wanted the Spanish government administration in Catalonia to reach fully developed bilingualism, which should be implemented in all offices and buildings, including justice courts. ICV also sought an official status for the Catalan language in the European Union institutions.

Source: Eurolang News, Barcelona, November 10, 2003, by Jaume Clotet, http://217.136.252.147/webpub/eurolang/pajenn.asp?ID=4496

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Updated (February 2004)

NEW CATALAN GOVERNMENT PLANS TO END A RELAXED ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE LANGUAGE

Convergència i Unió (CiU), the autonomist party that has ruled the regional government since 1980, won the Catalan elections held on November 16, 2003. However, it was only a Pyrrhic victory, as the CiU did not win enough seats so the coalition of the three other main parties will run the country for the next four years.¹

Since the main objective of the Government will be to achieve a new political status for Catalonia (the current status of autonomy was approved in 1980, and needs some modifications), it wants to pass through the Catalan Parliament a new and ambitious text, which will be sent to the Spanish Parliament afterwards. After that, it should be approved in a referendum by all Catalan citizens.

The ERC has managed to include in the new government program a series of measures aimed at increasing the social use of the Catalan language. The main goal is to end the relaxed linguistic policies of the former CiU governments, and to place more stress on legal protection of the language.

Following this scheme, the program states very clearly that the current situation of the social use of the Catalan language needs an urgent response. Therefore a Catalan language support plan will be set up in the near future, which will become the guideline for all policies related to the language.

From now on the Generalitat will take into account the presence of Catalan on labels and signs. Apart from that the new government will increase the presence of the language in the media and new technologies. A very important goal is to increase the number of cinema films that are dubbed into Catalan, an aspect neglected until now.

As for the Catalan language in the educational system, an immersion learning method will be extended from now on to secondary levels. Immigrants and newcomers will participate in the Catalan language courses to make it easier for them to integrate into the Catalan society.

Finally, the new government would like to introduce the language to the EU institutions. To do so, it will study all possible legal measures and will negotiate with the Spanish government.

Source: Eurolang News, Barcelona, December 18, 2003, by Jaume Clotet, http://217.136.252.147/webpub/eurolang/pajenn.asp?ID=4549

¹Out of 135 seats in the Parliament CiU obtained 46. The Catalan Socialists (PSC) got 42 seats, while the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) will have 23 congressmen. The remaining seats went to two minor parties: the Popular Party (PP, right wing) 15 and the Iniciativa (ICV, leftist and ecologist) 9 seats. These figures allowed for many combinations how to reach 68 seats needed to make up a majority in the chamber.

However, despite great efforts of the CiU to convince ERC to form a nationalist government, the ERC eventually decided to create a coalition with the PSC and ICV. As a result, the new government (Generalitat), led by a socialist Pasqual Maragall, will focus on social, ecologist and nationalist policies for the next four years.

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Updated (July 2004)

MIDSUMMER FIRES WERE BURNING FOR CATALAN

On Saint John's Day, or Midsummer Night, thousands of flaming torches blazed across Catalonia in support of the Catalan language. This year, moreover, they burnt also to protest against the lack of official recognition for Catalan in the future European Constitution.

This initiative is one of many which were organized after the decision taken at the Brussels Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) held in June concerning the future of the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages at European level. These languages were labelled as “translation languages” and not “treaty languages” as Irish, or “working languages” as Maltese or Estonian. Thus the Catalans will still have to use Spanish in their correspondence with the EU institutions.

The Draft Constitution, though welcomed by many, has provoked anger and disillusionment among minority language communities and stateless nations of Europe for its feeble stance on language and minority rights. The language clause was only slightly modified from the original Irish proposal.

Article IV-10 now reads:

This Treaty may also be translated into any other languages as determined by Member States among those which, in accordance with their constitutional order, enjoy official status in all or part of their territory.

The Conference considered that the possibility of producing official translations of the Treaty in the languages mentioned in the second paragraph of Article IV-10 contributes to fulfilling the objective of respecting the Union's rich cultural and linguistic diversity (as set forth in paragraph 3 of Article I-3 of the Treaty). In this context, the Conference confirmed the attachment of the Union to the cultural diversity of Europe and the special attention it will continue to pay to these and other languages.

A Catalan language expert, Miquel Strubell, could barely contain his anger on the revised text. He criticized the fact that Irish speakers have, alongside twenty official and working languages, the right to write to the institutions of the Union in their language and to receive replies in the same language; however, this right has not been extended to seven million Catalan speakers, as a result of the final text of Article IV-10. The Catalan government has translated the European Treaties into Catalan for many years so the fact that, from now on, the translated version shall be deposited in the archives of the Council did not make Catalan-speakers jump for joy.

On the one hand the Union promised to pay special attention to “these and other languages” but on the other hand in 2000, the budget line for regional and minority languages was closed down and no compensatory program has been elaborated yet.

Nothing in the new article or the declaration seems to give any assurance at all that the Union will take steps to put an end to the disgraceful exclusion of part of Europe's linguistic diversity (represented by Catalan, Frisian, Welsh or Sardinian).

Source: Eurolang News, Barcelona, June 24, 2004, by Alexia Bos Solé and Davyth Hicks, http://www.eurolang.net/news.asp?id=4640 and Eurolang News, “Catalan Fury over Language Clause as EU Chiefs Hail Constitution Deal”, by Davyth Hicks, June 22, 2004, www.eurolang.net, http://www.eurominority.org/version/en/actualite-detail.asp?id_langue=21&id_actualite=614

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Updated (March 2007)

KORRIKA - AN EXHIBITON RACE TO PROMOTE THE BASQUE LANGUAGE

The fifteenth staging of the Korrika, a popular exhibition race to celebrate and support the Basque language, started in the western end of Biscay on 22 March 2007 and will end in the city of Iruñea on 1 April 2007. The race will go on non-stop for ten days and will pass through all provinces where Basque is spoken. In all, runners will cover approximately 2,150 kilometers.

The race is organized bi-annually by the AEK, the Coordinator of Literacy and Basque Promotion. The first Korrika took place in 1980 and thousands of people, young and old, have taken part ever since. Every race follows a different course, although it always endeavors to cover a significant proportion of the historical Basque territories. The race is conducted in an extremely jovial manner, accompanied by music and general fanfare. During the period, many cultural activities are organized to promote the use of Basque, with support of the Royal Academy of the Basque Language.

In order to raise funds for the promotion of the language, each kilometer of the race is sold to a particular individual or organization, who is the figurehead of the race for the purchased distance. This race leader carries an engraved wooden pole, preserved from the first race held, and adorned with the Basque flag.

The Korrika has also a strong symbolic aspect: the main theme of its 15th edition is the unique role of the Basque women in the transmission of the language to the young. Regarding the theme, Chief Coordinator of the race, Edume Brouard, has noted: "We wanted to recognize the strength and determination Basque women have shown over the years to overcome the obstacles." However, the main message written for the 2007 Korrika will be unveiled at the end of the race.

With the money raised by Korrika15, AEK has promised to open two new night schools, one in Baiona and the other in Iruñea.

Critics of the Korrika argue that the race is too media-oriented and does not actually help the language. In contrary, Coordinator Brouard answers that after every edition many people enroll in the Basque language courses. Moreover, "If the race had no effect we would not organize it. I am sure that one day the Korrika will not be necessary, but for now it is," he concluded.

Source: Eurolang News, March 23, 2007 by Edu Lartzanguren http://www.eurolang.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2853&Itemid=1&lang=en

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