argia.eus
INPRIMATU
The hell with it! To the hell with it?
2013ko maiatzaren 07a

I have a friend who leads the language services of a village. Day after day, day after day, in the bar of one in the restaurant of the other, to translate this, to adapt it, to make it appear in the fight, in the menus of a Catalan and in the ad of the other. “I wish I had been born in Badajoz (Spain), I wouldn’t have to spend the day fighting!” Similarly, José María Nadal, Pep Nadal, says: “Maybe we’re making a mistake. Perhaps it would be better for us, instead of constantly suffering this cultural anguish, to send everything to waste, to forget, to do what comes, and that’s it!” In the post-coffee conversation these things often appear, we expel them when we are tired, or when they have given us wood. I'd bring Will Kymlicka to the arrangement. In his book Multicultural Citizenship, he says that he does not know that a cultural, or linguistic, identity has disappeared from the world, despite the years of oppression experienced by minority languages. Despite all the atrocities that have been committed to communities that spoke a different language – always, of course, in the name of a homogeneous and cohesive language – even if all the violence has been committed, the languages still live. And, for what? There is a lot of identity because they have a lot of strength. A vital force for community cohesion.