In the tiny village of Martimporra (population 16), nestling among the lush green hills and valleys typical of Asturias, Orfelina Suárez, 58, runs a household goods shop.
“If I was only allowed to speak Spanish I’d struggle with some vocabulary because I’m used to speaking Asturian,” she says.
“Without Asturian, life around here would be impossible. It’s not about geography, it’s more of an emotional terrain. You can’t underestimate the importance of a language that you speak and live and feel.”
Martimporra is in Bimenes, a district where the Asturian language has officially enjoyed equal status with Spanish since 1998. Now the regional government proposes to extend this language parity throughout Asturias.
Basque separatists laid down their arms more than 10 years ago and with the Catalan independence movement currently running out of steam, it seemed that Spain, a nation state at risk of unravelling along regional and linguistic lines, had stitched itself back together. But national unity could face its next challenge from this small and mainly rural region best known for its dairy products, cider and, until recently, coal mining.
In October, up to 10,000 people marched through Oviedo, the Asturian capital, to demand an upgrade for the region’s language.
Just how many of Asturias’ one million inhabitants speak Asturian daily is a moot point. Any Spanish speaker would find it easy to understand.
While it has grammatical differences, many common verbs are either the same or vary only slightly: hacer (to do or make) is facer in Asturian; hablar (to talk) is falar. Many nouns differ only by a letter: harina (flour) is farina in Asturian; gato (cat) is gatu.
As a spoken language, many argue that Asturian is little more than a Spanish dialect. But then, as others may counter, a language is simply a dialect with an army and navy.
Spain already recognises four co-official languages – Catalan, Euskera (Basque), Galician and Aranés – each sharing equal status with Spanish in the region where it’s spoken. If Asturian joins their ranks, the other minority languages of Aragón, León and Extremadura, as well as the Spanish Gypsy languages Caló and Erromintxela, may demand similar treatment in a Spanish state already fractured along linguistic fault lines.
Xosé Antón González is the president of the Asturian language academy, which has produced the standardised form of Asturian that will be implemented should the regional parliament vote to make it co-official. He says that Asturian is a language in its own right.
“We’re realists,” he says. “We don’t have a problem with bilingualism. We know that Asturian is a small language that belongs to a small community of one million people and that Spanish will continue to be the main form of communication with the rest of the world. But without the sort of protection offered under the constitution it can’t survive.”
Berta Piñán, the Asturian culture minister, argues that making the language co-official simply asserts speakers’ rights under the constitution. From that point on, “Asturias will be able to design its own language model based on rights rather than obligations”, she says.
“Making it co-official is the only way to guarantee our freedom to express ourselves in Asturian,” says Inaciu Galán, an Asturian language activist who has compiled an Asturian-English dictionary.
However, some Asturians fear the language will become politically weaponised, as is the case with Catalan, Euskera and, to a lesser extent, Galician.
“It’s very sad the way it’s been politicised,” says Álvaro Queipo, secretary-general of the conservative People’s party in Asturias. “Now there is no debate, just emotion and posturing, dividing Asturians into the good, who want to make the language co-official, and the bad, who don’t.”
González argues that language is a more fraught issue in Spain than in other European nations because Spain lurched from absolute monarchy into 40 years of fascist dictatorship with only a brief democratic interlude. A uniform idea of the nation was imposed without any recognition of significant regional differences. The other issue is nationalism.
“The reason we have linguistic conflict in Spain is because the nationalists are linguistic nationalists, as in Québec,” says Mercè Vilarrubias, a linguist and advocate of bilingual education.
Language, she says, is a means for regions to assert that they are different from the rest of Spain. She speculates on what could happen if the Spanish state gave these languages prestige nationally, beyond the areas where they are spoken, which is what Canada has done with French.
Instead, Spain’s other co-official languages are invisible outside their regions and face an increasingly vocal, one-nation Spanish nationalism led by a resurgent neo-fascism not seen the end of the dictatorship in 1975. The far-right Vox party, vehemently opposed to minority languages, has produced a billboard campaign depicting the Asturian president kissing a language campaigner under the slogan: “They’re trying to stick their tongue in you.”
On the other hand, Vilarrubias says, once a language becomes co-official, nationalist governments can try to marginalise Spanish and use language as a separatist tool.
This is what is behind an ugly dispute in Canet de Mar, a seaside town north of Barcelona, where a family complained of harassment and abuse for seeking to have their five-year-old son taught at least partly in Spanish. Insisting on the right to be educated in Spanish as well as Catalan is viewed by nationalists as anti-Catalan, even though more than 50% of Catalans claim Spanish as their mother tongue, compared with 36% for Catalan.
The resurgence of linguistic regionalism seems to undermine the process through which many of Europe’s nation-states emerged in the 19th century. Language standardisation was a used as a unifying factor, for example, in the creation of the Italian state in 1871.
In recent decades, however, language has been used as a justification for separation, not unity.
The European Union encourages the protection of minority languages – other than its 24 official languages (Irish only moved to official status on 1 January) – following the conviction that linguistic diversity is a social good.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, adopted in 1992 by the human rights body the Council of Europe (which has 47 member states), recognises 60 minority languages spoken by 50 million Europeans, 10 million of whom are Catalan speakers. The charter does not provide any definition of what a language or dialect is.
Scots, which many see as a dialect, is recognised by the UK in the charter, but Italy doesn’t recognise its numerous regional dialects as languages, although it does list 12 languages aside from Italian, among them Catalan, Albanian and Sardinian.
“Dialects [in Italy] are not a political issue in the way the minority languages are in Spain,” says Anna Cozzolino, a Neapolitan resident in Barcelona whose dialect includes words of Spanish, Catalan, French and Arabic origin.
“They survive because they’re spoken at home and in the street. Growing up in a middle-class Neapolitan family the local dialect was seen as vulgar but now people take pride in speaking it.”
Asturian language campaigners want to keep the language alive by ensuring it is taught in schools. But the main motivation behind the drive to extend co-official status is to raise its profile and use in public life.
Even in Catalonia, where a system of immersion ensures that everyone is fluent in Catalan, studies show that young people increasingly prefer to speak Spanish. This is partly because the internet and social media have further empowered Spanish and English, while doing nothing to stop the perception among many young people that Catalan is uncool.
Immigration is also a factor. About 1.3 million of Catalonia’s 7.5 million inhabitants are immigrants with little or no stake in the nationalist discourse. Around a third are Spanish speakers from Latin America, but others, such as Moroccans, tend to also speak in Spanish, partly because Catalans don’t speak to them in Catalan, thus reinforcing the impression among many immigrants that Catalan isn’t for them.
In the Basque country, where the educational options are 100% Spanish, 100% Euskera or a mix of the two, about 70% opt for Euskera, while immigrants are more likely to choose Spanish. About 750,000 of the Basque country’s 2.1 million inhabitants speak Euskera, an increase of 233,000 over 25 years which is an extraordinary achievement for a language that, unlike Galician and Catalan, is not part of the Latin family of languages.
“There’s a lot of talk about language rights,” says Rafa Arenas, an Asturian who teaches law at the Universitat Autònoma in Barcelona. “The question is, does a language have a right to have people who speak it, or is about people’s linguistic rights?”
González argues that, when a minority language is lost, we also lose a way of understanding the world. “This leads to uniformity which I don’t think is good for humanity. It’s our language and our culture and we still have time to save it. It’s my mother tongue.”
Aníbal Martín, who is campaigning for Castúo, which is spoken in northern Extremadura, to be made co-official, agrees. “There’s a consensus that we need to conserve our material heritage – a Roman bridge, for example – and language is part of the heritage you carry within yourself,” he says. “Abandoning a language means abandoning part of who we are.”
Back in Martimporra, Orfelina Suárez is perplexed by all the fuss.
“I don’t understand why wanting to preserve a language could be so controversial,” she says. “Just because we stand up for Asturian, it doesn’t mean we’re politically motivated. It’s the politicians who politicise language.”
