A new action has been taken just hours before the meeting of the EU's General Affairs Council which is to again consider the issue of granting the Catalan language official status in the EU. The Catalan cultural NGO, Òmnium Cultural, has joined with all of the universities in Catalonia as well as the business organizations, led by Foment del Treball, and the major trade unions to write a joint open letter. "Including Catalan in the list of official languages of the EU would not be a symbolic step, but would have a direct impact on the lives of millions of European citizens", says the text.
The General Affairs Council will meet this Tuesday in Luxembourg and is scheduled to return to the debate on the reform of the EU regulations to include Catalan, Galician and Basque among its official languages, of which there are currently 24. On September 19th, the Spanish government presented the proposal and argued in favour of it, but in the face of the reluctance of several countries, it postponed the decision pending legal reports.
The open letter in favour of granting official status was presented this morning at the key Catalan linguistic institution, the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, with the presence of representatives of all the promoter organizations, to demand that "the member states vote yes to the official status of Catalan in the EU". "This decision will undoubtedly strengthen the policy of recognition of linguistic rights and equality among all European citizens. A decision, in short, that honours the motto that binds us to the whole of European citizenship: united in diversity," affirms the text.
Consensus around the language
The president of Òmnium Cultural, Xavier Antich, who has stressed that they do not expect any other response from the EU than the recognition of the officiality of Catalan, has highlighted the importance of the joint letter initiative, which offers a very significant portrait of the consensus that exists in Catalonia around the language.
He has assured that they have had a positive response from everyone who has been asked to support the text and that the aim was to exhibit a "more qualitative than quantitative" display of unity. "It was immediately received as a possibility to show the muscle of a very broad consensus in this country around the language", he replied.
Full text: Open Letter for the Official EU Status of Catalan
[Dear fellow Europeans,]
We are addressing you on behalf of the universities, economic and business organizations and trade unions of Catalonia, in relation to the upcoming meeting of the General Affairs Council of the European Union at which the proposal to amend Regulation 1/1958 to recognize the Catalan as the official and working language of the EU will be debated.
Catalan, in all its variants, is the 13th most spoken language in the European Union, with more than 10 million speakers, present in three of the EU member states and with official status in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Country and Andorra. Catalan is our unique contribution to European cultural heritage; our own language and one used by millions of European citizens, and also in the academic, business and employment spheres. In addition, Catalan is a fundamental tool for social cohesion and equal opportunities for all people in the territories where it is spoken. However, Catalan does not yet have official recognition by the EU. With your support, we have an historic opportunity to achieve this, strengthening the European Union and its founding values of equality, justice and multilingualism, enshrined in the treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
With this letter, from the academic, business and trade union worlds, we want to share with you what it would mean for Catalan to become an official language of the EU.
Official status is a key legal protection that enables European languages to enjoy vitality and full normalization. We saw this when Catalan became official in the Spanish state in 1978, after 40 years of prohibition by the dictatorship. Thanks to official status and linguistic normalization policies, the understanding of Catalan among the population increased steadily for decades, being able to recover its health and dynamism in education, the economy, the world of work, culture, leisure and in the daily life of millions of citizens. Like many other European languages, Catalan has recently also been affected by globalization, new technologies and new forms of communication. However, as a result of not being considered an official language of the EU, the 10 million Catalan speakers do not find protection in key areas that are increasingly regulated by European institutions, such as labelling, the audiovisual field, technologies, social media and artificial intelligence. In 2022 alone, 47 regulatory provisions were passed with linguistic requirements that meant the exclusion of Catalan due to the fact that it is not an official language of the EU. Therefore, including Catalan in the list of official languages of the EU would not be a symbolic step, but would have a direct impact on the lives of millions of European citizens.
Many languages with a similar number or fewer speakers than Catalan are already official in the EU: Czech, Portuguese, Swedish, Bulgarian, Danish, Slovak, Finnish, Croatian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Latvian, Estonian, Maltese and Irish are part of the club of the twenty-four official languages of the Union, enriching its cultural diversity. This difference in the protection of European languages responds solely to the political will of the member states. For this reason, the regulations have been updated on seven occasions and we have gone from eleven official languages in 2000 to twenty-four today.
The millions of Catalan-speaking European citizens, from our productive and knowledge engines and our civil entities, want to contribute, with our own voice, to the construction of a cohesive, democratic and just European Union that protects its cultural and linguistic wealth, in consonance with our historic European vocation.
We, the undersigned university rectors, economic and business organizations and trade unions, ask the member states to vote YES to the granting of official status to Catalan in the European Union, in line with the recent incorporation of Catalan into the Erasmus+ platform and the bilateral agreements that have been promoted with different European institutions. This decision will undoubtedly strengthen the policy of recognition of linguistic rights and equality among all European citizens. A decision, in short, that honours the motto that binds us to the whole of European citizenship: united in diversity.
Thank you very much,
The undersigned rectors of eight Catalan universities (Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universitat de Lleida, Universitat de Girona, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), seven employers and business organizations (Foment del Treball, PIMEC, Cambra de Barcelona, CECOT, FemCat, Confederació de Cooperatives de Catalunya, Acadèmia del Cinema Català), five trade union groupings (Comissions Obreres de Catalunya (CCOO), Unió General de Treballadors de Catalunya (UGT), Unió Sindical Obrera de Catalunya (USOC), Intersindical – CSC, Unió de Pagesos de Catalunya), and the cultural NGO, Omnium Cultural.