Promoters of Koiné Manifesto respond to “word-twisting”

BarcelonaJoaquim Arenas i Sampera, President of Llengua i República (Language and Republic), the group which promoted the Koiné Manifesto, has written a public letter regretting "the misinterpretations" and the “word-twisting" that the document defending the Catalan language has been subjected to, "attributing to it that which it doesn´t say, and pinning intentions on it that the manifesto does not have”.

"Above all, it pains us to hear slurs that do not relate to the arguments that presented in the text", said the letter, which lists a series of clarifications on the manifesto. Arenas i Sampera stressed that the Manifesto "does not advocate monolingualism" nor the definition of a "single official status" for Catalan, a claim he labels as being "in bad faith". The author noted that Llengua i República has its own proposal regarding the question, but did not define it in the Manifesto "specifically to leave it open to possible solutions that might arise".

The statement stresses that the manifesto, which was signed by more than 200 personalities from culture and language, "does not try to define any political program nor any future legal-political framework", and that it does not denounce that individuals speak different languages, only "the political ideology of so-called ´bilingualism´". What it defends, he clarified, is that "Catalan and the Occitan of the Aran Valley become, in the future independent republic, the integrating axis in the framework for public acceptance of multilingualism".

The statement stresses that at no point the manifesto refers to the immigrant population as settlers, and that "it simply notes the well-known desire of Franco-ism to utilize them as an involuntary instrument of colonization". "Linguistic colonization", it adds, "is an equivalent expression here to "linguistic shift" and is used that way in ecolinguistics."