Spain’s Lonely Voices: We trace the demise of many minority Spanish languages and look at whether others will survive

Spanish minority languages are edging towards extinction, says SILVIA NORTES

“AS CHILDREN, MY father and my uncle used to play a game where they slapped each other on the head and then they let out a word in Asturian,” said Inaciu Galán, president of Iniciativa Pol Asturianu (Initiative for the Asturian Language), discussing how regional languages were “disappeared” during Franco’s dictatorship. “Only Spanish was used at the school. That turned into self-repression in the family environment. Now, some old people do not want their grandchildren to speak Asturian, due to the bad perception instilled in them as children.”

Spain’s current constitution says Spanish is the official language of the state, and four co-official languages are also recognised: Catalan (in Catalonia), Galician (in Galicia), Euskera (in the Basque Country) and Aranese (in the Catalan Pyrenees). The last two, together with Aragonese and Astur-Leonese, are included in Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. But many more languages of Spain are struggling to survive, including Amazige, Fala, Ceuta Arabic and Romani.

Francisco Moscoso, a Ceuta Arabic researcher, says “this language is in a dangerous situation”, since the administration promotes monolingualism and considers Ceuta Arabic to be “a non-traditional language of immigrants”.

Meanwhile 38% of Aragonese users have stopped teaching it to their children, and the percentage of children who never speak Galician rose from 30% in 2008 to 44% in 2018.

The disappearance of a culture is intimately linked to the disappearance of its language. Many words refer to animals, plants or traditional trades. María Sánchez, a well-known writer, collects these words in her book Almáciga. “It’s not just words but sustainable production models. And sounds: we no longer know the sound of a cart on the cobblestones or the wheel of an old mill,” she told Ethic magazine.

In Unesco’s words, “increased migration and urbanisation often bring along the loss of traditional ways of life and a pressure to speak a dominant language that is – or is perceived to be – necessary for economic advancement”. This was Aranese’s case. The opening of the Vielha tunnel in the Catalan Pyrenees in 1948 brought in tourists and workers from other parts of Spain, which made Spanish the main mother tongue of the area. In 2018, Spanish had become the initial language for 38% of the population while Aranese was for 21%.

The exodus to cities in the second half of the 20th century also made minority languages in rural areas more vulnerable. Most of the speakers of Estremeñu in Extremadura are aged 60 or older. However, associations are emerging to preserve languages and their cultures, such as Nogará Cultural Association, which has been teaching courses in Aragonese for 25 years. Hispanist Beatrice Bottin highlights the case of Basque culture, which uses language as an integrating element through bertsolarismo, tournaments where poets improvise verses in Euskera.