I joined in Bloggers Unite this event proclaimed by the UNESCO to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
While studying Catalan Philology, I have learnt that our understanding of the world does not vary depending on the language we speak. There is this old hypothesis according to which languages are responsible for different cultures, but it can not be scientifically proved. A good way to disallow this hypothesis is to remember the science fiction novel by Jack Vance The Languages of Pao (1958), in which new languages are created to change the interests of society. No dictator would obtain any results by doing this, unless he established a mutilated, insufficient language in a dehumanized, highly fictional world like in George Orwell's 1984 (1949), partly inspired in the Spanish Civil War.
When the Spanish dictator Franco forbade the generations of my grandparents and parents to speak and write in Catalan, their mother language, maybe he was trying to change their way of thinking. It would have been in vain: even if they had forgotten Catalan, the ones that hated the dictator would have continued hating him, and saying so in the language he wanted them to adopt. It is more likely that he tried to erase their cultural references: the names of the streets and every toponym, the songs and the books, the names and surnames of people... this is something he could actually do. My elders only learnt to write in Spanish, a language they never used, their names and surnames were replaced, their books burnt, their songs banished, their villages renamed. But, meanwhile, they continued using Catalan at home. What else? Apart from a comprehensible reluctance to speak in the imposed language after a fraticidal war, there was the need to refer to the things around them: their neighbours' nicknames, local traditions like
the shitting log, native plants, swear words and affectionate forms...
What we can say about languages is that they contain the vocabulary with which people refer to objects and events around them. And that these words are related to the customs, rituals, etc., set in their cultural repertoire, as well as to their conditions for survival.
After Franco’s dictatorship, my inherited world and my language endured, and this is something we Catalans are very proud of. It wasn’t the first time our language was endangered, and it wouldn’t have been the first one to disappear. All the states, not only in war but also in time of peace, tend to prioritize one language to official purposes. Yet the ones in which a single language is spoken throughout the territory are a minority, Denmark, Portugal and a few more, while some others, like India, have more than five hundred of them. Nowadays there is an accelerated recession in this regard and it is estimated that if the trend is not reversed, half the current non-official languages will disappear in this century.
We will certainly widen our views through learning other languages, and we will preserve our cultural references by speaking our own tongue. In addition to that, we are all the same no matter the language. We must be aware of this ambiguity, identify it and celebrate it. We share the so-called universal linguistics, according to which there are common elements in every language that mark the limits of our ability of communication: in all languages, the sound is articulated and has associated meanings; we all use vowels and consonants, as well as nouns and verbs; there's no language without terms for kinship and colours... and so on. Thanks to the universal linguistics, every language can be translated into another one, with evident difficulties but with no exception, and they are the proof for the general expression of something that is single and multiple, chaotic and harmonious, well-known and wonderfully fresh: human condition.
There are endless ways to describe our shared world, none of which is better or worse than the others. I think this is the way we shall understand the aim of preserving cultural diversity through promoting multilingualism.
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I wondered if they were referring to Kafka when I first read this quote, but I must admit that I was more intrigued by the cat on the cover.
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