Moderate satisfaction would be the definition that best fits the final assessment of the IX International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), which closes today in Cádiz. The fact that the Peruvian headquarters in Arequipa failed due to the political situation in the country forced its organizers to throw all the meat on the grill: the Cervantes Institute, the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies (Asale).
The Spanish Government, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, joined in the effort to organize this congress in barely three months, as well as the city of Cádiz, whose mayor, José María González Santos, declared at the closing ceremony: “Far from shutting up in the halls, the congress has spilled over the city”.
Under the motto “Spanish language, miscegenation and interculturality”, the 263 speakers from 70 countries have tried to shed light on the great challenges of Spanish. And the truth is that there has never been so much talk about other languages, both those that coexist in positions of inferiority in Spanish-speaking countries, and the predominance of English.
“It is impossible to displace English as the lingua franca in the world,” acknowledged the director of the RAE and president of Asale, Santiago Muñoz Machado, in a meeting with journalists. A great defender of work in artificial intelligence, such as the LEIA project, Muñoz Machado has presented his conclusions joking with the rappers who yesterday performed in one of the 78 parallel cultural activities that CILE has experienced, who challenged him to improvise rhymes as they do : “It’s a good thing I wasn’t there because they would have made a fool of me.”
Regarding the challenges, the director of the RAE has asked “to increase more educational resources and not lose the quality of Spanish on the networks”, while the song Despechá, by Rosalía, was playing. And he announced the “magic figure” of one billion visits reached by the Dictionary of the Spanish language.
For his part, the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, has recognized, also in statements to the media, “frictions” between institutions due to “certain personalities who sometimes have reactions that are not prudent for the spirit of cooperation”. and has joked: “If this happens around the discussion about an accent, imagine when you have to move 1,300 people around the world and decide on the place where things are going to be organized.”
The director of the RAE has admitted that “it is undeniable that there have been moments of tension”, but both directors accept the result of this congress, which has had to be organized in a hurry.
In his conclusions, the director of Cervantes stated: “We are debating for a press that is capable of defending the truth against the hoax that social networks sometimes present, but we have been able to hear live testimonies from journalists who in some countries their main mission is to survive”. García Montero has also expressed his wish that “artificial intelligence does not dominate the human being, but rather that it be for the good of humanity.”
The IX CILE was closed by the Government spokesperson and Minister of Territorial Policy, Isabel Rodríguez, who congratulated herself on “the professionalism and ability to react”, and the participation of the official languages ??of Spain, “which we must protect and on which we must work from the Government”. The congress has had a media impact that the minister has valued at 60 million euros.
