Nine entities from the economic, cultural and social world of the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and the Valencian Community have launched a manifesto on Monday for Spain to take advantage of the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union to stop "treating Catalan as a second language" and promote its official status at the European level.
The manifesto is signed by Plataforma per la Léngua, Òmnium Cultural, Obra Cultural Balear, Obra Cultural Balear de Formentera, Cultural Action of the Valencian Country, the Intersindical-CSC, the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, the Institute of Eivissencs Studies and the Foundation of 'Entrepreneurs of Catalonia (FemCat).
The initiative was presented at an event at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), in Palma, due to the "symbolic fact" that the Balearic Parliament was the first, in 1988, to request that Catalan be the official language of the EU . The proposal will gather supporters through the oficialitatara.cat website.
In the presentation, the president of Plataforma per la Llengua, Óscar Escuder, stressed that there are 11 languages with far fewer speakers than Catalan that are recognized as official – including Irish Gaelic, Finnish, Latvian and Maltese. As data, he has indicated that Irish Gaelic has 260,000 speakers, and only 80,000 of them use it on a regular basis; while Catalan has 10 million speakers and is the 13th language in volume of speakers in Europe.
Escuder has defended that the refusal to make Catalan official is not justified for technical reasons either, since it would not require the signing of a treaty but only a modification of the Council's regulations, a document that has already been changed up to seven times: from 11 official languages in the year 2000, to the current 24.
In addition, the president of the Platform has added that it is a request that "does not harm anyone", so the signatories have agreed that the fact that Catalan is not official is due exclusively to reasons of political will. "We are the largest political-linguistic anomaly in Europe. There is no other language with the characteristics of Catalan that is so silenced," denounced former MEP Bernat Joan, representative of the Institut d'Estudis Eivissencs.
Likewise, Joan has argued that the official status of Catalan would not mean a great economic cost in translation and interpretation services in the institutions, since "today in the Spanish booth [of the European Parliament], more than half of the interpreters know Catalan" , so that "they would not even need to add staff."
However, the officiality would imply "astronomical differences" in the treatment of the language in pan-European programs "with linguistic implications", such as the exchange of Erasmus students, programs for companies and others, he pointed out.
Jaume Aragall, member of the Executive Committee of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, has intervened online to highlight the role of Catalan as a "historical language of commerce" in the Mediterranean. "Our companies, with a great presence in the markets, must take our language and culture around the world, as well as use it internally. Companies that promote the use of the Catalan language demonstrate their corporate social responsibility", he said.
The promoters of the manifesto have agreed to reproach the Government of Spain for its lack of will to take this issue forward. "Catalan is not official in Europe because the Kingdom of Spain has not accepted that it is a State with different languages and only recognizes one as its own," said Bernat Joan.
The president of Plataforma per la Llengua has pointed out that they will send the manifesto "through different channels" to the State. On the other hand, they will offer to adhere to the manifesto to new social, business and institutional entities in the Catalan-speaking territories.
In the manifesto, the promoting entities consider that, by assuming the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU in July, Spain will gain "influence and visibility" before its European partners and "will have more capacity" to promote the official status of Catalan. Among other considerations, the text warns that "only in 2022, 47 regulatory provisions were approved with linguistic requirements that implied the automatic exclusion of Catalan for not being an official language of the EU."
