David Lema Vigo
Vigo
Updated Thursday, February 15, 2024-02:31
-Very few people speak Galician in Vigo, right?
-In Vigo? I do not know, that's the truth. I am from Nigrán.
-Oh, and in Nigrán?
-
In Nigrán yes, but I don't know Spanish so I respond in Spanish
.
We met
Mrs. Lingüistic Solidarity
in Vigo, in Praza Francisco Fernández del Riego, named in honor of one of the architects of the Galaxia publishing house, which was the meeting point for the survivors of Galicianism in the darkest years of Franco's rule.
In Vigo today it rains much more than people speak Galician. Don't be surprised either: the Karlotta storm has just passed and in some parts of the city 45 liters per square meter were collected, which is not bad at all. But it is true that, according to surveys by the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE),
almost 85% of the people of Vigo express themselves daily in Spanish
, with their Galician accent, of course. "It's a good thing you didn't come yesterday, because you would fly with the wind," says a taxi driver.
Vigo is the city that speaks the least Galician in the Community and, due to its demographics, it drags down the entire province of Pontevedra, where IGE data show that only 18.21% use Galician as the only language, when the average for Galicia It is at 30.57%. And yet, it is the second province in which those who speak both languages tend to express themselves more in Galician than in Spanish (23.95%) and the place where 47.22% of the total speak a lot of Galician... and 39.7%, quite a bit! And everyone understands each other! Contradictions? Are these Galicians crazy? No, they are only Galicians.
Let's see if by shaking this we can get the cocktail of
cordial bilingualism
.
The phrase "cordial bilingualism" or "harmonic bilingualism" has been used for years in Galicia, but it jumped to the national public square when
Alberto Núñez Feijóo
became the national presidency of the PP and,
coitadiño
, spread that his intention was to export the model of the Galician PP to Catalonia and the Basque Country, when the conservative party had always defended that
Spanish should be the vehicular language
. Criticism poured in, even more than shots fell in Vigo. In these 18-F elections, the PP project in Galicia is represented by
Alfonso Rueda
, who on numerous occasions has declared that he is "in favor of promoting Galician, which is a wealth, and of making
positive discrimination
, but not go to a monolingual education. This time the idea confronts the system proposed by
Ana Pontón
's
BNG
, which aims to recognize Galician as the vehicular language and a model of immersion in education and administration to achieve "full linguistic normalization" and total teaching in Galician.
But what the hell is this cordial bilingualism?
«From a scientific point of view, I don't know what the cordial label means», admits linguist Håkan Casares Berg, coordinator of the Galician Culture Observatory, «but I can tell you that in
Galicia there is a situation of contact between two languages with a "almost symmetrical legal
, a social conquest." Casares points out that, despite such equality, Spanish has more prestige, "because the citizen perceives that it is more useful, but that does not mean that there are hostile attitudes against Galician. These are marginal.
The one who is clear about what cordial bilingualism entails is, as could not be different, Román Rodríguez, popular
councilor
of Culture and Education of the Xunta: «It has been our model for 30 years, where languages are not a problem, but rather a wealth and They coexist in harmony. Our linguistic policy maintains the
utmost respect for the Constitution, the Statute of Autonomy and the freedom of the people
. We do not want any Government to tell the citizen in what language he has to speak.
Although Spanish is abundant in Vigo, it is not the Wild West, don't think: linguistic laws apply in the city. That is to say: the Linguistic Normalization Law, which Manuel Fraga drafted in 1983; the decree of multilingualism in non-university education in Galicia of 2010, signed by Alberto Núñez Feijóo; the Public Employment Law of Galicia of 2015... Legal texts that define Galician as the language of Galicia, which establish the duty to know both languages,
even as a requirement to opt for certain competitions
, its basic and mandatory education in equality of conditions and the empowerment of Galician at all levels of public, cultural and informative life.
The entire signage of the Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital in Vigo, a huge complex located on the outskirts, is read almost entirely in Galician. Only the machines where each patient enters their health card to pick up the appointment translates the messages. We asked what a neighbor, who is waiting to enter
Radioloxía
, thought: «Fillo, what do you say. I'm from here, why should it bother me? But cordial bilingualism is not something that can be demonstrated by asking Mrs. Maruja, who comes to check her hip. To do this, a study that is not available would have to be examined. What we do know is that according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), eight out of 10 people claim to speak Galician correctly; According to the Center for Sociological Research (CIS),
65.3% of the population feels as Spanish as Galician
; that 19.5% identify themselves as more Galician than Spanish and that 7% see themselves as only Galician (for continuing to flood things with data).
Waiting room at the Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital in Vigo.ROSA GONZÁLEZ
"I asked the Xunta several times to put the Hospital signs in Spanish, they told me they were going to do it, but they haven't done it." We listened to
Gloria Lago
, president of the We speak Spanish association and, in her day, of the extinct
Galicia Bilingüe
. A teacher and philologist from Vigo, Galicia Bilingüe was created in 2007, in the midst of the bipartite of the Xunta of the PSdG and the BNG. Since its founding, it denounced "the situation of exclusion of Spanish and linguistic nationalism in the official sphere of Galicia." Lago criticizes the decree of non-university education of the PP, since although it includes a percentage of subjects in balanced Galician/Spanish terms, he considers that "the most interesting from the linguistic point of view are Social Sciences and Natural Sciences, Biology, Geology , History and Geography", and these are taught in Galician. "This reduces children's knowledge," he declares, in a context in which among young Galicians, according to the INE, they begin to increase the distance with one of their co-official languages: 7.6% of those under 20 years of age They claim not to be able to speak “anything” of Galician and another 21.7% show difficulties. "We proposed to the Government that, at least, they rotate these subjects and the answer was a resounding no," says Lago, who describes the PP as nationalist.
A novice Feijóo then stood next to Galicia Bilingüe and, in 2009, she was followed by well-known faces of the PP in a large demonstration that took place in Santiago de Compostela. Some seven thousand people, according to police sources, demanded
"freedom to choose" Galician or Spanish
in school or in the Administration. Some 250 individuals who defined themselves as pro-independence supporters boycotted that event with altercations. There were personalities such as the current president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, the then vice president of Congress Ana Pastor or the
popular
mayors Corina Porro and Carlos Negreira. "They used us, they did not comply because they are nationalists," says Lago.
The
Minister
of Culture, Román Rodríguez, responds that then there was a situation of "immersion of linguistic policy from an educational perspective" with the PSOE and the BNG in the Government. It was the time of the two-party system. "We reject that." Regarding Galicia Bilingüe, he maintains that the association evolved and ended up being located "at a vertex." «From the other side they say that we marginalize the Galician.
We, the PP, are in the center
. To say that we are nationalists is not to know the sociological reality of Galicia. Nationalism is an exclusive ideology that seeks difference. Galicianism is to feel Galician and Spanish, to identify with the signs of Galicia but never to confront. Nationalism seeks an external enemy, Galicianism is integrative.
The journalist Fran Balado narrates in the biography
Feijóo's Journey. The village boy who never lost an election
(La Esfera de los Libros) that at that time the PP "had internal studies that reflected the concern of the urban population as a result of an alleged indoctrination that the nationalist leg of the autonomous Executive "I tried to implant among the little ones." Perhaps a good part of the blame lay in Anxo Quintana's idea
of teaching the Galician anthem to the children between zero and three years old
in the galescolas, the name with which the public nurseries were baptized. In the book, Balado collects the testimony of a political scientist who declares the following: «Feijóo fell into the temptation of not understanding the country he governed. At first he used the Galician war a lot, polarizing the population, doing the Galician a disservice. Then he corrected it."
"Friendly bilingualism?" Marcos Maceira, historian and president of the Bureau for linguistic normalization, considers that cordiality with respect to Galician "does not exist." And to explain it he emphasizes the idea of the "
gradual disappearance of Galician among the youngest
, which he sees, above all, in early childhood education centers." To support the thesis, remember another data from the IGE: "23.9% of those under 15 years of age know little or no Galician, and the percentage is increasing", although only 9.89% of that age group He says he doesn't understand it. “We have never seen this trend so pronounced,” he adds. Although he accepts that there are legal requirements to encourage the use of Galician, he considers that the Xunta does not comply with them. «What we proposed is that Galician should have a majority presence in education so that everyone could achieve full competence. Also in areas such as audiovisual and the entire administration, also in Justice.
The Cidade da Xustiza de Vigo is an almost futuristic building, and with its signs in Galician, of course. Although many of those that are posted on paper are read in Spanish. In Galicia, judges are not required to know Galician to practice, recall from the Communication Office of the Superior Court of Xustiza, but it is a merit when it comes to adding points for a transfer. Anxos Sobriño Pérez, linguist at the Pontevedra Provincial Court, explains that the linguistic teams that work for the Galician Justice are the ones who make it possible for
citizens to exercise their right to use Galician
. They translate documents and perform interpretations between the two co-official languages, both in the Galician Spanish direction and vice versa: «We are also sporadically asked for interpretations in trials, but this work is rather a minority because normally there is intercomprehension between the two languages: if a party claims ignorance from Galician, the other changes to Spanish. And he denounces that the judicial processing program used by legal operators, the Minerva Nova Judicial Office, is not in Galician.
This harmonious bilingualism, in short, is good enough for a treaty, but there are those who sarcastically explain it with just one sentence: even Vox uses Galician in its electoral advertising! "Our model works," insists
Councilor
Rodríguez, "and that is why we have governed for so many years." «We do not want to use language as a reason for political struggle. In Galicia there is no conflict, except among the minorities who want everything in Spanish or everything in Galician.
And yet, the great rival of the PP for this 18-F is for the first time the BNG of Ana Pontón, a left-wing nationalist political party, which in its program embraces the known as the
Catalan route of the referendum and total educational immersion in Galician
. It seeks a "new political framework that emanates from the exercise of the right of self-determination of the Galician people (...) without giving up the objective of full sovereignty." AND, . Given the "linguistic emergency" they detect, they will repeal the PP's multilingualism decree to replace it with an educational offer "completely or mainly in the Galician language." Everything, in a community where in general terms, according to the IGE, 72.28% of citizens understand Galician a lot and 23.18%, quite a bit; where 62.14% of the total write it a lot or a lot or where only 24.40% always speak in Spanish, to continue with the data, which we already know there is to drive us all crazy.
This is how we head towards the electoral appointment. With two linguistic models, with two models of society and, above all, with a key debate in this matter: whether three-month-old children have to take a bottle and burp, as Feijóo thought, or learn the verses of the Galician anthem, as Quintana proposed (or, who knows, both).