• Blaze (he/him)
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    629 days ago

    The EU pays for translators for Irish, which has less than 2 millions L2 speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language), Latvian with 1.5 millions speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_language), Maltese with less than 600,000 speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language).

    Why wouldn’t the EU pay for Catalan, which has 4 millions of L1 speakers, and 5 millions of L2 speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language)?

    If the argument is “yes, but they are their own country”, then that’s just going to give ammunition to the Catalan independentists.

    • @Obelix@feddit.org
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      229 days ago

      The argument seems to be “please, Spain, deal with your local seperatist movement without pushing those efforts and costs onto us”

      • Blaze (he/him)
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        128 days ago

        The EU pays for translations for a lot of languages with less speakers than Catalan.

        If they logic is to “save money, let’s use another language”, then let’s just drop all of them and just speak English.

        Education in Catalunya is given in Catalan. Some people only speak that language, the same way some Croats probably only speak Croatian.

        Recognizing a language isn’t separatism.

        • Calavera
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          125 days ago

          So they use catalan for “internal” communication and Spanish for “external” ones

          • Blaze (he/him)
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            125 days ago

            Kind of, in a similar way that a lot of European countries use their own language at a local level, then switch to English for United Nations communications: https://i.redd.it/p4d2mv7lnd1f1.jpeg

            Because they can speak English in an international context doesn’t mean that the local language isn’t the dominant one locally.