The knowledge needed to be a bellringer has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. What chimes are played for each holiday, to tell the time, when someone has died, for a wedding, for a baptism, for each mass, what would be played to alert a danger, how to take care of the bells...
The 21st century is seeing many traditional jobs get lost. But not the job of the bellringer. Though the bells that tell the time have been automatized, other chimes are still done manually. Many towns have a strong tradition of bellringing and have been passing down their knowledge, but to ensure that no town is left behind, the Guild of Bell And Carillon Ringers of Catalonia is starting the Joanetes School of Bellringers.
Starting in autumn 2023, every Saturday for a year the aspiring bellringers will attend class in the village of Joanetes (pictured above, in Comarques Gironines, Catalonia) and will be able to practise with the village's Medieval church's bell tower.
Sweden saying they'll vote against allowing the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union Parliament because "there's lots of minority languages and we can't allow them all" is so funny because CATALAN HAS MORE SPEAKERS THAN SWEDISH
Catalan is the 13th most spoken language in the EU. It has more than 10 million speakers, which means it has more speakers than other languages that are already official EU languages like Maltese (530,000), Estonian (1.2 million), Latvian (1.5 million), Irish (1.6 million), Slovene (2.5 million), Lithuanian (3 million), Slovak (5 million), Finnish (5.8 million), Danish (6 million), Swedish (10 million), and Bulgarian (10 million).
Neither Galician (3 million) nor Basque (750,000) would still be the least spoken languages to be allowed in the EU representative bodies.
But even if any of them did, so what? Why do speakers of smaller languages deserve less rights than those of bigger languages? How are we supposed to feel represented by the EU Parliament when our representatives aren't even allowed to speak our language, but the dominant groups can speak theirs?
It all comes down to the hatred of language/cultural diversity and the belief that it's an inconvenience, that only the languages of independent countries have any kind of value while the rest should be killed off. After all, isn't that what Sweden has been trying to do to the indigenous Sami people for centuries?
Yesterday, the linguist and activist Carme Junyent died. It saddens me deeply to write this post, because she was someone who I really admire.
She was a linguist who led the Grup d'Estudis de Llengües Amenaçades (GELA, Research Group on Endangered Languages) in University of Barcelona and author of many books and articles about language diversity and the defense of minoritized and/or indigenous languages here and around the world, and a firm defensor of immigrants' language rights and cultural diversity. She was also very active in defense of the language rights of her own community, Catalan speakers, against linguistic imperialism from Spanish and French.
Even in her last moments, she wrote an article about the right to die speaking one's mother language (Catalan in our case) if you are in your own country, instead of the usual case of forcing the patients who are part of the local marginalized and/or indigenous language community (even those in the very last moment of their lives) to speak in the dominant state language (Spanish, in our case). She sent it to the newspaper Vilaweb, where she often collaborated, to be published right after her death:
Carme Junyent recorda al govern que morir-se en català és un dret dels catalans i que l'administració hi té coses a dir i a fer.
She has died of cancer at 68 years old. In her last months, most doctors who treated her in Catalonia's public healthcare system did not speak or did not want to speak Catalan, only Spanish. But she took the decision to keep firm and not change her language, so she could die in her mother tongue.
And as if Catalan speakers already didn't already face enough discrimination in the healthcare system, now the new right-wing government of the Balearic Islands has eliminated the requirement of knowing Catalan (which, mind you, is the native language of the Balearic Islands) for people working in the public healthcare system, hoping to attract Spanish professionals.
Source on IB3.
In the same week, the new right-wing government of Aragon (region that controls la Franja, a Catalan-speaking area, which forms a small minority inside Aragon) has literally denied that there is Catalan spoken in Aragon. People from la Franja already couldn't go to school in Catalan (only Spanish) nor use their language with the administration, among many other instances, but now the new government is eliminating the few help they used to get: they have eliminated the few public funds that were given to help publishing in Catalan in la Franja, and they vow to defend "the Aragonese history and culture, [which are] indivisible parts of Spanish history and Spanish culture, against the interested lies and manipulations of Catalan nationalism". Are these lies and manipulations just us saying that we exist and that we have been here for centuries? They don't say, they just complain against "Catalan nationalists" lies but don't have anything specific to point at, just a ghost to make their voters fearful of Catalan speakers and these nebulous manipulations we're supposedly always up to.
The government also works on "Promoting the languages and linguistic modalities of Aragon, with no interference from any other language. Aragon's own model must be defended against the imposition of Catalan", that means that they want to defend the Spanish language and the Aragonese language (this is new, until now they only cared about Spanish and stood against teaching in Aragonese as well, saying that nobody speaks it anyway) and further stop Catalan-speaking areas from using Catalan in school. They consider that la Franja is Aragon, but la Franja's language is not an Aragonese language. The talk about "imposition" does not share any resemblance with reality, when it's Catalan speakers who have less rights than Spanish speakers, and it's Catalan speakers who face discrimination for speaking their language in their homeland; but for the last few years this rhetoric of "imposition" and "Catalans are attacking us by keeping their language alive and even wanting to speak it in public when we might be around to hear it" has become very popular with the Spanish nationalists.
Source: Vilaweb.
Brace ourselves, the new right-wing governments have just been sworn in, this is just the beginning.
*When someone makes content in Catalan*: "is it so difficult to add the translation to Spanish so that we all can understand it?!"
*When someone makes bilingual content*: "why do you waste your time translating it if Catalans already understand Spanish?!"
And they always conveniently forget that not all Catalans speak Spanish. Catalan-speakers from Northern Catalonia speak Catalan and French (and not Spanish!), Catalan-speakers from L'Alguer speak Catalan and Italian (and not Spanish!), and people from Andorra speak Catalan and don't have to know Spanish. And children of diaspora who live abroad and speak Catalan at home haven't necessarily learned Spanish.
But even then, even if we all did, that wouldn't take away our right to use our language whenever we want.
Vaig començar Sant Jordi arribant-me a la Via Laietana, dissabte, per escoltar algunes de les dones testimonis del llibre Torturades de Gemm
A very interesting editorial by the journalist, political analyst and activist Vicent Partal. I've translated it to English for more people to understand:
The psychological impact of historical violence against Catalans
The time has come to consider the reparation of the historical violence committed by Spain against the Catalans. Because it's a mark that we carry every day and that defines our society and the behaviour of our oppressors.
I started Sant Jordi celebrations on Saturday going to Via Laietana [Spanish military police headquarters in Barcelona -capital city of Catalonia- famous for being the place where the police have tortured many people in brutal ways] to listen to some of the witnesses of the book Tortured. Via Laietana 43. Twenty-two women witnesses of terror (1941-2019) by Gemma Pasqual. They explained, with an exemplary bravery and dignity, how they had suffered in that horror house -under the dictatorship and the democracy. Since 1940 until nowadays. The attendees cut the street, we were carrying banners condemning torture and the torturers as we listened for half an hour to those women's narrations about what they had been through right there, behind those doors, one by one.
It was precisely in one of the most intimate and chilling moments when a man who was walking behind us, precisely through the door of Via Laietana 43 [the police headquarters], dared to shout insults to the protesters, and continued walking in front of the policemen stationed there. It's evident that he did not feel any respect nor interest for those women's experiences, and I assume that he didn't care about everything they went through, all the opposite. But behind his action there was the security and the arrogance of knowing that he would face no consequence. All the opposite: that, if someone tried to get back to him, he had the police there to protect him.
This verification reminded me of a book I read recently with a lot of interest: Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, by the journalist Isabel Wilkerson. The book has had a great impact in the United States of America but also in countries like India, because Wilkerson explains how and why racism works not only in the USA, but also in more places -in the case of India, it talks about the dalit caste. And in what it explains there's a few lessons -because after all, she's talking about oppression and resistance- that are perfectly applicable to the Catalan case.
I'll start with this very Spanish man who insulted us on Saturday. How can there be someone so insensitive?, many of us asked ourselves after seeing his attitude. And Wilkerson's answer is clarifying: "The only way of keeping a group of intelligent people artificially oppressed, below others and below their own talent, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, applied with the intention of stopping them from resisting it, even before they can imagine that they could resist to it." And she explains that this terror, that this violence, is not spontaneous at all, but is fabricated by the oppressors throughout history and they pass it down from generation to generation. She says: "Dehumanizing another human being is not only declaring that he's not human, and it doesn't happen by chance one day. In order to dehumanize a human collective, a very long process, a methodic programmation, is needed. It needs a lot of energy and effort, it needs resources, to accomplish such an antinatural thing as denying that another member of your species is your equal and, thus, denying that he has the same rights."
And with a quote by the sociologist Guy B. Johnson she explains that accumulated historical violence is the key to this oppression process: "To understand the conflict, you must understand that during the years of slavery white people got used to the idea that they could 'regulate' black people's insolence and insubordination through force, without consent and with the support of the law and the state apparatus." Exactly the same as here. And it's as simple as this: for the last 300 years, but very specially during the years of the Francoist dictatorship [1939-1978], Spanish people -particularly Spanish people who live in Catalonia- have gotten used to the fact that Catalan people's "insolence and insubordination" can be regulated through the use of violence and with the explicit support of a law that always is and always will be discriminatory against Catalans and favourable to them, Spaniards.
The security given by decades where this always happens like this, systematically, explains the arrogance and shamelessness with which a passerby is able to walk in front of a group of women explaining that they were tortured right there, in the building in front of them, and, even seeing they're accompanied by hundreds of people, he allows himself to confront them all, him alone, with an insulting shout. Simply, he's psychologically convinced that those insolents and insubordinates will be put in their place by the state's violence, as, in fact -and this is the maximum gravity of what happened in 2017-, the Spanish state did on October 1st [the Catalonia independence referendum, when the Spanish government sent the military police to beat up voters, kidnap votes, and close the voting places to avoid the referendum from taking place] and after the declaration of independence. If today we have the Spanish nationalists encouraged -and autonomists scared- it's because the Pavlov works. We have been beaten again.
In Isabel Wilkerson's book, a calculation catches the reader's attention. She asks in what year will the citizens of the USA have spent as much time having slaves than not having them. And the answer is 2111. In 2111, for the first time, African Americans will have spent as long in freedom -at least theoretically- than the amount of time they spent -and which weights on everyone's consciences, black or white- being slaves. In 2111 maybe African Americans will no longer feel the historical weight that they feel now and maybe -we'll see about that- white people will have gotten used to the fact that they're equal humans, with the same rights. By highlighting this number, Wilkerson explains to what point the past's weight is expressed nowadays and the importance of taking it into account. The way in which it's particularly important among oppressors, who continue thinking that they can do whatever they want with us -and that they have the right to it- and they are not afraid at all, because experience has proven that if someone gets hit, if someone gets arrested, if someone gets jailed, if someone gets exiled, if someone gets tortured, it will be us and not them.
The book has made me reflect and has impressed me a lot because of how it approaches such a deep psychological component of the relation between oppression and freedom. (...)
I'll continue with the example of Via Laietana. The torture witnesses in Gemma Pasqual's book range from 1940, when the Francoist troops had just entered Barcelona, to 2019, during the protests against the Supreme Court's sentence [jail sentence for Catalan civil society leaders, NGO members and democratically-elected politicians for insubordination to the Spanish government because of their involvement in Catalonia's independence movement]. That's 79 years. Assuming that from now on they won't torture again, until the year 2102 Catalans, and particularly those from Barcelona, will have lived as long without being threatened with torture and violence in the Via Laietana headquarters as they have lived used to -and scared of- this torture and violence. And do you think this doesn't matter? That it doesn't leave a mark? That it doesn't condition our behaviour and, above everything else, our oppressors' behaviour?
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