In Le congrès ne marche pas, the play that La Calòrica has just premiered at the Teatre Lliure, we witness a recreation of the Congress of Vienna, which was held in the years 1814 and 1815 in the central European city. It was only supposed to last a few days, but it stretched out to nine months. Beyond all the absurdities that were perpetrated there and the pretense of appeasing revolutionary ideas by tying power firmly in the hands of the old, the piece ironizes the fact that the language of communication of those attending that first summit of history was French. The paradox arises that at that time the language of culture was that of the losers, that of Napoleon and his soldiers.
Mutatis mutandi, in the European Union English continues to be one of the main working languages, despite the fact that the British hit two with Brexit and that there are now only five million Irish speakers. Because the EU is a union of states that, consequently, uses the state languages. That is to say, despite the fact that English is now only native to five million or that Maltese does not reach half a million speakers, as they are state languages ??they have the honor of also being official languages ??of the Union.
Catalan, on the other hand, with ten million speakers, does not have the status of an official language in the European Union. Now, however, the acting Government of Pedro Sánchez has requested this official status, also for Galician and Basque, and the first stone has already been laid. At the moment, the EU says that the three languages ??at once are not, that they will study them one at a time, starting with the one with the most demographic weight. I don’t think this is an unreasonable criterion, because there are many more languages ??in Spain and in the other countries of the Union.
Let’s see what happens now with Catalan, especially because of what France will say or do, because the confusion that this State has done with its own languages ??that are not French is a joke, starting with the language of the troubadours, the Occitan, the first literary Romance language of old Europe. That the language of Joan-Lluís Lluís becomes official in Europe will surely open the box of thrones in the country of greatness.
As for Galician, if there had not been the sought-after political division with Portuguese and Galician criteria had been imposed, years ago its speakers could boast of being part of the Galician-Portuguese community with 220 million speakers, and of being official in the European Union since 1986, when Portugal entered it. Unfortunately, chauvinism is not exclusive to the French.
