Yesterday afternoon, at the Casa de Iberoamérica in Cádiz, within the framework of the IX International Congress of the Spanish Language, a “historic meeting” was held, judging by those present: for the first time a table was held in which those responsible for the academies of the languages ??spoken in Spain.
Of all? No. Due to “logistical problems”, the director of the Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, was unable to attend the meeting. But the president of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Teresa Cabré, and the director of the Royal Galician Academy (RAG), Víctor F. Freixanes, were summoned by the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, who declared: “ This dialogue between directors can open a path of understanding between languages”.
Under the title “Languages ??and cultures, a common heritage of the Spanish State”, the participants presented their points of view, to find solutions to the “multiculturalism and multilingualism” of the Peninsula, in the words of Cabré, since “politics sometimes he doesn’t know how to solve coexistence problems”, stated Machado: “Culture and language offer opportunities that are not sufficiently explored”.
The director of the RAE exposed the legal framework that regulates Spanish, “the name with which it appears in the Constitution”, and the other languages ??of Spain, which comply with the statutes of each community, and did not want to enter “into the problems that there are sometimes with some languages ??and dialects how they should be treated according to their communities”.
Machado, a lawyer by training, also cited the charter of European languages, which protects “those that are not the general languages ??of their countries.” And he referred to the concept of “linguistic normalization” included in the statutes, “because they were languages ??that had historically been discriminated against.”
The director of the RAE insisted that “this positive discrimination conforms to the Constitution”, and cited the rulings of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court that endorse it. “Despite what appears in some media, there is no legal violation of the laws of these communities.”
For her part, the president of the IEC wondered: “How can we structure linguistic coexistence in Spain? Spain is a multilingual and plurinational state, but it is asymmetrical”. And she proposed some solutions: “Diversity is a cultural good and linguistic plurality is biodiversity and it is a cultural heritage that must be preserved. If reality is like this and we defend these values, why can’t we get them to be respected and valued in Spain?”
Cabré exposed four factors that can improve this situation: “There is a lack of generalized discourse of this multilingualism as a good to be preserved. There is a lack of education from childhood in favor of teaching this plurality and multilingualism. There is a lack of protection and respect measures: if we believe these principles and these premises, we are going to defend them and that there be no attacks against this multilingualism. And more symbolic acts are missing, like this one today”.
Finally, the director of the RAG said: “The Galician language is widely used, but it has not had the prestige and support of power. Diglossia creates the self-censorship of the speaker himself when he has to go one step further. Galician society lived for centuries on subsistence. Therefore, one could not go further. Only when the surplus arrives is the value of the language projected”, thanks to the Galicians who travel to America and from there finance cultural projects. Today, “the Galician dictionary has 130,000 daily queries,” he announced.
Yesterday’s meeting was perhaps the first stone, which was laid from the world of culture, to overcome the problems of linguistic coexistence in Piel de Toro.
