Published originally in Spanish. Carlota de Benito Moreno. «Se me va de la lengua»
You may not speak Catalan. But perhaps you’ve visited Catalonia and felt like people there talked to you in Catalan just to bother you, knowing full well that you neither speak nor understand Catalan.
You may be Spanish yet have a mother tongue which is not Spanish, but another of the national languages. And perhaps you’ve felt that Spain treats your language worse than it does Spanish.
Perhaps you’re very angry about one of these two things. I’d like to be able to tell you that, in that case, this post will change your mind, but the truth is I doubt it. At this point, you’re probably quite comfortable feeling constantly angry and there’s little I can do to change that. But I can try to talk a little about whether you’re right if you identify with either of the situations described above.
Let’s start with Catalans’ insistence on speaking Catalan. Of course, you totally agree that it’s perfectly natural for someone to prefer to speak their native tongue, which is the one they’ve learnt at home, the one they use with their family and friends and, therefore, the one they feel most comfortable with. That’s obvious. But you also know that, for most Catalans, speaking Spanish is not difficult. They speak it perfectly, because they’re lucky enough to be bilingual. Why, then, do they insist on using Catalan with those of us who are not from Catalonia and don’t understand it? Because you’ve been to Barcelona, walked into a shop, said something in Spanish and received a reply in Catalan. Do we need any more proof of linguistic bad faith?
Well, the truth is we do. It turns out that the array of communicative possibilities is larger for plurilingual people than for monolingual ones. One example of this is code-switching — remember Spanglish? In the US it’s common for Latinos to switch back and forth between English and Spanish in the same conversation or even in the same sentence, just because… they can. It’s fun, it’s easy and it works — nothing but advantages. This phenomenon is related to another: one interlocutor might speak one language while another speaks a different one, neither speaker switching codes. This is common in Switzerland, for instance, where many immigrants don’t speak, but do understand, Swiss German, and speak standard German — it’s perfectly normal to hear a conversation which is half in Swiss German, half in standard German. Does this mean that the Swiss refuse to speak standard German? In one way, it does: it isn’t their native tongue, so they feel more comfortable with Swiss German. In another way, it doesn’t: they have no problem switching to standard German when they discover that their interlocutor doesn’t understand Swiss German. The thing is, this discovery doesn’t just happen, because conversations in two languages are perfectly normal to the Swiss. In this regard, the situation in German-speaking Switzerland is akin to that of Catalonia, where a conversation in both Catalan and Spanish can feel perfectly natural. It won’t, of course, to a monolingual person who’s only visiting — and who might therefore misinterpret the situation. But the misunderstanding is as easy to solve as saying, ‘Sorry, aber ich spreche kein Schweizerdeutsch’ or ‘Perdona, pero es que no sé Catalán’ (‘Sorry, but I don’t speak Catalan’). Catalans don’t talk to you in Catalan to make your life difficult or out of spite. They talk to you in Catalan because it’s just natural to them. Just say the magic words and start chatting away.
Let’s move on now to the systematic oppression to which the Spanish state subjects all languages except the imperial one. Because why in God’s name should Spanish have a leading role in the Spanish constitution? Is Spanish somehow better than the other Spanish languages? Can’t we be like Belgium or Switzerland, which are multilingual countries basically because they’re made up of monolingual regions? Isn’t this all just a whole lot of Spanish imperialism? Well, let’s see. When the Spanish constitution came into force, in 1978, the truth is that only a minority of Spaniards were monolingual in any language other than Spanish. Of course! Because Franco! Actually, Francoist language policy undoubtedly made things worse for minority languages in Spain, but the spread of Spanish happened much earlier and was linked to the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile. From a modern perspective, this expansion may seem unfair, imperialistic or destructive, but the fact is it happened and it constitutes our starting point. And the Constitution of 1978 — with Spain having just left behind the dictatorship’s uncompromising language policy — laid the groundwork for a considerably more progressive language policy than in many neighbouring nations, including key players in the history of democracy like France. The results are there for all to see. Spanish efforts to revitalise its minority languages have been much more successful than in France (where they don’t try too hard, truth be told). This is obvious if we compare the situation of Catalan and Basque on one side and the other of the French-Spanish border. The Basque sociolinguistic survey of 2013, for instance, showed knowledge and use of the Basque language growing in Basque-speaking regions in Spain, while continuing to decrease in France. The very same trend can be seen in a report on the situation of Catalan in France, commissioned by the Institute of Catalan Sociolinguistics. France is not the only case that makes Spain look good: the situation of Catalan in Italy (in Alghero, Sardinia) is very precarious, and Italy’s language policy lags far behind Spain’s, even if they’ve been a democracy for quite a while longer. And I’ve written before about how Swiss language policy is not particularly protective of its historical languages.
So is Spain particularly imperialistic when it comes to language policy? Not at all — rather the contrary. For such a young democracy, I think we can be proud. Is bilingualism a form of oppression? Isn’t it unfair that you can live your life being a monolingual Spanish speaker, but not a monolingual Catalan speaker? To be honest, I don’t know if it’s unfair, as this is a rather subjective concept (one implying that monolingualism is better than multilingualism, to begin with). The fact is, an overwhelming majority of human beings are multilingual, because an overwhelming majority of the world’s languages are small languages, spoken by small communities. Is Spanish language policy perfect? Of course not. Just like there’s no perfect democracy, there’s no perfect language policy (to start, because it’s impossible to please everyone). In Spain, just like everywhere else, there’s room for improvement.
Allow me, however, to question the notion that we’ll make anything better by constantly using our languages as political weapons, lying about them and propagating all sorts of negative myths. But hey, I know, it feels great to be angry. I get it — angry people get pampered more.
