Valentí Puig 12/07/20
When the regional minister of Culture maintains that Catalan public television TV3 speaks too much Spanish, the nationalist dogma of Catalan monolingualism once again exacerbates the many uncertainties that Catalonia is experiencing. Would it be illusory to expect that the groups in the making that choose to cover the centrist space of Catalanism recognize at once that Catalan society is bilingual and that it is time to adapt all regulations to that reality?
The Catalan regional minister of Culture is a virtuous signatory to the Koiné manifesto and, therefore, her policy is to ignore that, next to Catalan, Spanish is the official language of Catalonia. This goes beyond denying that for half of Catalan citizens their own language – that of every day – is Spanish. On the contrary, it is a very crude fallacy to assume that recognizing the bilingual reality diminishes the capacity of Catalan as a language for social use and as a language of culture. It is a question of rights, on the one hand, and also the confluence of two linguistic vitalities that are an indistinct part of the culture of Catalonia, for more than five centuries, although, according to the signatories of the Koiné manifesto, Castilian entered Catalonia with the Franco’s troops.
Monolingualism is a corrupt entelechy and an unsupported strategy of intelligence because what it is about is to seduce and not to standardize. The monolingual thesis is the bunker. Whoever tries to formulate a renewed Catalanism will hardly succeed if he does not enter into rectifications and nuances that put an end to the divisive and negativist policies. It is one thing to protect by law a language with the demographic dimension that Catalan has and quite another is that, with the interventionist policies of pujolismo, the imaginary construction of a Catalonia in which Castilian would be residual began.
The pressing health problems, the economic impact of the post-pandemic crisis and a crazy political map are not enough to dedicate themselves to postulating the fundamentalism of a total hegemony of the Catalan language in Catalonia. Rather, it would be an opportunity to harmonize the irrefutable validity of a bilingual society. It is even postulable that Catalan culture, getting rid of so many prostheses, would thus regain creative fluency.
Add comment