Regional and minority languages
sara abdulla
Wednesday, 13 August 2008 14:16 UTC
A recent Nature editorial called for the protection of regional and minority languages in France and elsewhere. A cautionary response on Nature’s Correspondence page, claiming that schools in a third of Spain teach only in minority languages, is itself prompting a bulging postbag of replies including, two of which subsequently appeared on Nature’s Correspondence page, here and here.
What’s your view on the role and effects of minority languages in science education, and about related science education policies?
Updated 05 September 2008 10:53 UTC
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I find it most disheartening to see in the comment posted by Mr. Luque that he actually left Catalonia so that his children would not learn catalan. As mentioned in previous comments, people educated under the catalan public school system have a level of spanish just as high as that of people educated elsewhere in Spain. As a native catalan speaker, it is thus deeply saddening to me to observe that someone would be willing to leave a job and move somewhere else simply to prevent his children from acquiring additional knowledge (in this case, my language).
Mr. Luque and others claim that the rights of the spanish speaking population are not respected in regions with local languages. Interestingly enough, I find the opposite to be accurate: while spanish is taught throughout Spain exactly at the same level, no public school in the spanish monolingual part of Spain offers to my knowledge courses of Catalan, Basque or Galician.
Pere Roca-Cusachs
post-doctoral researcher
Columbia University -
I’ve posted my continued thoughts on this issue in a blog entry.
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I’m 49 years old, i hav two soons, a i’m catalan, and use 4 languages, catalan, spanish, french and english.
My two soons study at public school in Catalonia and thye stdy, know, speek an write correctly spanish and catalan. So opinion of Mr rojo is no true. An now they are learning english and french.
I told my soons, that in European Union they must known four languages (catalan as own language, spanish, french and english) to be an eficient worker in futur.
Is known that people who know more languages probably they have more cognitive habilities. And in futur they will have more options to have a better job.
So, my conclusion is that people, like Mr Rojo, who wants for people to know only spanish in Catalonia, is bad,
He wants people with less culture background. -
@Josep: you’ve done much to prove my point to a French-speaking colleague, who is being a bit shy to make comments, that you don’t have to write perfectly in English to make your point on here. Thank you.
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Bon día a tots (hello everybody),
Just a few thoughts, my apologies for the draftness of this post…I really do not understand the violence (currently verbal but no one should forget that in a near past is was physical). This led to a Dark Age for our millenary language as well as for Spain in general. Indeed, some people had been jailed because of the use in public of the language of Ramon Llull’s, Salvador Dalí or of the first cookbook ever.
Probably people as M. Luque or M. Rojo (such as intellectuals that promote the Manifiesto por la lengua común) may wonder why so much people used to be more than diglossic before the 19th century, mostly in the Middle Ages (when people traveling used to speak latin and two or more languages depending on their tasks). They made up the society we live in and some of us propose to impoverish the way we exchange ideas ?
In 1705, and edict from "Louis XIV (the “King-Sun”)":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV claimed that my ancestors were disgusted (répugner in the Molière language – who used to talk in Occitan before becoming the most famous French playwrights) to talk in Catalan. Indeed, about fifty years before, the Catalan country was dismembered, just if now China and Europe divided the U.S. and claimed that one half had to talk in, say, French or German, and the other in Chinese. It took more than two centuries to reach the catalan practice minimum in the French “Catalunya Nord”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Catalonia ; in the 80’s, when I was myself really “disgusted” when wondering myself speaking this so old-fashioned and archaic language. In the same period, the spanish Catalunya dramatically arose as one of the most active regions of Europe and meanwhile, the French counterpart sank in a more than 25% unemployment stagnation… The “Wheel had turned” (as French say) and the jealousy now replaces the French arrogance. Nowadays, Catalan is à la mode in Perpinyà|Perpignan and Catalan-immersion schools cannot meet people wishes.Finally, from a more personal point-of-view, I consider that I am able to have fruitful exchanges with people speaking 6 languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan) and able to roughly understand at least 2 more (German and Greek, not including the many latin languages only spoken by some hundreds of thousands people – Gascon, Provençal, Sardinian, Corsican, Sicilian, etc…). This leads me to an anecdote: I was very recently in Sardinia in a part of the Island where catalan is not the vernacular language (North-East where people speak Gallurese) and had a conversation with local people in Italian when I used an word clearly litterally translated from catalan. A woman then asked me But you don’t speak Gallurese, do you ?? (in Gallurese, of course). I answered in catalan and finally began to mix some of their words in my own sentences… The folks were much more relaxed and no more considered me as a tourist but as a guest… Today, Gallurese speakers are about half a million, this could sounds little but the warmth of every (wo)man in this world when you make the effort to come closer in the exchange has no price.
But I am not very optimistic : the raw debate around this topic in Spain is sadly violent and economical problems come along on the top with this. We are in the same configuration as in the 30’s: beware not to go too far ! Human inclination towards domination over fellow creatures seems to be the most permanent (biological) trait
in Human evolution. This may not be the trait with the greatest fitness and it could contribute to our decline.Matthias Macé
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Perhaps Mr. Sales can tell us in what high school in Barcelona my children can be educated in Spanish, if only for 25% of their school hours… Is it so hard for the regional Catalan politicians to allow for 50% of the “supposedly multilingual” education in Spanish? It would be only fair for me as a taxpayer…
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Nature reputation as a scientific means of communication has always been out of any doubts. For years, some of the most outstanding discoveries in a broad range of scientific disciplines have been published under its name. This is the reason why I was so astonished when I read in Nature a letter to the Editor entitled ‘Schools in a third of Spain teach only in minority languages’ (Nature 454, 575;10.1038/454575d 2008).
To my surprise, that letter was full of false statements. The linguistic situation in the Catalan education system has followed language immersion programmes for more than twenty years. Everybody has to be fluent in both official languages in order to finish the compulsory education. Spanish language lessons are also mandatory in the whole country. Besides, parents in Catalonia have the right to demand a full-Spanish education for their children. This model has been shown to be succesfull as a means to guarantee that everyone is competent in both languages. Maybe the author and some of the self-called intellectuals signing the ‘Manifesto for a Common Language’ are not connoisseurs of the Catalan linguistic reality.
Moreover, the author sarcastically uses a humiliating and politically-biased language like “In the Basque country, despite the obscurity of the language (…)”. Obviously, the Basque language is not obscure for anyone who has it as mother tongue. In any case, as Merriam-Webster dictionary claims, obscureness is something “not readily understood”, or “relatively unknown”. I guess this is what new educational programmes in the Basque country want to erradicate, and make the Basque language
one of the most ancient languages in Europemore broadly known in its homeland.Altough I feel that Nature should not be a platform for the spreading of political propaganda of any kind, I hope the journal “will seek the informal advice of independent reviewers” in the future when such a delicate issue is discussed.
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We were very surprised and disappointed to read Rojo’s letter published in Nature, and we prepared a reply that was not accepted for publication.
Here is the letter:
That linguistic diversity, as defended in Editorials (Nature, 453,1144; 2008), enriches a society’s knowledge base, culture, and ability to communicate we take as a given. For this reason we were disappointed to read the provocative letter of Rojo (Nature, 453,575; 2008). His argument, so hostile to linguistic diversity and so weak in factual content that it borders on being gossip, is now strengthened by Nature’s impact potential on the decision-making community, worldwide. We cannot let it stand without rebuttal.
One would surmise from the letter that a third of Spanish children are forced to learn their academic curriculum in an obscure language and that they do not learn Spanish. In fact, in most regions mentioned in the letter, the parents can chose Spanish as vehicular language of education, so the 1/3 is a very poor guess (Page 31230 at https://www.docv.gva.es/portal/portal/2007/07/30/pdf/2007_9912.pdf). Furthermore, nowhere in Spain it is easier to study in English than in Spanish and all children in Spain learn Spanish. True, here in Catalonia, the public education system, democratically implemented by the Catalan Parliament (and ratified by the Spanish Parliament), designated Catalan as the vehicular language for instruction. However, since Catalan has been our ancestral language since the tenth century, the decision seems fair. Nevertheless, a prime objective of the Catalan education system is equal proficiency in both languages for all children and the success of this system is shown by studies conducted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science demonstrating the high performance of Catalan children in Spanish (http://www.institutodeevaluacion.mec.es/). In addition, this system has been lauded by the European Union (pg 18 in http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/doc/multireport_en.pdf) for both promoting multilingual proficiency and social integration.
So, it is false that Spanish is not well taught here. One of us (TTP), an immigrant from the USA, can personally testify to the success of this system. Three of his children were educated in a public secondary school in a small Tarragonan town where they learned to speak, read, and write Spanish at the level required to continue their studies, at public universities in Barcelona where Spanish is a necessity. After only three years in Catalan secondary schools these children from Maine were bilingual in Spanish and Catalan.
Finally, the tone of Rojo’s letter was derogatory towards Basque, Catalan, and Galician speaking people. What does “obscure language” mean? Rojo mentions the recent manifesto endorsed by renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Upon analysis, the real objective of both this manifesto and Rojo’s letter is to advocate the right of Spanish-speaking people to maintain a “privileged” position of monolinguism in regions where the rest of the population is bilingual. If this “privilege” were permitted it would be the death knell to the Basque, Catalan, and Galician languages.
And here is the cover letter:
Dear Sir:
Attached is a letter in response to J.M.Rojo’s letter, “Schools in a third of Spain teach only in minority languages” (Nature 454, 575; 2008) which is so politically charged that it can not be left unchallenged. Our letter attached is our own, but we have solicited the opinion of our colleagues here at the Institut Ciències del Mar-Barcelona (list below) to verify our impressions, interpretation, and facts on the matter. We realize that you will select your own title, but were we consulted we would suggest the following: “Maintaining linguistic diversity is not easy.”
We hope you find it interesting enough to merit space in the CORRESPONDENCE section of Nature.
Sincerely,
Ted Packard (ted@icm.csic.es), Ramon Massana (ramonm@icm.csic.es), and Dolors Blasco (icmdir@icm.csic.es)
Institut de Ciències del Mar CMIMA-CSIC
Passeig Maritim de la Barceloneta 37-49
08003 Barcelona, SpainInvestigators, PhD students and technicians at the Institut Ciències del Mar-Barcelona who support this letter.
Albert Calbet, Albert Reñé, Andrés Gutiérrez, Antonio Turiel, Carles Pelejero, Carlos Pedrós-Alió, Dolors Vaqué, Domingo Lloris, Elisa Berdalet, Enric Saiz, Enrique Isla, Eva Calvo, Francesc Sardà, Hugo Sarmento
Isabel Palomera, Itziar Lekunberri, Jaume Piera, Javier del Campo, Joan Batista Company, Jordi Font, Jordi Solé Ollé, Josep Lluís Pelegrí, Josep M. Gasol, Marc Belzuncess, Marta Estrada, Marta Ribes, Miquel Alcaraz, Montse Coll, Montse Demestre, Núria Gómez, Pere Puig, Pilar Sánchez, Pilar Fernández-Vallejo Caminals, Rafel Simó, Sílvia Anglès, Silvia G. Acinas, Vanessa Balagué -
Dear all,
I would only add one though: in Catalunya, almost everybody is fluent in Spanish (almost, because I know some people from France and th U.K. working in tourism, that benefit from Spanish health/social system, and not speaking spanish nor catalan…) whereas about 90% are fluent in catalan.
Here is the fact: catalan is the minority language in Catalunya, after being one of the main mediterranean languages for trade and culture, and it needs, and not spanish, the strongest protection. This is the main argument for the “immersion” system. Without this, catalan would disappear within the 21th century.
Fins aviat,
Matthias -
I have much hesitated before writing anymore on the subject of education in spanish bilingual regions, as the arguments can go on endlessly. However, keeping silent might be interpreted as me acepting Antoni Rosell-Melè and Jesús Purroys assertions in their recent letters (“Languages: Spain’s minority-language speakers are bilingual”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7209/full/455026c.html; “Languages: Catalan speakers learn a wider range”: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7209/full/455026b.html) on “my previous letter in the journal”:http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/454575d. I apologize for the lenght of my answer.
1 The right to choose
Amb modestia i amb ple respecte, as might be said in Catalan, with modesty and respectfully, I should first stress that my letter dealt with one precise fact precisely concerning parents’ right of choice. This fact is the impossibility –now or in the near future- of choosing education IN Spanish (I never said or meant OF Spanish) in several spanish regions, including Catalonia, because of the ever increasing unavailability of programs IN Spanish in public-funded schools.
That spanish parents should have the opportunity and the right to educate their children in Spanish in Spain seemed quite obvious to me and I hope to many other people too. If this was not sufficient, this is legally backed by the “Spanish Constitution (Art. 3.1)”:http://www.map.es/documentacion/legislacion/constitucion.html, that explicitly states “the right (of spaniards) to use it” (Spanish).
From these considerations on facts and rights, I believe that the education policy implemented by the authorities from these bilingual regions is an undue and abusive way of promoting their particular languages -which I otherwise deem a plausible aim itself.2 Misleading messages
“in Catalonia, the Spanish-language skills of schoolchildren completing their education are equivalent to those of children across Spain. “The Programme for International Student Assessment”:http://www.pisa.oecd.org) indicates that the learning capacities of Catalan and Spanish schoolchildren in science and mathematics are not dependent on whether they receive a bilingual education.” (A. Rosell-Melè).
“The Catalan schooling system, for example, does indeed promote the use of Catalan, but native Catalan students are as fluent in Spanish as their monolingual counterparts.” (J. Purroy).I would have prefered that, rather than rebucking my letter, A. Rosell-Melè and J. Purroy had refuted the facts exposed above.
Instead, they have misleadingly chosen to divert the attention towards issues at best indirectly or marginally related to parents’ right of choice; i.e.: the skills and fluency in Spanish of catalan schoolboys, or their performance in science and mathematics according to PISA reports, or their gifts in learning foreign languages.
I sincerely wish they are right, as I want the best for my younger fellow citizens in Catalonia and elsewere in Spain. But I believe that they indulge in self-complacency even on these respects, and their arguing is weak, as we shall later see.3 The “Manifesto for the Common Language”: Risky lies and Nature contents
“the manifesto mentioned in Rojo’s letter …seeks to enforce a Spanish rather than bilingual education, and to relegate Basque, Catalan and Galician to a linguistic ghetto” (A. Rosell-Melè).
“The political (sic) manifesto Rojo cites to emphasize his point is riddled with contradictions, is not endorsed by any linguists and does not belong in the pages of Nature” (J. Purroy).I believe that any disspasionate reader of the aforementioned “manifesto”:http://tinyurl.com/692c5g will hardly agree that it seeks or strives to enforce monolingual education in Spanish or to relegate regional languages (see particularly Premises 1-4 of the document). This is plainly false.
Now, I am really astonished at J. Purroy’s insight concerning the endorsment of the Manifesto by linguists. According to press releases, by mid-July 2008, less than one month after its presentation, the manifesto had been endorsed by more than 130,000 people around Spain. Does he seriously mean that he has escrutinized all these people and found no linguists among them?. I will help him: It is very easy to find that at least one much respected linguist, “Prof. Rodríguez-Adrados”:http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Rodr%C3%ADguez_Adrados – incidentally the Hon. President of the Spanish Society of Linguistics- has publicly endorsed the document (“i.e.”:http://www.elmundo.es/2008/07/04/uve/2443460.html). Again, lack of endorsment by linguists is plainly not true.
Unlike J. Purroy, I will never venture to tell the editors of Nature what does and what does not belong in their journal’s pages, but I doubt they will be happy at publishing such false or grossly inaccurate data.4 Freedom of choice pays: The case of Basque Country and Navarre
Let us go back to other assertions. The results of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests advocated by A. Rosell-Melè are most interesting. Particularly “PISA 2006”:http://www.mec.es/multimedia/00005713.pdf (main subject: Science) which, unlike previous reports in 2003 and 2000 include significant data from ten out of seventeen spanish regions, including Catalonia and other bilingual regions.
The mean score for all Spain was 488±2.6, roughly similar to OCDE mean (491±1.2). The rank of regional scores (and a short description of the educational languages and models of each region) from lower to higher are:- Andalusia (474±4.0 <; monolingual; education in Spanish)
- Spain 488±2.6
- Catalonia (491±5.9 NS; bilingual Catalan-Spanish; education in Catalan only)
- Basque Country (495±3.5 NS; bilingual Basque-Spanish; education programs at least part in Basque (Model B) or fully in Basque (Model D). Model A in Spanish becoming residual, plans to enforce Model D§ as the only model in the near future).
- Galicia (505±3.4 >; bilingual Gallego-Spanish; education at least part in Gallego, plans to enforce a Gallego-only model in the near future)
- Asturias (508±4.9 >; monolingual; education in Spanish)
- Cantabria (509±3.6 >; monolingual; education in Spanish)
- Navarre (511±2.9 >; bilingual Basque-Spanish; so far real choice of education among 4 programs including Spanish-only and Basque-only)
- Aragón (513±3.9 >; monolingual; education in Spanish)
- La Rioja (520±2.5 >; monolingual; education in Spanish)
- Castile and León (520±3.9 >; monolingual; education in Spanish)
(NOTES: >: significantly higher than spanish mean; <: significantly lower that spanish mean; NS: Not significant difference. §: Models are A, B or D, letter C does not exist in Basque)
I should first point out that, in my view, the system implemented in Navarre is the one that best reconciles the needs of parents and students with the promotion of particular languages in bilingual regions.
What these data shows is that, with the exception of Andalusia, all other monolingual regions considered performed significantly better than Spain as a whole or Catalonia in particular. As Andalusia ranks in the bottom in most socio-economic aspects, its score is much improved when PISA results are corrected for these factors (corrected score: 495) and is then similar to those of Catalonia (496) or the Basque Country (497) now slightly lagging behind the Spanish mean (499). The higher scores of all other regions and their rank is maintained after this correction, from Galicia (514) to Castile and León (525).
Now, Navarre is a Basque-Spanish bilingual region that performs significantly well. This is interesting because of the differences with her neighbour Basque Country cannot be easily ascribed to different socio-economic status or language. It is interesting too that, at least in “PISA 2003 tests”:http://www.ince.mec.es/pub/pisa2003resumenespana.pdf, 24% of the students in Navarre chose Basque instead of Spanish to perform PISA tests, versus a mere 15% in the Basque Country sample (Bilingual regions allowed their students to choose between Spanish and regional languages to conduct the test, with the exception of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, where only Catalan was allowed).
In my view, a major difference is that, unlike basque parents, navarres have an effective posibility of choosing the main language to educate their children. So, it looks like the best results are obtained when the educational systems adapt to the needs and wishes of parents and students, rather than parents and students adapting to the caprice of education authorities, independently on the mono- or bilingual nature of the population.5 Fluent in Spanish?
J. Purroy and A. Rosell-Melè boast the “Spanish-language skills” or the “fluency in Spanish” of Catalan students as compared to students from monolingual regions. In this regard, “Pedro Martínez”:http://tinyurl.com/5e6ltj makes a very interesting point namely that, in this year’s “selectividad” (exams that high school students take before entering University) the catalan students ….. had higher scores, in Spanish language, than the average for the country. I have unsuccesfully tried to confirm these data, and I would appreciate obtaining it, yet some factors have to be considered:
First, as shown in the results from PISA tests, there are large educational variations among spanish regions that root in socio-economic differences, confirmed by the differences in the percentage of students unable of satisfactorily “completing obligatory education”:http://www.abc.es/20080904/nacional-educacion/fracaso-escolar-llega-ciento-200809040859.html. So, it might have been better to compare results in Catalonia with those of other regions, including i.e. Madrid, having a similar socio-economic status.Secondly, and more important, this comparison might be a very good checking point if “selectividad” exams, like PISA tests, were all the same around the country and independently scored –which they are not. In fact high school teachers in Spain ,including my children’s, know but too well that there are large variations among regions concerning the difficulty level of “selectividad” exams, and among different correctors in scoring the same exam. A fact that the Deans of faculties from catalan universities complained about in 2007.
I will not go on telling the many cases I have recently known showing the increasing difficulties of catalan youngsters to deliver formal speeches or write assays in Spanish. If my recent, direct experience is of any value, I have to say that a sizable part of the more than twenty mesagges that I have received concerning my recent letter in Nature had coarse syntactic and orthographic mistakes. And I assume they were grown-ups.6 Fluent in English, and more
A recent study shows that, in most Spanish regions, between half and two-thirds of the population does not know a foreign language (“F. Alvira Martín and J. García López Cuad. Inform. Econ. 205, 119–138; 2008”:http://tinyurl.com/64ngkh). But in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, where most of the population understands both Catalan and Spanish, about three quarters of the population can also speak a foreign language (A. Rosell-Melè).Like the data on fluency in Spanish, the data of Catalonia and Balearic Islands in this study might be biased because of the high socio-economic status of these regions. Hence, a comparison to similar monolingual regions (i.e. Madrid) seems to me more suitable to support the point, yet the “link”:http://tinyurl.com/64ngkh is of no help as you can neither obtain the article free or buy it. An independent, quantitative and region-by-region indication of performance in foreign languages would be more appropriate. I suggest that a survey on of performance in TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or the FCE (First Certificate in English), or equivalent degrees in German and French could be useful, although it might suffer from other biases.
7. Last remarks
Amb modestia i amb ple respecte, nosaltres tenim un problema. With modesty and respectfully, we have a problem. And I sincerely believe this problem could be attenuated to a large extent if freedom and respect, rather than linguistic imposition “bordering humiliation”:http://www.elmundo.es/papel/2008/09/09/espana/2489719.html, prevailed in public schools in all spanish regions.
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