ERC and Socialists agree draft bill to allow Catalan to be spoken in Congress

Esquerra Republicana (ERC) and the Socailist Party (PSOE) have agreed on a draft text to reform of the rules of the Spanish Congress to allow the use of Catalan and the other co-official languages of the country in the lower house.

The amendment proposal will be put forward this week and, if it goes ahead, it will allow Catalan, Basque, and Galician to be used in plenary sessions, committees, and the written record of parliamentary initiatives.

In the latter case, the texts must be accompanied by the Spanish version, as it will be in the Official Gazette of the Courts.

The Socialists did not want to confirm whether the reform had been agreed with ERC or not, and simply said that they were working on a draft as had already been announced, but ERC sources confirmed to the Catalan News Agency that an agreement was reached for the draft.

Linguists welcome move

Linguists welcome the inclusion of other languages in the Congress of Deputies, maintaining it would have "great learning value" for citizens.

The initiative, they say, would lead to the languages gaining visibility which would help them become more normalized.

However, they also warn that this is only the first step and that the entire administration needs to be "open" to multilingualism.

Speaking to the Catalan News Agency, Emili Boix, professor at the University of Barcelona, professor Cristina Gelpí at Pompeu Fabra, and the UNESCO chair of Linguistic Policies at Pompeu Fabra, Vicent-Climent Ferrando also welcomed the inclusion of Valencian but pointed out that it is the "same language" as Catalan, and that if a distinction is made between them, it would be a political decision.