Not so much flogging as snogging a dead horse, here is an excerpt from Rafael Miralles Bravo's Memorias de un comandante rojo (1975), quoted by Fernando Díaz-Plaja in Anecdotario De La Guerra Civil Española (previous post), dealing with the brief civil war within a civil war in May 1937:

The 4th passed without incidents other than those already noted. Some Barcelona neighbourhoods found themselves in the hands of the FAI [fairly naive pro-FAI article]. This was the case in Sans, where the Bakuninists had hastened to proclaim a state of communist libertarianism, and at the entry to which, opposite the Plaza de España itself, fluttered a gigantic poster with the following inscription: "Independent Republic of Murcia. Here ends Cataluña. Forbidden to speak Catalan."

Díaz-Plaja adds:

They'd gone too far if you consider that, following the entry of the Nationalist troops into Barcelona, Franco's feared anti-Catalanists had at least guaranteed that "no-one will impede the private and family use of Catalan."

The FAI never got round to declaring Murcian the official language. It just wasn't their style.

[FYI, a quick n stupid Weinreich-based ghit-count suggests that, quantitatively speaking, Catalan is much more of a language than Murcian, but that both pale into nothing compared with Spanish:

]

Tags (experimental automated caching of WP extracts):

• Barcelona (881)
• Catalonia (998)
• Dante Alighieri (12) Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante, was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker.
• Italian literature (12) Italian literature is literature written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy.
• Spain (1423)

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