One argument I hear often is that there’s not much point in learning languages like Galician or Catalan and that you’d be better off learning say, Chinese. In the great scheme of things that might be true enough. But where the argument falls down is when it is put forward by people who live in Galicia or Catalonia, people who may well come into contact with the said regional languages on a daily basis.
It may be useful to learn a language like Chinese these days, if for instance, you intend to travel to China or encounter Chinese clients in your work. But if not, then what is it about learning Chinese that makes it of more practical use?
I merely use Chinese as an example. The same could be said of many other international languages that have a far higher number of speakers than Catalan or Galician does.
The crux of the matter might be, as a student of mine in A Coruña who had no interest in learning Galician observed, “many people in Spain do not think of regional languages as proper ones”.
There are many reasons for this outlook. It is too deep a subject for me to go into here, but chief among them is probably the fact that neither is the principal language of the state.
It’s kind of funny though, when they are co-official languages in the autonomous communities of Galicia and Catalonia. Co-official, yet somehow inferior. And in the case of Catalan, it is more widespread than many people are aware of, being the official language of Andorra, and also spoken in a number of Mediterranean islands (including Sardinia), as well as parts of southern France.
07/03/08 @ 18:40