Universities demand official status for Catalan, Basque and Galician in the Europena Union
According to the statement made public today by the Vives Network of Universities, the higher education institutions of Navarra, Galicia, the Basque Country and the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain join forces in a joint manifesto in favour of the recognition of their languages. The manifesto was presented to the Council of the European Union.
The Vives Network member universities (one of which is the UAB), the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, the Universidad Pública de Navarra, the Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, the Universidad de Deusto, the Mondragon Unibertsitatea and the Universidad EUNEIZ claim the importance of this step as “a recognition of the EU's own diversity, as well as of its linguistic rights, academic freedom and scientific creation, all of which is specific to the university environment”.
The university rectors give their support to the request made by the Spanish government to the European Commission. The manifesto, which is open to new adhesions, recalls that four out of every ten citizens of Spain are speakers of one of these three languages and that, “together these languages represent more than thirteen million active speakers, above the average of the rest of the official languages of the EU”.
The universities thank the Spanish government for the initiative presented to the Council of the EU and call on the political representatives of Spain to give their support, “in line with the broad social consensus that the language issue has”.
The UAB, with Sustainable Development Goals
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