Between the State and the Charter: The Precarious and Dangerous Situation of the Co-Official, Regional, and Immigrant Languages in Spain
By Nick Ortiz Nick Ortiz is a graduate student in History at The University of Illinois. Nick’s future plans include finishing his research. Nick wrote this blog post in the 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ course in spring 2019. Source: Wikimedia Commons It has been twenty-seven years since the writing of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML) and eighteen years since its ratification in Spain. Since then, the Spanish government has cultivated its own image: one of a country that guarantees the protection of regional languages required by the Statutes of Autonomy in the Spanish Constitution and by the ECRML. However, this image can be deceiving. Every language, even the co-official ones, remain suppressed and marginalized to various degrees in Spain due to the neglect and the weakness shown by the Charter and the central government in Madrid. There are numerous marginalized languages that span across almost every region of Spain: Leonese in Ca...