Seoul, Dakar, Los Angeles and now New Delhi: the world is too small for the expansion of the Spanish language, judging by the explanations of the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, at the IX International Congress of the Spanish Language that was celebrated in Cádiz. They are venues already active or that will open soon, where the cultural institution expands its mission.
But where copper is being fought today is in a territory not delimited by physical borders, since the digital world does not understand passports. Technology and artificial intelligence rule, and the first vice president, Nadia Calviño, in her speech in Cádiz, made it very clear: “Spanish is going to be one of the leading languages ??of the digital world.” Calviño expressed the need to “get Spanish on the train of the digital revolution”, for which “it is necessary to act now so that the new technologies, still incipient, speak common Spanish”.
In this sense, the Cervantes Institute and the RAE are working, and the challenges of artificial intelligence have also been analyzed at the congress. “Knowledge and culture must be accessible to all citizens, through all means,” declared Raquel Caleya Caña, director of culture at Cervantes, “because there is nothing more foreign than a machine.” Caleya presented the Ethical Decalogue for a pan-Hispanic digital culture, in the session “Diversity and unity of the Spanish language”, where the activities in which the institute is immersed were reviewed. Another novelty is the World Map of Translation, which collects data on the history of translation since 1950. For now, it contains information on works published in Spanish and translated into ten languages. Caleya summarized: “You have to digitize the humanities and humanize the data.”
The director of Cervantes opened his speech by quoting Cabrera Infante: “He was right when he said that Spanish was too important to be left in the hands of Spaniards, that we are 8% of Spanish speakers.” Downtown Los Angeles, “where there are 12 million Spanish-speakers,” wants to avoid “linguistic marginalization” in the United States, said García Montero, “for this reason it is important that Spanish be a language of science and technology, and California is a important place”.
Precisely, in the previous session, “Languages ??and intercultural education”, Professor Kim Potowski, from the University of Chicago, had spoken about the situation of Spanish in the country of Uncle Sam, where, contrary to what was expressed in the majority of the interventions, “Spanish is a minority and minority language”.
Potowski presented a reasoning in the form of a syllogism: “A son of a Mexican father and a Puerto Rican mother will speak in the Mexican dialect if he is raised in Mexico and in Puerto Rican if he lives in Puerto Rico. But what if he grows up in Chicago, where the dominant language is English? The US is a kind of dialect laboratory where “the diversity of Spanish accents is mixed.” But the reality is that today “53% of the grandchildren of Spanish-speaking immigrants no longer speak it,” said the teacher, who attributes the reason for this loss to linguistic bullying of which Spanish-speakers are victims.
The other side of the coin was presented by Daniel Cassany, a professor at Pompeu Fabra University, who defended that “education must recognize that our brain is multilingual and adopt more scientific practices” and “not monolingual, as often happens with the teaching of Spanish”. For this reason, he considers that “we must change the mentality and teach Spanish with respect for the languages ??of the learners.”
Apart from the academic program, the day closed with a workshop on improvised rap in which the artists Blon, MNak and NikiDMT participated, moderated by Queen Mary. A cockfight as succulent as the fight for the tilde of only recently lived in the RAE.
