Acceso usuarios
Xavier Vilhar Trilho
If Spain ends up becoming a federal State, one of the first questions that will come to the fore will be determining what the official bodies signing the federal agreement will be, and, consequently, establishing how many and which the future federated States will be. The possibility of such a federal change in Spain would necessarily entail, according to the author, a clear acceptance of its existing multilingualism. This would imply the proclamation of Castillian, Catalan, Galician and Basque as the official languages of the federal official bodies. Such federal State would have a double dimension: on the one hand, it would encompass the four linguistic communities referred to; on the other, it would be based on the existing Autonomous Communities. The author proposes that the model that should be followed is that of the Belgian Constitution of 1994, which establishes a distinction between linguistic communities and regions. The establishment of the limits of the linguistic communities he advances for the Spanish case should be based on serious philological and sociolinguistic criteria, which should even be included in the writing of the Federal Constitution. Each one of these linguistic communities would have the same number of representatives at the federal constituent assembly, and they would have the power to regulate the use of languages on a federal level. It is not a very credible scenario, but it is even more difficult to sustain that the present State with its autonomous administrations can be "federalized" or "federalizing," or to think that such State, based on autonomous communities, can be federalized without altering some of its fundamental components. In this sense, the goal would be to reach a truly democratic and egalitarian treatment of the multilingual reality existing in Spain.
