JUST SAY YES... TO THE LANGUAGE
The extreme right had seemingly been given royal houseroom, and for Vox, the Royal Household’s intervention was an opportunity too good to be missed.
Seven thousand or forty thousand. Attendance at rallies is prone to vastly differing estimates, the organisers never knowingly erring on the conservative side. The Obra Cultural Balear (OCB) cannot really be described as conservative in a political sense but they are in a linguistic sense. Conserve, promote Catalan, although I do accept that one preserves a language rather than conserves it. But that’s English for you, and there wouldn’t have been much of that being spoken in Palma’s Plaça Major and its environs last Sunday afternoon. “Yes to the language” (the Catalan language) was the theme of the rally.
The Day of the Language (Catalan) had become the day of the defence of the language on account of dark linguistic forces seeking to penetrate the defence, to pull down the barricades of an historically significant European language in a manner akin to that of the reviled Bourbons of Felipe V at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.
The day coincided with the final stage of the ‘correllengua’, an event arranged by what might be perceived as the youth wing of the OCB - Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua - if only because they are both based at the same address in Palma. For five days, the language run and the carrying of the flame of the language (Catalan) had taken in all four of the islands for the first time. A correllengua ‘interilles’, was this a defence of a Balearic language?
Heaven forbid. Most certainly not; not in the sense of there being a Balearic language, that is. The language (Catalan) is common to all four islands; the islands’ language, except when the islands’ variations intervene - or Castellano, the blame for which can be placed firmly at the doors of the House of Bourbon and Felipe V. And he wasn’t even Spanish, he was French, born in the Palace of Versailles, for goodness sake. Which was of course the reason for the war - other European powers aghast at the prospect of a French-Spanish monarchical union.
By somewhat unfortunate coincidence, the current Bourbon monarch, Felipe VI, had given the Sunday Day added relevance. To what extent, if at all, had the King been involved with the decision? Who can say, but the Royal Household had nevertheless gone ahead and granted a ‘Real’
(Royal) title to an entity known as the Acadèmi de sa Llengo
Baléà. For the uninitiated, the
‘sa’ is a clear Balearic giveaway. The feminine definite article, the so-called salat article, it is common usage in the islands’ Catalan variations, the islands’ own languages, though there are plenty who would dispute that they constitute languages per se.
Here, therefore, was royal recognition of an apparently scholastic body dedicated to the Balearic language. To say that this had generated a dispute would be an understatement. What was this academy? Where was its track record? Who were its scholars, doctors and professors? Román Piña is the president of an academy of more than seventy years standing. It is ‘Real’, the Royal Mallorcan Academy of Historical, Genealogical and Heraldic Studies. On learning of the Royal Household’s title award, he was “stunned”. Not only did this academy not appear to have genuine university credibility, he totally rejected its raison d’être - the existence of the Balearic language, which is an invented language not recognised by academia or international linguistic science.
The president of the OCB, Antoni Llabrés, was outraged. “Approval by the Royal Household to a marginal and unscientific group, close to the extreme right, is simply grotesque.” And Llabrés was
obviously to the fore in addressing the thousands last Sunday. President Prohens, he said, must choose between Catalan and the social majority of the people of Mallorca or “kneel down before fascism”. The thousands had gathered because a defence of Catalan was necessary, the attack on “the language” having been an inevitable consequence of Prohens and the Partido Popular having given houseroom to Vox in forming a government (the only real choice that had existed for her).
The extreme right had seemingly been given royal houseroom, and for Vox, the Royal Household’s intervention was an opportunity too good to be missed. In advance of Yes to the Language Day, spokesperson Manuela Cañadas stated that she didn’t know what had changed so that “we now kneel down before the Catalans”. The University of the Balearic Islands, arbiter of language, could say what it wanted, but a “foreign language” (Catalan) should not prevail, when the people of the islands had “always existed”. Yes, and their languages had been influenced in different ways. What was her point? But emboldened by the Royal Household, Vox would be asking the Prohens government if it was in favour of replacing Catalan (a co-official language) with the Balearic languages in the region’s Statute of Autonomy.
This won’t happen, and Vox know it won’t happen. But they were all for applying linguistic pressure on a weak government for reasons every bit as ideological as those they despise, yet without the kind of popular support that the Day of the Language demonstrated. Why rake over the ashes of old wounded ground in whipping up potential conflict? Other than for zealous political purposes.