Talking about language

It must be about time for people to be considering their summer holidays and I bet at least some of you are thinking about a Spanish (Castilian) speaking country. Because of my renowned language skills pals often (well maybe two or three in the last fifty years) ask me if I can provide a few key phrases to help them get by.

My advice is to not worry about phrases in the first place but to spend hours going over the pronunciation pages at the beginning of the phrase book. If you can read and pronounce the word Córdoba when you say it to the chap behind the desk at a railway station you will get your tickets without too much difficulty, if its bocadillo in the bar then your sandwich will soon be with you.

I went to get some fags today. I slipped a little and pronounced the cigar brand Dux as ducks, the man looked quizzical, I said it properly the second time, more like doooks and the fags were mine. Spaniards are nowhere near as tolerant of mispronunciation as English speakers. I'm told it's because they are speakers rather then writers but for whatever reason time spent on those vowel and consonant sounds will pay dividends on your holiday. ¡hasta luego!

¿Parlem Valenciá?

¡Parlem Valenciá! Speak the local Valencian language; it's an exhortation seen on plenty of walls in the Valencian Community which includes the province of Alicante where we live.

The language that most people call Spanish is, more accurately, the language of Castile. It's Castilian that is the home language for 20 countries of the World with the largest concentration of Castilian speakers being in the United States of America. Castilian is the third most popular mother tongue in the World after Chinese and Hindhi though English is still miles in front, numberwise, when additional language speakers are taken into account.

There are four main languages in Spain, all of which are Spanish: Galician, Basque, Catalan and Castilian. There are three variants on Catalan - Catalan itself, Mallorquin (from Mallorca and with other variants in the Balearics) and Valencian. Mind you radical Valencians or Mallorcans would argue that their's is a language not a dialect.

During the dictatorship all the local languages were supressed so as soon as the dictatorship crumbled there was a mad dash to reclaim local identity amongst the Catalans and Basques in particular. Now I'm all for that. Roots are a good thing, knowing where you belong and hanging onto the individualism of communities seems very positive. But these things are easy to radicalise and it is now difficult to find a Castilian sign in Cataluña. Whilst the Catalans used to only give grief to their rivals from Madrid over speaking Castilian it's now more acceptable to many Catalans to deal with me, for instance, in English than it is in Castilian.

I mentioned the Pinoso festival of Villazgo a couple of weeks ago. It's a big tourist event bringing people from all over the place. Some of them may even come from the next province along of Murcia (it is only 3kms from Pinoso after all). In Murcia they speak Castilian. But all the publicity for Villazgo was written in Valencian! There was no Castilian version.

Worse still, for government workers throughout Spain there are tests a bit like the UK Civil Service exams. In Valencia part of those tests include being able to read and write in Valencian. This is a problem for lots of Valencian speakers as it is very much a spoken language with significant local grammatical and word variations. Even first langauge Valencian speakers have to cram for their tests. For a teacher, for instance, with qualifications from Madrid or Toledo or Seville they have to pass the Valencian language test before they can work here.

It seems, to me, utterly ridiculous to abandon a language of World status for a local language spoken by a thousands rather than millions of people and then to make it a requirement for professionals to have language skills that are nothing to do with their jobs.

A blow for the common man

You may remember that I got a bit tetchy with the people who run the website for the Town Hall in Petrer (see Giving Blood, October 2006). I suggested that they might have time to put some dates and details on their events calendar if they spent a bit less time in the bar.

I had a look at their website today for the first time in ages. They've put the dates against all this years events, done a little spiel about them and, where they have the timetable, they've put that in too. I sent them a little note to say what a good job it was.

Villazgo

As there is a post in the February 2006 archive about Villazgo, the festival in Pinoso that celebrates the "divorce" from Monóvar, I won't go into too much detail this time.

We went, along with a couple of friends, to this year's event. We saw the various stalls celebrating the traditions and customs of the area and we had a lot of fun eating our way through local speciality food and drinking our way through local wine.

The dancers are dancing a Jota, the other photo shows the Neighbourhood Association from Culebrón. They were there to fly the flag for our particular village.

Moors and Christians

There have been other posts on this blog about Moors and Christians so, just to say, that the season has started again with Sax's festival from 1 to 5 February. We had visitors with us who were interested in seeing the procession on Saturday despite the torrential rain.

I was very impressed that, whilst we sheltered under the overhang of a block of flats, the participants just got on with it and splashed their way from puddle to puddle. I could understand why the Comparsa whose uniform was a long frock coat and a "Capn. Hornblower" hat, complete with feather, chose to wrap matching plastic bags around their hats.