Everything has gone very fast. The cancer diagnosis and the operation she underwent without much hope for Sant Joan led her to say goodbye to family, friends and colleagues. But her life gave her a two-month bonus, which she took advantage of until the end.
Today the linguist and professor Carme Junyent i Figueras has passed away. She was born in Masquefa (Anoia) in 1955 and was 68 years old. Ella Junyent was a professor of linguistics at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Barcelona and a great connoisseur of linguistic diversity in the world, Africanism, endangered languages ??and migrations in Catalonia.
Junyent was also president of the Consell Lingüístic Assessor and received the Sant Jordi Cross in 2019 “for her long career in studying and defending linguistic diversity in Catalonia and in the world.”
From the Faculty of Philology at the UB, she dedicated herself to the investigation of endangered languages, convinced that “if a language disappears, humanity loses knowledge”. Likewise, she established herself as one of the referent voices of the Catalan language. For decades, she warned that Catalan is in danger of extinction and that language immersion in schools and, above all, institutes in Catalonia is not being complied with. To break with this dynamic and as president of the Consell Lingüístic Assessor, Junyent proposed measures to boost its use in schools.
In addition, the linguist is the author of several books, among which stand out The future of Catalan depends on you and Catalan, the effervescent language. Likewise, he coordinated the edition of the volume We are women, we are linguists, we are many and we say enough, a bibliographic work that reflects critically on inclusive language. In an interview in La Vanguardia at the end of January 2022, the philologist affirmed that “imposing inclusive language is against linguistic logic”.
