• Santiago Muñoz Machado "The controversy of the solo has been funny, but it would be dangerous to question the work of the RAE"
  • The city where the words are born The language of Cadiz

King Felipe VI has inaugurated at the Gran Teatro Falla in Cádiz the ninth International Congress of the Spanish Language, a week of academic and cultural events organized by the Royal Spanish Academy, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (Asale) and the Cervantes Institute.

"The twenty-first century must be the century of Spanish," said Don Felipe, who recalled that "In 2100 it is expected that 6.3% of the world's population will be able to communicate in Spanish."

"Spanish from its origins is a mestizo language and that miscegenation transcends all its culture, in all the nations that speak it. The King referred to the Amerindian languages that have become part of us and that "magnify Spanish". Before, Don Felipe made a historical chronicle of the previous congresses. Zacatecas, Valladolid, Rosario, Cartagena de Indias, Valparaíso, Panama, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Córdoba (Argentina)... "This is the most important event for the Spanish language and the place where the foundations of the pan-Hispanic linguistic culture have been laid."

The language congress has arrived in Cádiz as an emergency solution, after its organizers renounced in November to hold the meeting in Arequipa, the venue planned since 2019, frustrated by political instability in Peru. The new headquarters is not badly chosen, a city of mercantile and maritime history, obviously linked to America from architecture to its speech. Spanish language, miscegenation and interculturality. History and future, is the motto of the congress and can simply be used as an attempt to understand the Spanish language in relation to the languages and cultures with which it coexists, whether they are the other Spanish languages such as those originating in America, Portuguese or English.

Before the King opened the Congress, his hosts took the floor. Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute gave a speech very much of our time: he spoke of miscegenation, of the discourses of "racism, irrationalism and lies", of interculturality, of the Constitution of 1812, of "open identities, of unity and diversity" and of happiness. " What good subject is the mother tongue to reflect on our way of being, on our right to happiness, an inevitably linked matter, the sea, the sea, the sea, only the sea, to the relationships between intimacy, the private and the public or between the first, second and third person of the verbs. 'If you want me to leave,' Lola Flores asked the people who were invading and hindering a celebration of the family." In the end, he even quoted a motto from Cádiz C.F., "The struggle is not negotiated."

Elvira Lindo, writer from Cádiz, made the literary laudatio of Cádiz in her speech, with an intimate memory of the youth of her parents: "There is a mysterious bond that unites the grace of the people of Cádiz with my love for popular speech," said Lindo, who explained that being in Cádiz, is "apprehending the lightness that permeates everything" , whether it is the tanguillos that his father taught him, "the orality that is the essence" of the place or the carnival music, full of "requiebros from the other side of the Atlantic" and typical of the Gran Teatro Falla. "Laughter is a revolutionary resource that makes us all equal," Lindo said. And one more: "Purity does not exist here."

His colleague Soledad Puértolas, academic of the RAE, then took the floor and made the scientific justification of the Congress. His words made a history of the word "mestizo" since the time of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, seen early as a wealth and an essence of Hispanic culture. Puértolas spoke of a "triumphal journey" that corrected the first meaning in the Dictionary of the RAE, which related it to the verb to corrupt. Several centuries later, "the Oxford Dictionary recognizes the Spanish origin of the word mestizaje."

Sergio Ramirez.EFE

Sergio Ramírez, Nicaraguan writer and Cervantes Prize winner, then intervened to link Congress with the defense of freedoms. Ramírez, representative of the Nicaraguan Academy, which the Government of Daniel Ortega has withdrawn its administrative status because it considers it an organization financed by its external enemies, spoke of the traumatic history of his country, of Ovid's exile, of Joseph Roth's chronicles of the SS attacks on bookstores in Germany. of Juan Gelman and his consolation in words... "Literature is the only form of moral security that society has," said Ramirez, who is exiled in Spain. "Mine is a language without borders, from which no one can banish me."

Santiago Muñoz Machado.EFE

Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy and representative of all the academies, spoke of rights and freedoms, which are the subjects of his original profession as a jurist. Muñoz Machado referred to the birth of the concept of citizen in Cádiz, in 1812, and to the appearance of a wide vocabulary resignified or newborn and prepared to portray a new world: homeland, conservative, liberal, servile, citizen ... Its thread led to vindicate the work of the academies as a way to "preserve the freedom" of the language, to keep it alien "to the tyranny of the ignorant who want to take it away from the people."

More institutional speeches: the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares who distributed thanks, had a courtesy towards the frustrated project of Arequipa and referred to Cádiz as an ideal destination for CILE. The minister recalled that 54 representatives of America intervened in the Cortes of 1812 and spun in Congress of the Language with the recent Ibero-American Summit of Santo Domingo. And the president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, related the effort made to host the Congress with his modernizing project for Andalusia.

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  • RAE
  • Cadiz
  • Jose Manuel Albares
  • Spanish language