The fifth section of the administrative disputes chamber of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has just issued a judgment in which, in response to an appeal filed by the Spanish ministry of education, represented and directed by the state's Solicitor General, it has established that a minimum of 25% of teaching in the Castilian language in Catalonia must be guaranteed, in addition to remarking that the use of this language is residual.
It is not the first time that the TSJC has made pronouncements on the subject and I have a great fear that it will not be the last, because for decades the Catalan educational system has been a target for the most rancid Spanish nationalism, with its obsession about eliminating Catalan language immersion from schools, a model of successful social harmony in society and in the classroom, and which, in practice, has allowed Catalan to resist as a language at a time when its decline is quite evident, however you look at the statistics.
This week, the language pressure group Plataforma per la Llengua has stated that the situation is a linguistic emergency, as although an ever-increasing percentage know how to speak and write in Catalan, and more than 90% of Catalans understand it, the social usage of the language, far from consolidating, is moving backwards. You just to take a look around schools to see that this is so, where the playgrounds provide a good example. Castilian has won the battle as the language of conversation among young people and, consequently, there is a very anomalous situation: students receive class mainly in Catalan and this finishes when the bell rings, and they switch automatically from one language to the other and Castilian ends up prevailing.
On this route, Catalan stands to lose everything, because there is no social awareness of a need to use it and it could end up being an academic language and little more. The fact that, in this situation, there is ministerial and judicial concern to increase the hours of Castilian in the classrooms is clearly contradictory, and that the Solicitor General, or the Spanish government, directs the offensive of the ministry, is odd and should be noted. There is no possibility that students will not learn Spanish, as evidenced by surveys carried out in different autonomous communities in which Catalan students do not fare at all badly in comparison with other parts of the Spanish state.
If this is the case, why the insistence? It is obvious that the strategic corpus of the deep state is not just to put an end to the attempts of a new popular revolt for independence like that of 2017. It is also to put at risk Catalan identity by cutting a path that uniformizes all that it comes across. And in this, the Catalan language and culture are always differentiating elements and until a few years ago were even the glue which bound together certain national demands. Combating Catalan by whatever means is the ultimate objective of a Spanish establishment which has before its eyes a destruction of regime which is unparalleled in Europe, with judges and soldiers having become permanent political actors and setting the news agenda every day. The most dangerous part of all is that the discourse of the right wing has taken root and parties that previously strongly defended the Catalan language are today doing their best to look the other way. And this is not good news, because, in a normal country, the language should be everyone's business.