On Friday of the previous week, I was preparing a session on Jordi Pujol’s period of government for the Catalan politics course that I teach at the UdG. As an obligatory episode we had to stop at the approval of the linguistic normalization law of 1983. It was a matter of priority at that time when the bases of self-government were being built. And political representatives of all colors dedicated time and intelligence. The resulting law would end up consolidating the school model that we later said of immersion, and was approved without any votes against. It was not the a priori proposal defended by CiU, nor by ERC, but within the framework of a rich deliberation process, the conclusion was reached that the best option for social cohesion and the future of Catalan was to consolidate a single school network (the PSC proposal) that would ensure the knowledge of the two official languages to all the citizens of Catalonia. The use of Catalan as a vehicular language which, as a minority language, made this milestone possible.
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Coincidences of life, in a break, I took a look at the online press that talked about the agreement reached between PSC, ERC, JxCat and ‘comuns’ to shield the linguistic model in the school against the threats of the TSJC. Good news. But he also read that the postconvergents had begun to doubt after receiving certain questions on the networks. Bad news. In my opinion, the decline in the use of Catalan is explained by a multiplicity of factors: from cultural globalization and the digitization of communication to aspects that have more to do with limitations or errors in national and state public policies. But there is one factor that we should not forget and that has recently been the one that worries me the most: that Catalan is perceived by part of society as a foreign language, as a heritage that is not its own. The politicization of the debate on language has contributed to weaken certain sentiments, to create problems where there were none: Cs was born with the purpose of breaking the Catalanist consensus and, as a priority, that which is built around the language; but certain attitudes of essentialist appropriation of Catalan by pro-independence minorities also contribute to alienation.
The four political forces mentioned above have been weaving, in discretion, a way to be able to fully maintain the linguistic regime marked by the education law (2009) in educational centers. The chosen formula is the reform of article 21 of the language policy law (1998). It was not the only way, it is true. It could have proceeded, for example, to introduce changes in the LEC. But what is important here is the achievement of a broad and plural agreement, and this has a double potentiality. On the one hand, an instrumental one: the inclusion of socialists in the equation commits the Spanish Government itself in search of a solution. On the other, a more substantive one: the approval of a proposal that has, at a minimum (and while waiting for other forces to be added), the support of 106 parliamentarians out of 135 goes in the direction of ensuring that Catalan continues to be a shared language, backbone of diversity. A language of all. A language to love.