CATALONIA -- Spanish State still does not protect the rights of Catalan speakers - VilaWeb

Spanish State still does not protect the rights of Catalan speakers - VilaWeb:

Spanish State still does not protect the rights of Catalan speakers

This is one of the conclusions of InformeCAT (Catalan Report), presented on Wednesday by the Plataforma per la Llengua

Catalan is a dynamic language in expansion, with a notable presence
in various areas, in some cases much larger than expected given its
demographics, but at the same time it suffers an inexplicable lack of
official and legal recognition as well as unprecedented attacks from
institutions like the Spanish government and various local governments.
These ever more frequent, directed attacks on the Catalan language and
which have as their principal objective stopping the process begun in
Catalonia to decide its own future, may end up stopping the growth of
our language. This is the main conclusion that can be gleaned from the InformeCAT 2014
(Catalan Report 2014) the annual report carried out by the Plataforma
per la Llengua on the state of health of the Catalan language, and which
was presented today.

The InformeCAT, which was created from
various sources and studies that the group carried out over the past
year, attempts to give a broad view of the health of the Catalan
language, through fifty data points in various areas. The objective is
to have a reference document that can serve as a thermometer for the
current state and evolution of the language.

According to the document, Catalan enjoys good health in many areas:
for the first time, our language has surpassed the figure of ten million
speakers. In ten years, the number of speakers has risen by 750,000 and
the number of people who know how to write it, by more than a million.
It is also the seventh most learned by young people and the 14th most
spoken language overall in the European Union. In addition, the use of
the language by newcomers continues to grow; comprehension of Catalan
among foreign residents of Catalonia has risen 21 points in the last ten
years.

But this growth varies widely from territory to territory and also
from environment to environment. For example, in contrast with this
positive data, in territories like Valencia, the Franja de Ponent and
the Balearic Islands, the language has slid backward thanks to the
unprecedented attacks by the respective governments. In Valencia, oral
comprehension has fallen 12 points since 1992. Or in the area of
education, 155 school units in Valencia have been eliminated or are in
danger of being eliminated in the 2014-2015 school year. With respect to
the university level, Valencia trails the list with respect to the use
of Catalan: no university in Valencia offers more than 25% of its
classes in Catalan. Like in Valencia, the autonomous government in the
Balearic Islands has also used the sensitive area of education as a way
to attack the language. The Tractament Integral de Llengües (Integral
Language Treatment) decree which marginalizes Catalan in school has
outraged and mobilized the civil society in the Islands and has made the
educational community react: more than 120,000 people demonstrated on
the streets in Palma (population 869,000) in September to protest these
measures of José Ramon Bauzà's government.

Finally, the Aragon Law of Languages, which renames Catalan as
"LAPAO" (Aragonese language of the Western Pyrenees) and turns back the
timid advances at recognizing the use of Catalan in the area, has also
gotten an important response, in this case from local politicians, who
have joined together in a group of thirty area mayors who have pledged
to undertake the necessary legal action to abolish the law.

This pointed political strategy throughout the territories where
Catalan is spoken has been complemented by the well-known policies of
the Spanish State to dismiss Catalan and refuse to recognize it in many
areas. Two examples: Spain is the only state out of the 32 in the
Schengen Area that doesn't recognize as official the languages of more
than 10% of its citizens, as is the case of Catalan.

And second, the Spanish State and its various governments that have
had responsibilities in this matter are also the principal ones
responsible for Catalan still not enjoying official status in the
European Union. There are eleven official languages in the EU with fewer
speakers than Catalan, an unusual, inexplicable situation. Further,
linguistic discrimination on the part of the administration for using
Catalan has not stopped: the 2013 Plataforma per la Llengua report
detects 12 new cases.

By area, there are sectors in which Catalan has not been able to take
off, or it has been implemented at a very slow pace, like in the legal
system (this year 25% fewer rulings were given in Catalan, which in 2010
were only 14.5% of the total to begin with), in film (movies offered in
Catalan grew only 1% from 2011, again, starting from a very low
percentage, even though the number of moviegoers grew by 7%), and in
children’s toys and games (less than 8% of toys include instructions in
Catalan).

On the other hand, there are a number of positive data points in
important sectors like culture. Two examples: the three most visited
digital newspapers in Catalan have each surpassed a million monthly
visitors, and in 2011 there were twice as many theater shows in Catalan
than in Spanish. In the business world, it's important to point out that
more than 70% of Catalonia's employees use Catalan at work and three
out of four SMEs use Catalan to promote and contract employees.

But where Catalan shines the brightest is as one of the most active
languages on the internet and in the world of new technologies. There
are numerous data that demonstrate this fact: the Catalan version of
Wikipedia, Viquipèdia, received a record number of visitors this year,
and the four principal operating systems already offer versions in
Catalan. On the Internet, six out of the seven most popular social
networks have a version in Catalan, while one of the most popular world
networks, Twitter, has more than 150,000 users of its Catalan version
since July 2012.

 

InformeCAT 2014