Acceso usuarios
Joan Ramon Solé i Durany
The Statutes of Autonomy of Autonomous Communities with an autochthonous language other than Spanish declare these languages to be official, together with Spanish. However, most of these statutes state, with greater or lesser emphasis, that the language other than Spanish is the autochthonous language of the respective nationality. These statements enable us to distinguish between the principle or concept of autochthony, the content of which is attributable exclusively to the respective autochthonous language, and the principle or concept of official status, the consequences of which favour this language and Spanish equally. There is a majority doctrinal agreement that the autochthonous nature of the language other than Spanish is derived from its historical character and, in most cases, its generalized use in society. Although it is compatible with co-official status with Spanish, it does, however, exclude the latter from the metajuridical values derived from the historical character and long-established use of the language in the area where the other language is autochthonous. The interest of the doctrinal debate on the concept of autochthony lies in the possible provision of a positive legal content legitimizing measures specifically aimed at preserving or favouring the autochthonous language. A thorough study of this concept has been carried out in order to determine whether the difference between autochthonous official language and official language is or is not legally relevant; this was necessary so that this concept could be used to justify in an objective way the protective norms of the autochthonous language and also to detect any abusive measures used against it or against citizens' rights. Since both the Catalan and Spanish regulations are vague in content as well as in meaning, this study offers a legal analysis of the concept of autochthonous language, and it describes the different arguments presented by the Catalan doctrine dealing with this concept. The starting point of the analysis is the juridical or metajuridical nature of the concept and the possibility of deriving legal consequences from it. The different legal content in both the principle of autochthony and the principle of officiality is analyzed and the minimum and maximum limits for the development of the principle of autochthony are defined. Moreover, on the one hand, a distinction is drawn between the types of norms, based on the principle of autochthony, which have been issued in Catalonia recently and, on the other hand, the study presents the norms based on the principle of officiality and the problems of the legislation in force, especially the Spanish government legislation, where a monolingual linguistic policy is dominant. The distinction this study makes between autochthonous language and official language can be useful for all those people wishing to establish a model of coexistence between two languages in which the autochthonous language of the territory prevails.
