Freedom defeats social engineering: Spanish is now the most widely spoken language in Galicia

Galician nationalism has been upset for a few days now by a survey that has confronted it with the social reality of Galicia.

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For the first time, Spanish is the most spoken language in Galicia

On October 11, the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE) published a survey which indicates that Spanish is the most commonly spoken language in Galicia. Specifically, 29.2% of Galicians always speak Spanish and 23.74% speak more Spanish than Galician, compared to 23.99% who always speak Galician and 21.52% who speak more Galician than Spanish. This is the first time this situation has occurred since these surveys have been conducted.

According to the data by age published by the IGE for this survey, Galician only remains the most spoken language among those over 50 years of age, with a special incidence among those over 65. There is one particularly relevant fact: among children aged 5 to 14, 53.67% always speak Spanish, a percentage that is 43.01% among young people aged 15 to 29 years.

The RAG regrets the “decline of Galician”

Faced with these data, the Royal Galician Academy (RAG) has lamented that "in a couple of decades there would probably be no more Galician speakers under 15 years of age, and the decline of Galician would become irreversible." As usual, the RAG blames language policy, even though this policy has been oriented for many years to privileging the use of Galician, teaching the subjects with the most text in schools in this language, excluding Spanish from official toponymy and putting most of the signage of public institutions only in Galician.

A defeat of social engineering

I am a Spanish-speaking Galician and I understand Galician perfectly, which is my second language. I am not happy about this loss of Galician speakers, because it is a language that I have great affection for. In fact, the name of the Spanish edition of this blog is in Galician and I have written many articles in that language, in addition to having a collection of music in Galician that I do not think many who declare themselves nationalists have.

What I am happy about is the failure of the social engineering of some politicians, institutions and organisations, which have been promoting policies for the marginalisation of Spanish in Galicia and, what is worse, the infringement of the linguistic rights of its speakers. Among these organisations I include the three parties in the Galician Parliament: the PP, the BNG and the PSOE, which have linguistic nationalism as their official doctrine with certain differences in nuance. For years they have been treating us Spanish-speaking Galicians as foreigners in our own land and now it turns out that we are the majority of the population of this region.

The RAG's responsibility in the decline of Galician

Among the causes of this decline of Galician is not only the rejection generated by this social engineering. The linguistic engineering carried out by the RAG is also largely to blame for this loss of speakers, as I have been denouncing for years. In 2014 I already pointed out here that the RAG has erased words that are commonly used in Galician, such as "pulpo" (octopus), simply because they coincided with the Castilian form.

Added to this is the RAG's absurd desire to build bridges with the Lusism, changing words that are so commonly used, such as "gracias" (thanks) to "grazas". The Royal Spanish Academy would never have thought of doing something so absurd, but the RAG has favoured linguistic nationalism and an absurd differentiation over the habitual uses of Galician, and this has ended up having a regrettable effect on a social level. For example, those of us who studied Galician in the 1980s learned a form of the language that predates these absurd changes. Today, the youngest learn a laboratory Galician that bears little resemblance to the one their grandparents speak. And all because some geniuses wanted to make Galician more Lusitanized for purely political reasons.

Some 'defenders of Galician' have contributed to mortally wounding it

Paradoxically, during Franco's regime, when Galician was not taught in schools - a discriminatory situation similar to that which exists today in Catalonia with Spanish, with the difference that we are now in a democracy - Galician was the most widely spoken language in Galicia by far. The production of books in Galician was considerable at that time, but not because the Xunta bought them to put them in a warehouse, but because there were many people who wanted to read books in Galician. The linguistic nationalism of the RAG, the PP, the BNG and the PSOE has ended up mortally wounding the language it claims to defend, turning something that for many Galicians was endearing into something that many young people identify as an odious imposition. With "defenders" like these, Galician does not need enemies.

It is the people who have rights, not the languages

Obviously, in a globalized world, Spanish has enormous potential, as it helps us communicate with almost 600 million people. It would be a good argument to prioritize the study of Spanish, but for many years I have been defending the free choice of language. It does not matter that there are politicians who believe they have good arguments to prioritize one language or another in schools: those who should decide the language of schooling for their children are the families, within the framework of the right to freedom of education inherent to a democracy. In other countries with two or more official languages, this free choice exists. It does not matter what the result is in terms of the number of speakers, but rather that they see their freedoms respected. It is the people who have rights, not the languages.

In Galicia and other regions of Spain, many politicians have been determined to trample on this freedom. Well, there you have the result of trying to put barriers to the field: Freedom has ended up defeating its social engineering. A defeat that I applaud, with the pity that the injured party is a language for which I feel great affection and which is not to blame for having such foolish "defenders".