Contrary to the provisions of their own legislation (the Law on the Use and Teaching of Valencian), and ignoring citizen protests, the majority formed by the People's Party (PP) and Vox in Alicante City Council has approved a declaration urging the Valencian Parliament, where these two parties also hold a majority, to make the necessary legislative changes to declare Alicante a Castilian-speaking region. This is a new attack on the Catalan language by the nationalist right, and it is particularly serious, due to its symbolic significance, but above all because it is carried out against the obvious, against reality itself. Education Minister José Antonio Rovira has already demonstrated this with the consultation with families to choose the language in which they wanted their children's primary education: when the result was clearly in favor of schools in Valencian, Rovira, Mazón, and their associates got angry and decided to ignore their own survey. They don't want to listen to the citizens; they only want to stifle public schools and the Catalan language.
What's happening in Alicante should make us aware of a couple of fundamental ideas. The first is that the offensive by Vox and the PP against Catalan is not window dressing, a smokescreen, or a product of political marketing. We may or may not agree that it works well for them as a diversionary maneuver, but above all, it is a political objective and an inalienable ideological principle. If the PP wants to reach budgetary or government agreements with Vox, there are two conditions: one, they must abandon compromises with the idea of linguistic diversity, and two, they must go on the offensive. Far from ceasing to be a source of controversy, the languages of Spain, and Catalan, as always, in particular, have become more politically polarized than ever. Vox says: "We're ending this comedy," and demands the fulfillment of the unfinished project of the Spanish Jacobin nationalist movement: one state, one nation, one flag, one language. The PP, or at least the PP in which the extreme right represented by Feijóo competes with the extreme right championed by Ayuso, is doing well, and the budget agreements recently signed in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands (where the PP had an alternative majority with the opposition groups, but refused to accept it) are in place. The challenge is real, and it is based on a combination of ignorance and hatred—on the part of Vox—and cynicism—on the part of the PP—that could cause serious damage to the language and society, lasting for the very long term.
The other lesson is that what happens to Catalan wherever it's spoken affects us all. The fuss about the supposed death of Catalan, the jokers and the brothers-in-law who suddenly also happen to be linguists, the chest-thumping, the insults, the whining, and the expressions of rage and frustration: all of this will serve little, if any, purpose if we continue to view Catalan as a matter of regional origin. Catalan is, and must be, our mental framework, the linguistic and cultural reality that all of us who speak it share, day in and day out.
