When I came to Spain, talk of immigration actually meant talk of emigration: of internal migration, especially in the 1960s, of Spanish guest workers in Germany, Republican exiles in France or Mexico, and economic migrants to Argentina or Chile. Now immigration means newcomers to Spain, who make up about 12% of the population. Immigrants brings skills that exporters need. By speaking Russian, Chinese, Polish, or Urdu to their children, they are passing on language skills and cosmopolitanism. Those skills are desperately needed. Language teaching is poor in Spain, and attitudes towards language learning contradictory (as reported in the following story from last Friday's La Vanguardia):
About six years ago I met a highly educated Russian woman at a central Barcelona playground. She was speaking to her daughter, who might have been four, in lightly accented but fluent Catalan. (Her Catalan was better than the Catalan premier's, but that's another post.) She told me that she'd been told, by a teacher at a public school, to give up speaking to her daughter in Russian. Her daughter will have no access to the Russian language in the public educational system until she enters university.
Here comes the unfair part. In polities whose experience of immigration is long and intense, policy makers know enough to use public schools to preserve immigrant languages. Heritage language teaching, as its known, can mean a dual-language school-day in New York, in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean and French. In Toronto, free after-school classes are on offer in fifty languages, from Danish and Armenian to Marathi and Yiddish. Is it fair to ask Barcelona to mimic New York and Toronto? I suppose not, but it is necessary. If Catalan policy makers wake up to the potential of their young charges in time, the Catalan economy will stand a better chance of finding its niches and prospering. If they allow their teachers to discourage trilingualism and do nothing to raise awareness of the importance of heritage languages, a vital opportunity will have been lost.
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