THE 5-YEAR OLD WHO MADE CATALAN EXTINCT
THE 5-YEAR OLD WHO MADE CATALAN EXTINCT
The powers that be in my former region in North-Eastern Spain never let a chance go to waste to set Catalonia's two language communities at loggerheads with one another. The real Catalan question, conflict or crisis -call it as you please- is entirely internal: between Catalans.
The State does not really help much, and down here in the South most people just wish the Catalans would get on with it. In the areas of origin of SOME of the Spanish-speaking Catalans -themselves or their parents or grandparents driven by poverty and despair back in the day, just like the young boys that flee in droves from North Africa these decades- most people don't want to hear another word about it. They'd rather see Catalonia separate and set up the hoped for totalitarian tax haven than have to put up with any more whining and winging.
Part of the parcel of constant whining and winging is that the long-suffering Catalan language is about to become extinct at the hands of evil enemies ranging from Franco to them unadaptable Spanish-speakers. That is simply not true. Catalan in some version is spoken as mother tongue or second language by 10 million persons. Catalan is the 14th biggest language spoken in the European Union and ranges 88 amongst the world's thousands upon thousands of languages. 7.009 languages are more endangered than the locally all-powerfuld Catalan.
But even if the false propaganda claim of pending extinction were true:
Are rights something that languages possess; or are rights something persons have? Check the legislation and the human rights if in doubt.
There are troublesome consecuences of the self-serving Catalanist perception of rights (and morals) as something that can only ever be on their side and never ever oblige them to share anything (such as power and schooling in the mother tongue) with the other half, the larger half, the downtrodden and humble half in the region itself:
And so, the RIGHT to have a measly 25 % of teaching carried out in Spanish in the bilingual region's public education, all the way from kindergarden at age 0 to university two scores years later, is for each single family to insist on ... and wait for years on end for yet another Constitutional Court decision to establish it yet again. And not only that:
Whenever a family wins in court (unlike me who could not even convince the headmaster to hand over an email address to send my request to), the parents and their toddlers or teenagers must suffer a very heavy and institutionalised (and physically dangerous) form of bullying.
This is the hate.
This is hate at the helm.
And this is how right now, a five year old in the town of Canet is about to bring down the socalled language bath of swimming in a pool of only ever Catalan in "l'escola catalana" that the nationalist leaders themselves do not send their children to.
Imagine the hate this little boy is met with, perceived as he is as the slayer of the Catalan language, that poor indefensible creature of a tongue.
