The Popular Party vindicates Spanish in the USA while marginalizing it in Galicia

The language policy of the Popular Party (PP) in Spain is something that could be used to write a volume in an anthology of nonsense.

A campaign against Spanish is news if it is done in Catalonia but not if it is done in Galicia
Freedom defeats social engineering: Spanish is now the most widely spoken language in Galicia

Trump establishes English as the official language of the United States

On February 20, the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ASALE) published a statement in defense of Spanish in the United States "in response to the withdrawal of the White House from the Spanish-language website and social networks." It should be noted that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, with 57 million native speakers. The first, English, has 254 million native speakers.

Likewise, the U.S. Constitution does not establish an official language. Perhaps its framers felt that was unnecessary. On March 1, Trump signed an executive order declaring English the official language, stating: "From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language." The order adds:

Speaking English not only opens doors economically, but it helps newcomers engage in their communities, participate in national traditions, and give back to our society.

Personally, since this is an issue that affects the country's identity, I believe that the ideal way to introduce this official language would be through a constitutional amendment or a law passed by Congress. In any case, it should be up to the citizens of the United States to decide.

The People's Party (PP) asks Pedro Sánchez to defend Spanish in the US

Here in Spain, a few days ago it was announced that the Popular Party has registered an initiative in Congress in which it urges the Spanish government to ask the White House to recover Spanish in its communication channels, claiming that the influence of Spanish in the US is "increasing" in that country.

Meanwhile, the PP is cornering Spanish in Galicia.

The PP's initiative has filled me with astonishment. Currently, Spanish is an official language throughout Spain, by virtue of Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution. Furthermore, in Galicia, Spanish and Galician are co-official languages, by virtue of Article 5 of the Statute of Autonomy of that region. Currently, and after many years of a majority of Galician speakers, Spanish is the most widely spoken language in this community.

However, the PP maintains legislation that excludes Spanish from official toponymy, promoting the ridicule and demonization of Spanish place names in Galicia, as if Spanish-speaking Galicians were foreigners in our own homeland. The official signage of regional and municipal institutions is done almost exclusively in Galician.

Furthermore, the autonomous government, in the hands of the PP, has prohibited the use of Spanish in internal communications within public education, pursuant to a 2010 decree approved by the PP and which, under the title of "plurilingualism", excludes Spanish from these communications in its article 3. Let us also remember that The regional government is developing campaigns to get children to stop speaking Spanish regularly, replacing that language with Galician.

As if all of the above were not enough, the PP has been supporting municipal ordinances that marginalize Spanish in Galicia, and it also does so by ignoring a ruling by the Constitutional Court, 31/2010, which stated that the status of a regional language as its own language "cannot entail an imbalance in the constitutional regime of the co-official status of both languages ​​to the detriment of the Castilian". In fact, the Justice system already declared such an ordinance illegal in 2006, but the PP continued approving them, displaying the same contempt for bilingualism that characterizes the Galician separatists and socialists.

So, in view of that party's double standards, will we Spanish-speaking Galicians have to become US citizens so that the PP stops marginalizing us for using Spanish?

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Photo: Partido Popular. Alfonso Rueda, president of the Galician government, with Alberto Núñez Feijóo, national president of the Popular Party, at a PP rally in Ferrol on May 18, 2023.