(Much of this article was published in March 2019 and has been updated to adapt it to the current context)
Talking, communicating, working, having fun or loving are activities that hundreds of thousands of Valencians carry out regularly every day in their own language, Valencian, with great ease. People, for the most part, enormously respectful of their other official language, Spanish, which they also use with the same naturalness, without this enriching and integrating bilingualism causing any difficulty. In neither of these two cases, those Valencian men and women, and here I include several relatives of mine, some already elderly, interpret that the use of one language or another supposes a political option, even less a partisan one; It is simply the instrument that allows them to dialogue with themselves and with others, it is about their identity, their greatest cultural heritage, also made up of two languages ??with which they coexist in perfect harmony.
But since the victory of the PP and Vox, some leaders of the Valencian right-wing parties have begun to develop a very dangerous strategy: that of stigmatizing the use of Valencian and/or its empowerment as an element of Catalanism, nationalism or even independence (a strategy that always finds collaboration from certain more radicalized sectors of the Valencian left). That is to say, it is like affirming that my mother, 80 years old, a conservative woman, from Alzira, deeply rooted in her family and social environment, is “independentista” because she speaks Valencian; I think that from the laughter that she would enter she could give us a scare. Or that her children, who wanted to look for schools where there was a line in Valencian, without giving up Spanish, and possibly learning English and French, are also “Catalanists” who intend to “generate the environment like the one that led Catalonia to the procés” . Or that those of us who have related throughout adolescence and youth in Valencian, were enemies of Spain and the germ of that pan-Catalanism that some in the PP and all of VOX obsessively denounce. I have come to hear on more than one occasion that speaking Valencian “is from the left”, which if some of my acquaintances, conservatives and PP voters, heard it, they would not be astonished.
It is as if someone pretended that speaking or learning Castilian —or Spanish, in its international philological denomination—, is a matter of “fachas”. Or that taking the children to a concerted one where there is little Valencian is “promoting Spanish nationalism”. Or that speaking Spanish with friends with absolute normality, while knowing Valencian perfectly, is being “a traitor to the Valencian Community”. Or that studying the great (and some formidable) authors in the Spanish language, or working in a media outlet that publishes in Spanish (such as La Vanguardia) is to be an enemy of Valencian culture and identity. Or that for not speaking Valencian a politician should never dedicate himself to this trade in the Valencian Community.
It has reached a point of nonsense effervescence that begins to confuse problems and themes with enormous irresponsibility. Obviously, we can disagree with the multilingual educational model of the Ximo Puig executive designed by Vicent Marzà; because that is legal in a democratic system. And it is that those who do not share this model seek alliances to oppose and propose an alternative (there are not a few professor friends who point out that the two-line model was better than the current one). But in recent weeks, statements have been made that are, literally, completely disrespectful to those hundreds of thousands of Valencian men and women who love their own language in the same way that they love Spanish or, at least, do not reject it.
The issue is not new. Some of us have lived through it for decades. It is true that there are “pan-Catalanists” just as there are “Spanishists”, and on each front the radical groups do their job. But what is unfortunate is that, more and more, some people associate the mere fact of speaking or writing in Valencian (and be careful how you write or speak it, because there are philologists in every corner of this geography) with the independence or catalanism. That some say that “Castilian is in danger in the Valencian Community”, because it is not true. It is enough to see cultural consumption – books, art, cinema, theater, the media – to verify, without effort, the dominant position of Castilian and the marginal position of Valencian in the Valencian Community; certainly in disturbing regression in social use.
It does not matter. The electoral machinery is in motion (and also the fake news that circulates so well on social networks and some front pages), and messages are going to be launched that, in addition to not being true, generate discomfort among moderate people who love the Valencian or who simply respect the right of Valencian speakers to use their language, or who also want their children to have an education in the language they value so much. The PP (I know many of its voters who do love Valencian) should be careful and not give in to pressure from some of its sectors or from Vox, because there are many Valencians, in many cases their voters, who feel attacked when their tongue is attacked. The PP understood it very well in the 90s; he knew which keys not to play or which consensus to break, especially in the counties and cities of the provinces of Valencia and Castellón. And he even promoted an entity, the Valencian Academy of Language, AVL, to pacify a conflict that had fractured Valencian society. But now, unlike the Galician PP, it seems that the current leaders of this party are giving in to certain pressures, especially from Vox. They will be wrong.
