WHEN RAMON Aleu stood up on Wednesday in the upper chamber of Spain’s parliament – the voice of its regions – he addressed fellow senators for the first time in Catalan. In doing so he inaugurated a new language regime that, for many, is an important symbolic step in at last acknowledging the country’s linguistic diversity and the reality that up to a third of the population, 16 million people, speak a regional language as well as Castilian Spanish.
Members will be able to address each other in Catalan, Galician, Valencian, and the Basque language of Euskara, in addition to the country's common language, Castilian. The 25 interpreters will cost the senate €350,000 a year, an extravagance, opponents say, difficult to justify in these straitened times. A scathing editorial in El Mundocomplained that "the same parliamentarians who talk to each other in the corridors in a language that they all share need interpreters to understand one another in the chamber".
Of course the new dispensation, like Ireland’s insistence that Irish become one of the 23 official languages of the EU, has little to do with empowering those who might currently be linguistically challenged in parliament. It is an assertion of the value of diversity and an attempt to promote regional languages by raising their profile. But, largely, the subtext is that the language struggle is part and parcel and totemic of the struggle for regional identity and autonomy.
Behind the opposition from the conservative People’s Party (PP) – its MPs refuse to speak anything but Castilian – and claims that the chamber is becoming a “tower of Babel” lie a strong ideological commitment to a centralised, unitary state and hostility to regional autonomy. “Something like this would not happen in any normal country,” PP leader Mariano Rajoy insisted.
The party’s attitude is also a reflection of ongoing tensions at regional level where the shoe has been on the other foot for some time and nationalist governments have pressed ahead with measures to give primary status to their language. In Catalonia, most classes in public and many private schools are taught through Catalan with Spanish only a second language. And the insistence of some authorities on public servants speaking both Castilian and the local language has led to accusations that they exclude other Spaniards from jobs.But, as Ireland itself has experienced, redressing the balance for languages suppressed – as Spain’s were for many years under Franco – is a difficult but legitimate task.