Everything went very fast. The diagnosis of cancer and the operation she underwent without much hope for Sant Joan led her to say goodbye to family, friends and professional colleagues. But life gave him a two-month tip, which he took advantage of until the end, writing articles full of humanity and leaving the projects he had started in good hands.
The linguist and teacher Carme Junyent Figueras died yesterday. He was born in Masquefa (Anoia) in 1955 and was 68 years old. Junyent was a professor of linguistics at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Barcelona and a great expert on linguistic diversity in the world, Africanism, threatened languages and migrations in Catalonia.
At the head of GELA (Threatened Languages Study Group), he investigated linguistic phenomena in depth, especially in Africa, such as the relationship established between the languages of power and indigenous languages, which live under threat and end up disappearing
This knowledge, transferred to what is happening with the Catalan language, led her to issue a worrying diagnosis about her health. Junyent detected in Catalan the same symptoms that had occurred in other languages that had ended up being residual. One of his last books on the matter, with Bel Zaballa, was The future of Catalan depends on you.
Junyent defined himself as an Africanist, although he had never set foot in Africa, for fear that he liked it too much, he confessed to Xavi Bundó on the program Via lire, on RAC1, where he often collaborated. However, his popularity came mainly for his stubborn fight against the so-called inclusive language. Great defender of the generic masculine, as a provocation she had signed a book as "editor", instead of putting "editor".
In this sense, the collective book that he coordinated with seventy women, We are women, we are linguists, we are many and we say enough, is a bibliographic work that reflects critically on inclusive language. In an interview with La Vanguardia at the end of January 2022, the philologist stated that "imposing inclusive language is an attempt against linguistic logic".
Junyent also denounced the breach of language immersion in schools and, above all, in institutes in Catalonia. To break with this dynamic and as president of the Advisory Linguistic Council, Junyent proposed measures to boost its use in the school environment. Among the multiple recognitions she received, Junyent was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2019 "for her long career in the study and defense of linguistic diversity in Catalonia and in the world".
She has died an excellent linguist and a person of great humanity, who knew how to put her personal stamp on everything she did, never raising her voice, but speaking truths like peasant houses. A calm but incorruptible voice.
