An attack on the peaceful coexistence between languages, an attack on social cohesion

Just under 40 per cent of the population in Catalonia claim to use Catalan on a regular basis. Despite the efforts made over three decades of democracy and self-rule to revive a language that had been banned and abused during the Franco regime, nowadays Catalan is not the common language in its own territory. In some areas it is clearly disadvantaged: mass media, employment, the justice system, cinema … There are only two fields where it is the priority, default language: Catalonia’s schools and its administration. These two areas have been moderately successful in making up for the existing negative bias and this has not been accomplished at the expense of Spanish, which is one of the two official languages in Catalonia and is spoken daily by over 50 per cent of the population. The Catalan administration uses the Spanish language to deal with any member of the public who makes that choice and, upon leaving school, all Catalan children have a mastery of Spanish that matches or exceeds the proficiency level attained by children across Spain. Furthermore, they also learn English as a third language, even if there is still much to be done in that regard.

Thanks to a broad-based social and political consensus, the Catalan school system was born at the end of the dictatorship as a space where both languages would coexist in harmony, with Catalan as the main language of instruction and Spanish as the second language. Unlike in the Basque Country, it was wisely decided that schoolchildren in Catalonia would not be grouped by language preference. Instead, the decision was made to build an inclusive school system in order to avoid a language rift or war. Furthermore, the system meant that, in adulthood, all Catalan people would know the language of Catalonia, which is not widely spoken in many metropolitan areas.

So, Catalonia’s school system was devised to contribute to social cohesion and offer equal opportunities, especially for migrants who had arrived from many Spanish regions and, in recent decades, from across the globe: everyone deserved a chance to learn Catalan in order to progress on a level playing field in the society that welcomed them. All that was achieved thanks to a joint national effort, as well as a good deal of flexibility and common sense in the way it was applied in practice. As a matter of fact, despite several attempts in recent years to break up this historic agreement, which is understood as a collective undertaking, school communities (teachers, parents and students) have stood up for it and reaped its benefits.

Therefore, Ciudadanos and the PP’s insistence to dilute Catalan language immersion in schools —a system that has been researched and praised internationally as exemplary— constitutes an outrageous attack on our peaceful coexistence and reveals a crass attempt to weaken the weaker language even further. If Catalan truly cannot be the language of instruction in Catalan schools, where can it? Without language immersion programmes at school, the future of the Catalan language is bleak. Furthermore, it is an abuse of democracy for a party that only obtained four seats in parliament in the last election to attack Catalan teaching on the back of a totally exceptional political context [with Madrid’s imposed direct rule].