Carme Junyent: "There have always been languages that die, but not at the speed and amount it's happening now"

Carme Junyent, who remembered the UB lecturers Jordi Matas and Marc Marsal, members of the 1-O Electoral Syndicate and for whom the prosecution service requests two years and nine months in prison, started her speech linking dialogue and identity. Regarding the relation between language and identity, she noted “When people want to recover a language, they are not asking for a communication system but a system of identification”. She also noted that, unlike other systems of identification, language is “accumulating, and mostly, tangible: when language is not visible people can doubt who you are”. “Since it is accumulative, that is, we can learn all those languages we want without having to forget other languages, it is a system that prepares us for cooperation”, she said.

Junyent, Africanist and director of the Study Group on Threatened Languages (GELA) of the UB, analysed the situation in Catalonia from a global perspective and talked about the homogenization process some languages are going through as well as how fast they are disappearing. “This can happen to us”, she said, and then asked: “What would we be without our language?”. She explained how African literature has disappeared and has been replaced by a group writers of diaspora who talk about Africa like non-Africans would: “They are not producing African literature, they talk about African literature”. Therefore, if our language disappeared “we would not be people to talk to, but people others would talk or write about”. “They would talk about us and not with us”, she concluded.

After the conference, the journalist from La Vanguardia and editor of the newspaper stylebook, Magí Camps, who chaired the activity, gave way to the debate, which counted on the participation of the lecturers Albert Branchadell, from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, M. Teresa Cabré, from Pompeu Fabra University, and Francesc Xavier Vila, from the University of Barcelona.

M. Teresa Cabré, president of the Philology Section of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), reflected on the role of academies like IEC. She highlighted the different realities of the Rotal Spanish Academy and IEC, which needed an important task of language cohesion and recovery of what could not be done in previous periods. Cabré claimed that academies can be an element to help shaping the language identity “provided that the attitude to implement language models is tolerant, permissive and puts emphasis on the variety of registers and dialects”.

Francesc Xavier Vila started his speech remembering the function of some languages when defining reality: “We seize reality thanks to words, in some sense”, and then he gave as examples some insults that were used in the conflict between Catalonia and Spain. He said those insults “reflect the need to deny any legitimacy to the interlocutor”. And he noted there is a “mystical and religious view” that Spain is unable to dialogue.

There will be two more debates that will treat the Catalan conflict from different perspectives:

• "El model dʼescola catalana", conference by Professor Joan Mateo, from the Department of Methods of Research and Diagnosis of Education of the UB. December 13, 2018, at 6.30 p.m. in the Historical Building. 

• “La política: lʼespai de resolució dels conflictes”, conference by the emeritus professor of Political and Administrative Sciences in UAB Josep Maria Vallès. January 17, 2019, in the Historical Building.

Each session consists of a conference given by a prestigious academician, followed by a roundtable on the topic of the conference. The debates and interventions will be published in several volumes of a new collection by Editions and Publications of the UB: Debats UB.