Skip ahead to the 12 minute mark if you want to avoid Chomsky's pro-communist hobbyhorse about Cuba and Russia. At minute 13 he starts talking about language.
"The prestigious American linguist, Noam Chomsky,
uses Catalonia’s efforts to revive a threatened language as an example
of the struggle of a people against state imperialism. Chomsky made the
point last month in a "Talk to Google" conversation at Google's offices
in Cambridge, MA, in which he pointed out that Catalonia will hold a
referendum in order to decide between autonomy and independence. The
conversation had slipped under the radar until the daily Ara reported on it today.
"There's
a referendum coming up in Catalonia, another one in Scotland, asking
about autonomy or independence. That's dissolving the European state
system, something that has just been going on for a while, and
reconstructing the languages.
"I visited Barcelona in the late seventies. You couldn't hear a word
of Catalan. It was spoken, but in secret, because under the
dictatorship, which the US backed, it was barred. Ten years later, if
you go to Catalonia, all you hear is Catalan. It revived. The Basque
language has revived. Other regional languages are reviving. If you walk
around Wales, kids that are walking out of school are talking Welsh.
Things like this are happening. The ?? achievement was unique. But it's
kind of a natural development, I think that should be stimulated myself.
"We should recognize that there is enormous loss when the cultural
wealth of a society disappears and that's encapsulated crucially in its
language."
Read more...
(Src: VilaWeb - News from Catalonia)
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