At just 68 years of age, Carme Junyent, linguist, professor of the Department of Catalan Philology at the University of Barcelona and tireless fighter for the Catalan language died this Sunday. A person of imposing vitality who always said what she thought and, wherever she could, presented a strong defence of the Catalan language whether people liked her position greatly or very little. She had that quality, nowadays so hard to find, of an intellectual coherence that overcame any kind of prejudice. Her public discourse was often far from the politically-correct line and although she held different posts of responsibility related to the use of Catalan or endangered languages, her voice was always that of a free thinker and an indisputable figure of consensus.
I met her on several occasions during these last few years and I was always impressed by her wisdom, her strong convictions and her ability to empathize with everything she stood for, which always made her a tireless fighter. Her passion for Catalan and Catalan culture was always present in any of her conversations and she could be counted on for any initiative made related to the language. Her recipe for improving the health of Catalan was apparently simple - that it should always be used and that it be transmitted, the two guarantees for the survival of the language.
As well, she was opposed to the use of inclusive language, which she considered to be of imposed and dishonest use, and embodied her position against the use of gender-neutral neologisms in Catalan like totis in her last work Som dones, som lingüistes, som moltes i diem prou (We are women, we are linguists, we are many and we've had enough), where she stated that the big problem with inclusive language is that, in reality, it discriminates. She thus clashed with the Catalan equality minister, Tània Verge, and Junyent affirmed that inclusive language only involved a modification of the language when what is necessary is to change society. And she repeated that she did not know of any case in which changing the language changed the reality.
The widespread expressions of condolement to Carme Junyent's death as we begin this month of September give an idea of the dimension of her figure and the impact she has had on the political class, despite the fact that she was often an uncomfortable figure for those in power, in the cultural world, in linguistic, associative and academic areas. She lived, expressed herself until her last day and died as a free person, defending everything she believed in and, above all, Catalan.