Why it’s convenient for Latin Americans to say we speak Spanish and not Castilian

Could something similar to Spain’s happen in Argentina, which has just approved a reform of an education law that eliminates Spanish as a “lingua franca for education” and allows regional languages ​​(Catalan, Basque, etc.). ) to learn in schools? Could Argentina have more than one official language like Paraguay (which is bilingual), Bolivia (with 37 official languages) or Mexico (with 68 national languages)? Why is it convenient for Latin Americans to say we speak Spanish and not that we speak Spanish?

Spanish and Castilian are the two names of the language we all speak, Clarín immediately clarifies the linguist and the teacher Santiago kalinowski, member of the Academia Argentina de Letras, but who speaks in a personal capacity. “A certain progressive in Argentina thinks that if you speak Spanish you are touching the sky with your hands, as if he is anti-imperialist and you are defending the people. Saying Castilian to the Spanish language has a negative effect It is very important that if we insist on saying Spanish, internationally, the Spanish name is associated with the country Spain and this is something that we must avoid at all costs, because the reality is that the language does not have to be associated to a country. ”The same could happen to English: it could only be associated with England.

“From a political point of view, the most radical, the most correct thing is to call out all the Spaniards. If there is a Spanish speaker on the coast who says “gurí”, this word comes from Guaraní, when it changes from Guaraní to its Spanish-speaking lexicon, it becomes a word in Spanish. As a political gesture, there is nothing more powerful than this, because from saying Spanish to everything, the priority association that the language has with a country is cut off. And imperialism is that: Linguistic imperialism mainly associates a language with only one of the 23 countries which have Spanish as an official language “, he argues.

And he insists: “The reality is that to tell them Spanish is to give them the ball and prick them to score the goal. It is to pave the way for all sectors in Spain that want an association between the Spanish language and a priority country. For those sectors that we call the Castilian is barbaric, we help them. We bow to his project of linguistic imperialism ”.

Why does Argentina only have one official language?

“The idea that we are one monolingual country and it is a political project, which has to do with national integration, Unitarianism, while the reality is that we are a multilingual country like Bolivia ”, he explains. Kalinowski. “Throughout history, the languages ​​of indigenous peoples have suffered from enormous symbolic and non-symbolic violence, there were real linguistic bans in an attempt to impose the Argentine monolingual project, which was based on the suppression and rejection of the other. The Argentinian model was supposed to be an Argentinian of certain characteristics, who spoke Spanish, who suffered from shocks because a quarter of the population at the beginning of the 20th century was an immigrant ”.

In other words, in the light of the ideas of the French Revolution, according to the linguist, “Creole projects are becoming Europeanized and this implies a crushing of their own identity. But languages ​​are not prohibited, although violence and trauma can be exerted. There are generations who choose not to learn their languages ​​or speak to them in a certain language to avoid stigma who wears it, as is the case today in the United States with Spanish-speaking immigrants who do not speak Spanish to their children so that they do not speak it, because it is a disadvantage. Linguistic violence is always on the person, because languages ​​are not in the air, but in people, they are people. Violence against language is violence against people ”.

And, precisely in this sense, what is happening in Spain is that the other languages ​​which are not listed as “official” have not weakened, as they have done in other countries like Italy, France and even Argentina. “At one point – the researcher goes deeper – a small piece of Spain said that our language is everyone’s language, it is a strong, powerful and violent imperialist gesture. But this is their fight. Our reality is Latin American and it is another, with our inequalities and the violence we have exercised against indigenous peoples. This is historical violence, which is located under the aegis of “monolingual Argentina”, which, at the time, gave shape to the national project “.

Pc