How many languages would you say are spoken in Spain? No, I am not referring to the official ones – Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Aranese – nor the rest of the vernacular ones. I am referring to all those languages that have a permanent community of speakers sufficient to appear in our linguistic landscape or to be taken into account in public policies.
The linguistic landscape may sound like something new to you. And what is that?
“The linguistic landscape is the sum of all the verbal signs that we see in public places, from a graffiti of sports rivalry to an electoral poster, both a commercial sign and a toponymic signage, including the paper that ephemerally warns of something and the signage. parietal of a significant monument,” wrote Lola Pons, professor at the University of Seville, in a separate article on the Andalusian linguistic landscape that we published a year ago. in the magazine Archiletters.
Until a few decades ago, hardly any attention had been paid to the linguistic landscape by language scholars. Now it is one of the essential observatories not only for sociolinguists, but also for experts from many other disciplines outside of language sciences. It helps us to know much better the society in which we live, its plurality and diversity, even its complexity.
Well: in that work, experts from nine different universities led by Lola Pons detected, photographed and analyzed almost two dozen different languages in the streets of Andalusia.
A few days ago, I found another clue about the linguistic diversity of Spain. It was in a tweet (sorry, I still don’t have an equivalent noun in the renamed X network built into my linguistic software). It was a tweet from @ desdelamoncloa, the official government account. “The violence against women hotline is available 24 hours a day, 365 days, in 53 languages,” the tweet said, referring to the number 016.
Permanent service in 53 languages! I got the list, here it goes: “Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, English, French, German, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Romanian, Bulgarian, Tamazight and 39 other languages through a tele-translation service.” And what are those other 39? Some from our closest geographical environment, such as Dutch, Danish or Polish. Others, from more distant territories and from linguistic families that have little or nothing to do with ours, the Indo-European. For example, yullah, which comes from Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali, in West Africa; the tetun, which has its natural territory in East Timor, in Southeast Asia; or Lingala, which is spoken in central Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo.
Two dozen different languages on the streets of Andalusia, more than fifty languages in a state-wide public service. If language is the greatest and best collective heritage of the human being, we have a very rich country in this, without a doubt.
#languages #spoken #Spain
