8. The National Pact for the Catalan Language, which is still in the drafting phase,
includes different types of social participation, such as the diagnosis of a group of
specialists and the open participation of citizens.
a. Through this participatory process, more than 2,600 proposals have been
collected. These proposals have been integrated into the initial draft of the
National Language Pact.
b. This draft will be submitted to debate and will end up becoming the final text of
the agreement.
9. The National Pact for the Language highlights some of the main challenges for the
survival and progress of the Catalan language and it can be inspirational for the Universal
Declaration that has brought us here today. Let me summarize some key ideas:
a) First: The legal minorization of languages can lead to a violation of the rights
of speakers. For example, making the state language mandatory in stateless
nations such as Catalonia, while their own language—in our case, the Catalan
language— implies the facto a systemic erosion of the status of the minority
language that violates our national rights. Equality is needed in the legal
frameworks between the nations that constitute a state in order to prevent
systemic violation of linguistic rights.
b) Second: When speakers of minoritized languages cannot access public
services (health, justice, etc.) using their language because the system is built to
preserve the monolingualism of dominant groups, the rights of speakers of
minoritized languages are not protected. Adequate protection of linguistic rights
requires certain obligations on the side of, at least, public administrations. If the
State and the dominant linguistic groups do not accept these obligations, the
rights of the speakers of minoritized languages end up vanishing.
c) Third: The digitization process is leading to a weakening of the protection of
minoritized languages through de-territorialization. Thus, for example, many
administrative procedures that were previously carried out face-to-face in
Catalonia are being substituted by telematic services in Spanish-speaking
territories. And this kind of substitutions are not usually accompanied by
multilingual telematic services.
On the contrary, the operators argue that they do not offer their services in
Catalan because they work for a Spanish-speaking. The legal instruments for the
defense of stateless nations must be rethought so that they also include the right
to access to public services in their language. d) And finally, let me stress the risk
of loss of audiovisual space and digital diglossia. The minoritized linguistic
communities and the stateless nations like Catalonia notice that higher authorities
that discriminate against them are the ones regulating the audiovisual space. If
the audiovisual sector is today responsible for collective imaginaries, and
collective imaginaries are central to the protection and survival of collective
identities, the audiovisual must be plural and include all languages.