Entities, universities and unions send joint letter to EU states backing Catalan as official language

A total of 21 different organizations have sent a joint letter to member states of the European Union calling for the approval of Catalan as an official language.

The initiative was presented on Monday at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.

The campaign was backed by Òmnium Cultural, one of the biggest civic groups in Catalonia, the heads of eight public universities in Catalonia and the main trade unions and employers associations in the territory.

The letter says that this is a "historic opportunity" to recognize a language spoken by "more than ten million" European citizens and "present in three of the member states."

Signees of the letter also consider that making the language official would strengthen "the founding values" of the European Union, and points out that the language is the 13th most spoken in the continent. 

“Key legal protection”

Among the arguments put forward by the letter is the "key legal protection" an official EU language would get against phenomena such as "globalization, new technologies, and new forms of communication."

As a result of not being official, they say, "the 10 million Catalan speakers do not find protection in key areas that are increasingly regulated by European institutions, such as labelling, audiovisual, technologies, social networks or artificial intelligence."

Speaking to the media after the presentation event, the president of Òmnium Cultural, Xavier Antich, said that the group expects the Catalan language to be made official. 

For him, making it official is "an important and essential step forward," though he also focused on the need to "strengthen the social use" of the language.

"We are still years away from a fully normalized situation" with regards to the use of the language in society, Antich said.

Podcast 

​​As of September 19, Spanish MPs can address Congress in Catalan for the first time ever - as well as Basque and Galician. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez agreed to pro-independence parties’ demands to grant these three languages official parliamentary status.

We covered the latest developments in the status of the language in a recent episode of our podcast, Filling the Sink, which you can listen to below. Press play below to listen or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify.

Some see it as a move towards a more plural and multilingual Spain, while others see it as a political stunt. And the next step is the European Union, where Catalan could become the 25th official language there.

Òscar Escuder from the Catalan language NGO Plataforma per la Llengua and Vicent Climent-Ferrando, translation and language science professor at the Pompeu Fabra University, talk about the campaign to get Catalan approved and what this could mean for other minority languages across the European bloc.