May 22, in Valencia
Start signatures for petition

May 23, 2021

At the end of 2018, the organisation „Hablamos Español“ had collected over 500,000 signatures for a petition demanding freedom of choice of language. For formal reasons, only 455,685 signatures were recognised.

Due to the crisis, Hablamos Español has only now started collecting petitions again. The start was marked by numerous demonstrations and car parades in various cities.

For a long time, it seemed quiet around the issue of language imposition in various autonomous regions of Spain. There also was no more action on this blog.

In fact, there was no calm. The forces in Spain that use the language imposition for their idea of exaggerated nationalism and separatism and that sit in the autonomous governments have done everything to make the Spanish language disappear.

In September 2020, the Villajoyosa town hall decided to use only the Valencian name. A course of action that can almost be called harmless in view of the fact that in many cases the regulations for the Corona restrictions were no longer announced by the health centres in Spanish, but only in the respective local dialect^*.

No matter what one's position is on the Corona laws, whether following Boris Johnson advices or even banning the mask requirement, as several states in the USA have done, it is surely unacceptable that the proportion of the population that speaks only Spanish remains excluded from this highly relevant information.

It cannot be repeated enough that in all the autonomous territories the largest proportion of the population is formed by those whose mother tongue is Spanish.

The fact that in Spain the government's Corona regulations are no longer so harsh now makes it possible to start collecting signatures on the petition again.

* I use the term dialect according to the explanation in Wikipedia: "There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language". I do not want to and cannot make a statement about whether Valenciano, for example, is a Catalan dialect or a language in its own right. Let the linguists take care of that.

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