Languages versus speakers. "The common language in a plurilingual Spain" by Angel Lopez Garcia

Abstract

Taking Spanish as a koine created by Basque speakers and then taken up by Castilian and other Romance speakers, Lopez Garcia (2009) argues that it should be the common language in a plurilingual communicative space, and other languages such as Galician- Portuguese and Catalan/Valencian should be understood by all speakers in that space. But this receptive bilingualism amounts to productive monolingualism in Spanish for most speakers, and the history of Spanish in both Spain and the Americas is not one of a graceful adoption of a koine but one of conquest and hegemony. Alternative proposals are those of Moreno Cabrera (2009), who considers all four languages to be each the national language of its own separate nation, and Marcos-Marin and De Miguel (2009), who regard Spanish as the common and international language and Basque, Catalan, and Galician as ethnic minority languages. It is argued here that, rather than languages, speakers and speakers’ communities of practice should be considered, so that their language choices and needs are taken into account in a multilingual policy. In this way, speakers and speakers’ communities will not be forced to speak another language nor will they be hindered when speaking their own