[LINK] "En Catalogne, devenue terre d'immigration, les étrangers s'intègrent par la langue"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Le Monde, Marion Van Renterghem has an interesting article ("En Catalogne, devenue terre d'immigration, les étrangers s'intègrent par la langue" "In Catalonia, a land of immigration, strangers integrate through language") that takes a look at the travails of immigrant parents in the small town of Salt as they deal with a firmly Catalanophone school administration.

A l'école primaire La Farga, à Salt, les réunions de parents sont compliquées à organiser. Dans cette banlieue de Gérone où les étrangers affluent, l'école accueille 80 % d'enfants immigrés (100 % si l'on compte les Espagnols non catalans). Les parents ne parlent que l'arabe marocain ou le berbère, l'une des sept langues de Gambie (bambara, wolof, fola, madega, sara...), le chinois, l'urdu du Pakistan, le roumain, éventuellement le français et au mieux le castillan s'ils viennent d'Equateur, de Bolivie ou d'autres régions d'Espagne.

Les instituteurs, eux, ne s'adressent à eux qu'en catalan. Dura lex, sed lex : dans les établissements publics de la région, l'enseignement se fait exclusivement en catalan (les élèves apprennent le castillan comme une langue étrangère). Lors des réunions, le père marocain tente de deviner quelques mots de catalan qu'il traduit en français à son voisin sénégalais, lequel l'explique en bambara à sa voisine gambienne... "C'est assez bruyant, convient la directrice de l'école, Gemma Boix. En général, ces réunions se terminent dans le langage des signes, ou en faisant des dessins au tableau."

En Catalogne, région crispée sur sa singularité "nationale" et que le succès économique a conduit à devenir la communauté la plus riche d'Espagne en nombre d'étrangers, la cohésion commence par la langue. Le gouvernement de Catalogne prépare une "loi d'accueil" qui prévoit d'obliger les municipalités à diffuser des cours sur la connaissance de la société et de la langue catalanes. Oriol Amoros, secrétaire pour l'immigration, insiste : "Le catalan est la langue de la mobilité sociale. Le parler, c'est un signe de prestige."

Below, my rough translation into English.

At Farga primary school in Salt, parent-teacher meetings are difficult to organize. In this immigrant-attracting suburb of Girona, 80% of the students are immigrants (100% if one counts the non-Catalan Spaniards). Parents speak only Moroccan Arabic or Berber , one of the seven languages of Gambia (Bambara, Wolof, Fola, Madega, Sara...), Chinese, the Urdu of Pakistan, Romanian, eventually French and at best Castilian if they come from Ecuador, Bolivia or other areas of Spain.

The teachers only speak to them in Catalan. Dura lex, sed lex: in the publicly-owned establishments of the area, teaching is done exclusively in Catalan (the pupils learn Castilian as a foreign language). During the meetings, the Moroccan father tries to pick out some words of Catalan which he translates into French for his Senegalese neighbor, which explains it in Bambara with his Gambian neighbor... "It is rather noisy," says the principal, Gemma Boix. "In general, these meetings finish in sign language, or in sketches on the chalkboard."

In Catalonia, an area driven by its singularity as a "nation" singularity with an economic success that has made it the biggest attand that economic success resulted in becoming the community with the largest nubmer of immigrants in all of Spain, cohesion start with the language. The government of Catalonia is preparing a "law of reception" which envisages to oblige the municipalities to organize courses aimed at promoting knowledge of Catalobnian society and the Catalan language. Oriol Amoros, secretary for immigration, insists that "Catalan is the language of the social mobility. Speaking it is a sign of prestige."

The ongoing Catalanization of Catalonia's education system is part of a broader set of language policies maintained for the past thirty years which have had the aim of promoting the use of the Catalan language. These policies have succeeded: Of all of the regional langauges of Europe, Catalan is easily the healthiest with a growing number of speakers and broad use at every level of society. Occitanophones can only dream of having similar status. Incorporating the recent wave of immigrants from beyond Spain does fit with John Rex's argument that encouraging knowledge of Catalan among immigrants so that they can participate in wider Catalonian society is a vital task, just as encouraging fluency in various world languages (Spanish, French, English) is essential for a globalized Catalonia. Here's to hoping for this project's success.