Òmnium Cultural, economic and business organizations, unions and Catalan public universities, have sent a letter to EU members to demand the recognition of Catalan as an official language within the European Union.
“You cannot expect any other response from the EU member states than their commitment to ensure that Catalan is considered a full official language,” said the president of Òmnium, Xavier Antich, who demands the support of the European countries within the framework of the meeting of the General Affairs Council of the EU scheduled for this Tuesday.
The key to adding one more language to the 24 already official is the approval of the proposed modification of regulation 1/1958, which, according to the letter, will allow the legal protection and normalization of the language, in the same way as “when Catalan became official in the Spanish State in 1978, after 40 years of prohibition by the dictatorship.”
Among the promoters of the letter, apart from Òmnium, are the Autonomous University of Barcelona; the University of Barcelona; the University of Girona; University of Lleida; the Polytechnic University of Catalonia; Pompeu Fabra University and Rovira i Virgili University in the educational sector, and, among the organizations, Pimec; FemCat; Chamber of Barcelona; Blind; Promotion of Work; Confederation of Cooperatives of Catalonia; the Catalan Cinema Academy, and the CC.OO unions. from Catalonia; UGT of Catalonia; I use; Intersyndical-Csc and the Union of Farmers of Catalonia.
The actor Sergi López and the television and film director, Sílvia Quer, were in charge of reading the letter at the event held at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC), where the institutions claimed “the 13th most spoken language of the EU with more than 10 million speakers, present in three of the EU member states and with official status in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community and Andorra”.
In the same sense, they argue that other languages ??with a similar or smaller number of users than Catalan are already official in the EU, such as Swedish, Bulgarian, Danish or Slovak, so “this difference in the protection of European languages ??responds solely to the political will of the member states,” they say. Including Catalan as an official language of the EU “would not be a symbolic step,” they emphasize from the IEC, but rather “it would have a direct impact on the lives of million European citizens.
The letter also urges to strengthen the EU and its founding values ??of equality, justice and multilingualism, and protect access to Catalan speakers in the face of the threat of globalization, social networks and new technologies in the field of communication, measures that are already used for official languages, and that are regulated by the European institutions.
