SPANISH CONGRESS AND LANGUAGES

Like the rest of Europe, Spain is the home of several languages. Spanish is spoken by one hundred percent of the population and the rest, which we could label "regional" languages, Aranés, Gallego, Catalan, Basque, and Valenciano, have varied percentages of native speakers, all of whom, as I have already said, have a good command of Castilian, with different accents, intonations, and phraseology, also comparable to different accents, intonation, and phraseology in German, French, Italian and other continental languages. This is nothing to write home about except that, until a few weeks ago, Spanish was the only means of parliamentary communication in Congress since the advent of democracy after the Dictator´death, 1975. Unfortunately, the Socialist government decided to use languages as political weapons, approving a law permitting regional languages to be used in parliamentary procedure, with simultaneous translations into and from Spanish, forcing Aitor Esteban to address the chamber in a language he doesn't command, Basque. He solves the problem by using both: a few sentences in Spanish, and reading another few sentences in Basque. Gabriel Rufián showed his poor command of Catalan, reading a prepared speech. The result is that the government is using languages as weapons to divide and antagonize, divide et impera. The result is chaos and misunderstandings, not counting the large amount of time and money wasted on gadgets and interpreters. Socialists and communists do not give a hoot about regional languages, but they orchestrate confusion using such languages as weapons.