Ethnic nationalist wolf disguised as multilingualist sheep

The Organització pel Multilingüisme wants the Spanish royals to start using Basque and various other lesser-used languages in official ceremonies. That seems fair enough to me, but what I found interesting is that they only seem interested in languages which are associated with racist or ethnicist nationalism (list is page right, halfway down).

The figures on Ethnologue are highly unreliable - Catalan mother-tongue speakers are overstated by at least 60%, even if you include Valencian - but why should the Organisation for Multilingualism want to include Aragonese (”11,000 or more active speakers”) and Occitanian (none that I’ve ever heard of) when it excludes Spanish Sign Language (”102,000″) and, for that matter, Arabic, Berber and English?

(Interestingly, none of the links on the OpM page work. Is that infantile symbolism or incompetence?)

Trevor @ 9 June 2004 8:02 AM

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