In Aragon, different voices from the university, political and associative spheres have come out in recent days in defense of Catalan and Aragonese after the regional president, Jorge Azcón, assured that in his community “Catalan is not spoken” and brandished the plans of its Executive for eliminating their legal recognition as their own languages.
At the University of Zaragoza, the community’s educational benchmark, more than 250 professors and researchers have signed a declaration in defense of both languages. The signatories assert that Catalan in Aragon has received “recognition and interest” from international Romance studies “for many decades”, which is a teaching subject on campus present in some degrees – Hispanic Philology, Classical Studies and English Studies -, part of the “everyday life” of the campus and that maintains its own area in the department of Linguistics and Hispanic Literatures.
They also argue that different researchers from the center participate in various projects funded at the state level whose objective is to study both Catalan and Aragonese in Aragon “from their linguistic, historical and social perspective” and that the results are the subject of publications “in magazines of high international impact.”
For this reason, they demand recognition of the research they carry out in this field and that the University be taken into account in the development of policies that concern this reality, as well as that it respects the autonomy of the Legua Academy and the independence academic of its members.
There has also been a response from the political sphere. To the initial criticism of Chunta Aragonesista (CHA) or Teruel Exist, this week the PSOE joined in, which criticized Azcón for “generating a problem where there is none” and combining “division and polarization” with the use Catalan and Aragonese, which are spoken in Aragon “in a totally natural and habitual way” on a daily basis in dozens of towns, they say.
For its part, the Provincial Council of Zaragoza, the only body of political power that the socialists managed to retain in the May elections, also approved a proposed resolution to maintain the current wording of the Cultural Heritage Law, which includes the recognition of the Aragonese language. and Catalan as the community’s own languages.
The text went ahead despite the rejection of PP and Vox. From the popular ranks, deputy Emilio Ferrero expressed his defense of the different languages ??and dialects “with their own identity” and justified the Government’s policy in the duty to preserve these varieties so that they do not become “what they are not.”
Thus, he gave the example of the Zaragoza town of Maella, where the students “are learning a wealth that is not theirs because they are learning the Catalan of Catalonia” instead of “maellá”, their own dialect.
In response to this situation, the first mobilizations have already been called in defense of these two languages. In Zaragoza, different groups gathered this Saturday afternoon at the doors of the Auditorium for “equality, dignity and the right to exist of the three languages ??of Aragon.”
That same day, but in the morning, the town of Mequinenza (province of Zaragoza) is scheduled to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Mequinenza and host a rally in defense of the languages ??of Aragon.
The declaration was signed on February 1, 1984 by the former Minister of Culture of the Government of Aragon, José Bada, and the then host mayor, Sebastián Caballé, in an event in which 17 first councilors participated.
The document recognized that in this community “different languages ??are spoken and that the Catalan language spoken in the Eastern Strip belongs to the cultural heritage of Aragon” and served, among other issues, to promote the teaching of Catalan in the classrooms.
For the city council of this locality, a situation similar to that occurred in June 2013 is now repeated with the approval of the Language Law which established that the languages ??and linguistic modalities peculiar to Aragon would be the Aragonese Language Proper of the Eastern Area (LAPAO) and the Aragonese Language Proper to the Pyrenean and Prepyrenaic Areas (LAPAPYP).
These denominations motivated the second Declaration of Mequinenza, a document signed by 28 city councils that denounced the ridiculousness of references that “have no scientific or academic basis”, for which they requested its repeal.
