On 27 June 2024, the Valencian courts passed Law 1/2024, an act ‘regulating educational freedom' that gives families greater choice between Valencian and Castilian as the base language of instruction in schools. Though presented using the rhetoric of freedom of choice, many have seen the act as ‘an offensive against Valencian, the territory's own language', explains Rafael Castelló Cogollos in L'Espill. The law, he argues, belongs to a centuries-old ‘genealogy of policies' aimed at ‘dispossessing the Valencian people of their right to exist fully in their own language within the Kingdom of Spain'.
Castelló argues that the commodification of Valencian strips it of its value as a tool for communication and collective life, turning it into ‘symbolic capital' with little exchange value in a globalized labour market, where English and Castilian are portrayed as people's real ticket to future job opportunities. Working-class families thus risk being priced out of their own language, choosing Castilian ‘not out of conviction but out of a need for survival'.
Drawing on Foucault's concept of neoliberal governmentality, Castelló shows how responsibility for protecting Valencian is shifted from the state onto families and schools, transforming the citizen into ‘a homo œconomicus who chooses language based on calculations of individual economic gain'.
Valencian is facing ‘extinction through neglect' as resources and institutional support are withdrawn. Yet resistance remains alive through educational self-organization, digital content and campaigns for linguistic rights. For Castelló, securing the language's future ultimately requires rebuilding ‘the material and institutional conditions that make a dignified life in Valencian possible'.
Literature and dialect
To write in dialect, or not to write in dialect? That is the question Juli Capilla explores in this wide-ranging piece on dialectal forms of Catalan in contemporary literature. Far from being a vehicle of separation or linguistic impoverishment, writing in dialect can strengthen a shared language: ‘Difference – including dialectal difference – not only enriches us but makes us stronger.' This is particularly important for Catalan, since embracing variation makes ‘a minority language larger, geographically and demographically'.
Yet such diversity requires contact. Capilla laments the ‘watertight compartments' separating Catalan-speaking territories, with Spain's autonomous communities functioning ‘as dams holding back waters made of words.' Even Catalan-language television often fails to cross regional borders, limiting speakers' exposure to neighbouring varieties.
Drawing on a wealth of lexical and phonetic examples, Capilla shows how dialects can, paradoxically, reinforce linguistic unity. The traditional division between eastern and western Catalan is far from absolute, and its many ‘leaks' reveal unexpected similarities that facilitate mutual intelligibility.
Capilla then turns to literature and translation, examining how dialectal differences are variously smoothed out or deliberately thrust centre stage. All writing is ultimately an artifice, he argues, but writers and translators have numerous ways of creating credible regional voices, from highly dialectal prose to balancing colloquial speech with the standard language. Capilla welcomes this coexistence of literary models. The challenge is knowing where to draw the line: ‘the real danger lies in failing to recognize when one has gone too far in either direction.'
Catalonia's golden age
Catalan nationalism has long invoked the splendour of the Middle Ages, with its iconic Romanesque churches, Mediterranean conquests and the prestige of Catalan as a major European literary language. Yet today, historian Paul Freedman notes, the sheen of Catalonia's medieval golden age seems to be fading. Instead, ‘justifications for throwing off the Spanish yoke focus on grievances concerning economic exploitation, political oppression and cultural contempt on the part of the central government in Madrid.'
In a broad sweep rich with historical examples, Freedman charts Catalonia's emergence as ‘a political and cultural reality': from its de facto independence from Frankish rule and the expansion of the Crown of Aragon to Bourbon centralization, Francoist repression and the resurgence of Catalan nationalism in the twenty-first century.
After the ‘heady final two decades of the twentieth century', marked by democratization, prosperity and greater autonomy, came growing disillusionment with Catalonia's place within Spain. Yet arguments for independence have largely ceased to evoke ‘the centuries when Catalonia was genuinely an independent nation and Barcelona dominated the waters of the western Mediterranean'.
Why this eclipse? Freedman points to declining interest in history and the humanities, waning Catholicism and a changing society increasingly disconnected from its rural and religious past. There is also a deeper discomfort: ‘the Mediterranean empire of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, glorified during the Romantic era, now looks more like colonial expansion.' As Catalonia confronts declining habitual use of its language, Freedman ultimately asks whether the past can still provide answers to the dilemmas of the present.
Comparing genocides
Between 1904 and 1908, the colonial army of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia, massacred the Herero and Nama peoples through indiscriminate killing, forced displacement, starvation and internment in concentration camps. Germany officially recognized these atrocities as genocide in 2021.
In the wake of the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, scholars have increasingly compared the destruction of Gaza with earlier genocides. For Pau Viciano, the Herero genocide ‘would thus be not only a precedent for the Nazi extermination of the Jews but also one that bears similarities to the destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza'.
Viciano dissects these similarities – and the arguments wielded to reject them. Those who deny that Israel represents a form of settler colonialism contrast the supposedly legitimate Herero uprising with Palestinian ‘genocidal terrorism' and argue that, unlike the Herero genocide, Gaza lacks an explicit extermination order demonstrating genocidal intent.
Viciano challenges each distinction. Nationalism and colonialism, he argues, are not mutually exclusive; violent resistance cannot be divorced from the conditions of domination that produce it; and genocidal intent need not be committed to paper. Extermination and expulsion can instead operate together, with mass violence making a territory uninhabitable and clearing the way for settler expansion.
History never repeats itself exactly, Viciano concludes, but comparison can expose disturbing continuities. ‘Compare, and you will begin to understand', as the great Catalan writer Joan Fuster put it.
