The debate about whether the Valencian is Catalan is more than over. There is no room for discussion: the thesis of the Valencian Academy of Language is going to mass. That said, it is difficult to join the criticism that the regulations that the Carlos Mazón government has just approved are going to break the unity of the Catalan language.
From now on the Valencian administration will address the citizens as it is spoken on the street. The Consell has made adjustments to some words to “revalencialize” them. Recover origins, it is understood.
I wrote before that I don’t see how it breaks the linguistic unity that terms like “este/a/os/es” are used instead of “aquest/a/os/es”, “expense” before “despesa”, “hui” and not “avui”, or inchoative verbs ending in “-ix” and not in “-eix”. From common sense, which coincides little with that of politics, the drama is that a government wants to annihilate the weakest official language, here Valencian compared to Spanish. Historically, the PP has shown that it is not trustworthy in this sense and there are known attempts to diminish Catalan. But does revalenciating some terms weaken the Catalan language? No, if it is about respecting the internal variation of each speech so that its uniqueness survives.
In the Valencian Community they call their language Valencian because that is what was approved in their Statute of Autonomy, something that did not happen in the Balearic Islands. The Statute of 1983 establishes that Catalan is the language of the archipelago, not the “Balearic” in its Mallorcan, Menorcan and Ibizan modalities. Deciding the name of the official language obeys more political than scientific criteria. Hence in the Balearic Islands, as its Statute says what it says, as important or more important than the name is the linguistic model. The Institut d’Estudis Catalans allows each major dialect to preserve its specificities, another thing is for political managers to lend themselves to it.
Mazón’s adjustments this week lead us to remember that there are sectors on the islands that defend the official establishment of a Balearic standard. They maintain that the territory’s own linguistic formulas are being lost, and so is its prestige. The Barcelona standard exerts a vacuuming effect there, easily verifiable if you put your ear close to the street. Furthermore, proper idioms are hardly given in school and today it is the grandchildren who correct their grandparents according to the model of central Catalan. For example, young people use “jo sóc” and not “jo som”, many do not know when to use the article salat and when to use lalat correctly (“la” Cathedral of Ciutadella) or they do not articulate the zero verbal ending (“jo cant” , not “jo canto”).
Defending Mallorcan, Menorcan or Ibizan in all areas, including the official one, is not going against Catalan but in favor of it. Why can’t the Balearic Islands be like the Valencians or the Algheroes? You just have to get your tongue out of politics.
