language

More than 60 demonstrations have taken place to protest against the new law announced by the Spanish Education Minister, José Ignacio Wert. The demonstrators consider it to be “an attack” against the Catalan language, as it would no longer be a ‘core subject’ and pupils could end their schooling period without taking a single Catalan language exam. Furthermore, it would end the current linguistic immersion model, which has been in place for the last 30 years and ensures that all children end their studies knowing both Spanish and Catalan. Almost the entire Catalan political class and civil society is against Wert’s reform, as well as public figures in the rest of Spain, such as the Rector of the Madrid Complutense University. The current model guarantees social cohesion and equal opportunities. It has been praised by international organisations and has been validated twice by the Spanish Constitutional Court.

In Brussels, all political parties but the PP denounced the new proposals by the Spanish minister for Education, José Ignacio Wert, to relegate the Catalan language to a third-class subject in schools. MEPs from the CiU, the ERC, the PSC and the ICV have written a joint letter to the European Comissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, Androulla Vasilliou, asking for a meeting to discuss the Catalan language situation in Spain. The Catalan politicians have also presented a parliamentary question to the European Commission urging the institution to protect languages such as Catalan and asking whether the law proposed by the Spanish government is in line with European directives.

The Spanish minister for Education, José Ignacio Wert, has proposed a new law that the Catalan government sees as a “threat” to the current Catalan educational system and the “worst” legislative piece on the teaching of regional languages “since 1978”. The proposal would relegate the Catalan language to a ‘specialized subject’ at schools, while the Spanish language would continue to be a ‘core subject’ and a second foreign language would be taught as a ‘specific subject’. Catalan minister Irene Rigau left a meeting in Madrid to express her opposition to the motion. She said that the proposals presented are “not negotiable” for the Catalans.

With 3.39% of the votes in the last elections and 3 MPs in the Catalan Parliament, polls indicate that the number of Ciutadans’s MPs could double in the next elections, resulting in between 6 and 8 MPs, and forming its own parliamentary group for the first time. In its 6 years of existence, it has mainly focused on attacking the policies defending the Catalan language. Now, clearly opposed to Catalan independence and organising a self-determination referendum, C’s is lifting the banner of Spanish unity to attract voters. Ciutadans is seen by many as a populist party, with a conflict-driven speech criticising Catalonia’s political class and offering easy solutions to complex social problems.

Spain’s Constitutional Court has responded to an appeal from the Catalan Parliament dating from 2004. The appeal was against the Judicial Power’s last reform, approved by the Spanish Parliament, in the time of José María Aznar. Now, the Constitutional Court states that the Catalan Government only has competence over the non-judicial staff working in the justice administration, but not over the judges and other judicial staff. This means that the knowledge of Catalan language will not be a condition to work as a judge in Catalonia. Therefore Catalan citizens may not be able to use their mother tongue in their justice procedures or they will have to use interpretation services.

José Ignacio Wert, the Education Minister, made this statement at the Spanish Parliament, while defending the recentralisation measures he is trying to implement. Wert’s words have provoked major outrage in Catalonia. The Catalan Government, all the non-Spanish nationalist parties, trade unions and civil society organisations have qualified Wert’s statements as being “totalitarian”, “a barbarity”, and “pre-Constitutional”, reminding them of Franco times. Furthermore, many citizens channelled their outrage for Wert’s words through Twitter, making the related hashtag Spain’s main trending topic. Besides, results show Catalan students have better results in Spanish than Spain’s average.

The Catalan Education Minister reminds her Spanish peer that such measures are not legal and do not correspond to the current legislation. The Spanish Education Minister, José Ignacio Wert, is considering giving public funds to privately-owned schools teaching in Spanish, which would set up a de facto parallel public school system in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Wert stated earlier this week that he would work to end the current Catalan school model, which is based on the linguistic immersion principle and guarantees the knowledge of both Spanish and Catalan by all pupils, as results show.

The search engine giant adds thirteen languages to its speech recognition system, also including Basque and Galician. From this Friday, it will be possible to use the service on phones with the Android operating system to search in Catalan. With this addition, Google’s speech recognition software now supports 42 languages.

The Conca de Barberà County does not want to neglect the high number of immigrants living in Catalonia and is organising Arabic, Chinese, and Wolof language classes with native speakers as a pilot project. Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania and has over 13 million speakers. The courses are designed to focus on the language, although there are aspects of tradition and custom taught in order to enhance the student’s exposure to other cultures.

The Pro-Language Platform, an organisation that works to promote the Catalan language, reports that only 6% of products sold in supermarkets meet the Consumer Code of Catalonia, which requires that products are labelled in Catalan. In a study, the organisation revealed that the market is not yet standardised, claiming that 94% of products do not meet the law’s requirements and that this is disrespectful to the consumer. The organisation reports that although large multinational companies such as Danone, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Gillette and Philips respect the laws of other linguistic areas, they do not abide by the labeling requirements in Catalonia.

New research by the Catalan Government studied more than 20 Catalan cities in different sectors to calculate how Catalan use has increased in schools, hospitals, public administration and media. The study, Ofercat, concludes that more traders and public employees are answering in Catalan despite it not being their usual language.

English Summer S.A. has been organising English language immersion camps for kids for 30 years. This summer, Jiajia Wang Liu is organising a new concept for the company: a Chinese language summer camp. Wang Liu is an entrepreneur who came from China when she was 8. She studied economics at the Pompeu Fabra University and at Harvard. Nowadays, she has her own publishing house and a lot of projects on the go.

The tribunal declares null and void the 2008 Catalan government decree which stated that Catalan “should be used as the language of instruction” for pupils between 3 and 6 years old. The Supreme Court also overturned the article that banned the separation of pupils for linguistic reasons and the one that established that teachers should guarantee that foreign pupils learn Catalan in order to achieve “rapid integration”. The Catalan minister for Education, Irene Rigau, says “all stays the same” because the education law is newer than the decree affected by the ruling and also states that Catalan is the language of instruction in Catalonia.

PEN International has presented at the Catalan Government’s Palace in Barcelona the Girona Manifesto on Linguistic Rights. Catalonia’s President regretted that the Catalan language still “suffers from the intolerance or belligerence of some bodies of the [Spanish] State”. The manifesto, which had its origins in the World Conference on Linguistic Rights held in Girona in 1996, aims to defend linguistic diversity throughout the world. The Manifesto has already been approved by the PEN General Assembly. The 10 point document has already been translated into 18 languages.

The world’s most popular short-message network has included Catalan as one of its 28 official languages. Twitter has opened a Catalan ‘translation centre’ to adapt its content. In the first 24h, more people had registered voluntarily than the number of those who did it within the 6 months after the Finnish version was released. Twitter’s CEO had already announced at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, which is held every year in Barcelona, that the company would do it, but he did not specify a date. Wikipedia opened its Catalan version 11 years ago and Youtube incorporated Catalan in early 2011. Catalan is is the world’s 8th language with the most blogs, the 13th most used language in Wikipedia, and the 14th search language in Google.