It rains in Spain

This post has its roots in an article in the FT about teaching languages in Catalonia, but I was reminded of it by the paper at reference 3. This being a well written and accessible paper in English, written by a team who are probably all native French speakers, all working in France. Maybe they had the paper smartened up by an English editor, but it is still quite impressive. My own French might be good for reading Maigret, but I have plenty of trouble trying to write short messages to French sellers on ebay and my French is certainly not good for writing scientific or any other sort of papers. Furthermore, my recollection of my time at secondary school, is that there was a chasm between the arty types, some of whom might do dead or live languages, and the science types (like me) who didn’t do language beyond O-level at all. Beyond perhaps pretending to learn German for one lesson a week for a year or so.

I have no idea how many English speaking scientists active now could manage a paper in some other language, but my impression is that a lot of scientists whose mother tongue is not English do manage to write papers in English. Maybe in order to be competitive, they have to be able so to manage. In which case, there must be a lot of scientists out there who have taken out a good chunk of quality time to learn English – a chunk English speaking scientists don’t have to bother with.

From where I start to wonder whether in working meetings of the European Union, they still speak English as the most convenient way to proceed, despite our having abandoned ship, with simultaneous translation being too expensive and too clumsy for day-to-day purposes.

While in Scotland, Ireland and Wales they make more or less serious efforts to keep their various forms of Gaelic alive, but apart from the expense involved, it is not really a problem. Pretty much everybody gets on with life in English. While the Cornish and the Cumbrians have more or less given up.

Which brings me to Spain (population 50m) where, on the evidence of reference 1, language clearly is a problem in Catalonia (population 7.5m). About half the population of Catalonia speak mainly Spanish and a third mainly Catalan. But most education in schools is conducted in Catalan and there is plenty of controversy about whether schools should be required to conduct at least some teaching in Spanish, given that Spanish is the language of the land. And then lots of the Catalonians think that Catalonia should be independent of Spain, not part of that land at all. And in Franco’s day the central authorities tried hard to get rid of Catalan. So there is lots for everybody to get cross about. And hard to come to a compromise which everybody will sign up to.

I suppose I should just be grateful that we don’t have this particular problem here in the UK. Although, as they used to say, it does broaden one’s mind to have a least a smattering of some languages other than one’s own.

PS: Canada, Zimbabwe and India are three more large countries where language is a live issue. As it may be in Mexico (population 130m), very much a Spanish speaking country, but also one which runs to maybe 300 indigenous languages, of which Nahuatl is the largest, with getting on for 2m speakers. On which I stand corrected; I had not realised that Spanish was as dominant as is reported at reference 4, vaguely thinking that half the population spoke – or at least could speak – Nahuatl. And I dare say there are plenty more countries where there are language issues.

References 

Reference 1: Language wars in Spain stoked by schools bill: Removal of reference to Spanish as medium of instruction is seen by some as insidious threat to the state - Daniel Dombey/FT - 2020. 24th November 2020.

Reference 2a: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/aryans.html. Home to a nice graphic describing the Indo-European family of languages.

Reference 2b: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/05/i-met-lucky-people.html. A reminder that Romani is a language from the Indo part of Indo-European family rather than from the European part.

Reference 2c: Ancestry-Constrained Phylogenetic Analysis supports the Indo-European Steppe Hypothesis - Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall, Andrew Garrett - 2015. The source of the graphic that comes with reference 2a.

Reference 3: Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy – Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Lionel Naccache, Jérôme Sackur and Claire Sergent – 2006.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Mexico. 

Reference 5: https://www.idescat.cat/?lang=en. The Statistics Institute of Catalonia. Offering English, Spanish and Catalan. Searching for language turns up various stuff, including the fact that Catalan is strongest in the south western corner of Catalonia and weakest in Barcelona.

Reference 6a: ISO 639-3 Registration Authority: Request for Change to ISO 639-3 Language Code: Change Request Number: 2015-045 - Nate Cheeseman - 2015. For those interested in the bureaucracy around maintaining the master list of the languages of the world. Sampled in the snap above.

Reference 6b: https://www.sil.org/. With this outfit being in the lead, curiously, a religious outfit from Dallas, Texas. 'SIL’s service with ethnolinguistic minority communities is motivated by the belief that all people are created in the image of God, and that languages and cultures are part of the richness of God's creation'. One supposes that one of their activities is translating the word of God into the languages of those of his peoples who wouldn't otherwise get the message. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Reference 6c: https://www.ilcdallas.com/. Where faith meets language.