Around 45 minutes north of Valencia, nestled between two mountains, is a town of disputed name. Upon entering the town, some road signs welcome you to ‘La Vall D’Uixó’ and others to ‘Vall de Uxó’. The name depends on the language you use: Valencian (La Vall D’Uixó) or Spanish (Vall de Uxó). This is not unusual in the region; there are many places with two names: Castelló/Castellon and Vila-real/Villareal, for example. The differences are subtle but important for the people who live there. It is even common to see one name crossed out and another written below. But this is rarely an act of seditious graffiti. In Valencia the local government changes the names on road signs from Spanish to Valencian.
Here—like in many other places in the world—language invokes politics, not just identity. Road signs are a part of this political story. The drive to promote regional languages in Spain is, at its core, a continuing backlash against the legacy of the Franco dictatorship. Under Franco Valencian and other regional languages were criminalised. Everyone had to speak Spanish or, as Valencians continue to call it, castellano—the language of the Castilians (an eponym for the region in Northern Spain from which Spanish derives). From 1939 to 1979, criminalisation meant there was no official documentation in Valencian, publication in Valencian was banned, and children were not educated in the language.
While many European states have banned regional languages, Franco’s enforcement was especially vindictive. In general, the speakers of regional languages in Spain (the Basques, the Catalans, and the Valencians) were on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Reminders of this disquieting fact are ever present, even in contemporary Spain. On a hike around the mountains that flank La Vall D’Uixó, my companion—a native of the town—pointed out the remains of the machine gun pits cut into the hill side. ‘For shooting at fascista bombers,’ he told me. In 1939 Franco and his allies defeated the second Spanish Republic, a broad coalition of leftist, centrist, and regional powers. With the war done and Franco victorious, the government punished the coalition by banning all regional languages. It was also a response to the regime’s continuing anxiety about enemies within, whispering sedition in abstruse tongues. Enforced monolingualism was a pillar of Franco’s attempt to create a more hegemonic Spain, devoid of its regional identities.
To police the languages spoken within a territory is a challenge, even for the modern state. The continuation of Spain’s many regional languages, despite the efforts of the dictatorship, speaks to this. Of course, there are instances of state-led language suppression resulting in a decline in the use of a regional language. In the UK, for example, we have effectively lost Cornish and Manx. In Spain, however, 40 years of Franco were not enough to finish off Valencian. Over dinner the wife of my hiking companion told me that, during the dictatorship, locals of La Vall D’Uixó (government mandates enforced the use of the Spanish name) spoke Valencian at home but Spanish in the streets, lest the Guardia Civil arrest them for anti-Spanish activity. Many people in their fifties and sixties, who were children under the Franco regime, speak Valencian as a native language, despite it being formally banned during their childhood. Languages, even when exiled and criminalised, tend to be spoken while people think them worth speaking. In the case of Valencian, I cannot help but feel there was something subversive, maybe even insurrectionary, in the clandestine use of their old language.
Today, there is some distance from Franco and his policies of language suppression. Yet, the push to return to linguistic plurality is ongoing. Spain is a federated democracy comprised of nine Autonomous Communities that, through the rights ensured in the 1978 Constitution and support from the European Union 1992 Charter For Regional or Minority Languages, promote regional languages. This has involved, for instance, ensuring educational institutions teach regional languages, promoting cultural activities, and using the regional language in official documentation—road signs included.
According to estimates by the Valencian government, around two million people within the Autonomous Community speak Valencian; however, there are some complexities to this figure. The challenge stems from a dispute over the status of the Valencian language—a dispute Valencia has with its northern neighbour, Catalonia. Two points of contention relating to the Valencian language and its history exacerbate this long-standing discord.
The first of these is related, once again, to the naming of things. Officially, Valencian is a distinct language from Catalan. Yet, in hushed voices Valencians will concede that their language is practically indistinguishable from that of their northern neighbours. According to the Catalan government, around ten million people speak Catalan across the region (including in Catalonia, France, Corsica, and Valencia). However, the fact that Catalan is spoken by so many people outside of Catalonia means many Valencians question whether the term ‘Catalan’ is even useful. It is not, after all, just the language of the Catalans but that of a broad range of people who inhabit this corner of the north-western Mediterranean. In an act of defiance against the pan-catalanistas, Valencians prefer to consider themselves speakers of Valencian.
A second point of discord comes from standardisation. Catalan, like many other European languages, was standardised during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Valencians, nevertheless, resisted this process in their own region. While I worked in a school in La Vall D’Uixó, I asked a colleague if I ought to learn Valencian. He advised against it; there was no single ‘Valencian’ to be learned. Each town has its own dialect—its own way of doing things. The Valencian of La Vall D’Uixó differs from the Valencian of its immediate neighbour, Villavieja, and that Valencian differs from the Valencian of Onda or Castelló. I come from England, where we are accustomed to a shared, international language, so I asked if this was not strange. My colleague told me that he did not find it unusual. In his mind, the people will always want their own language. It was a local thing. He was surprised when I told them that back in England, we all—more or less—speak the same English.
Valencian is now taught in schools across the region. I worked in one such primary school, CEIP Blasco Ibáñez, named after one of the leaders of the late-nineteenth century movement to revitalise Valencian. However, there are more exigencies placed on educational institutions than merely to teach the local and national languages. The national government has also promised to raise the standard of English spoken in Spain. The Spanish are behind their European counterparts in terms of proficiency in English, so the central and regional governments have made significant efforts to improve the nation’s level of English. From the outside, one could object that there are simply too many languages to teach children. However, I witnessed little pushback against this policy of multi-language education—least of all from the children. I rarely, if ever, faced the inevitable question most teachers confront: ‘Why do we have to study your subject?’ These children, as young as seven, understood that languages matter and that English would open the world to them. There is a snowball effect for the world’s most spoken languages: The more people use them, the more the demand to learn them increases. I was in La Vall D’Uixo partly in response to this snowball effect. The children I taught were caught up in it. The combination of national and local policy means children in Valencia must learn a regional, national, and international language all at the same time.
One might expect Valencia’s politics to reflect the obstinance of its language. In Catalonia, a strong regional sense of identity coupled with a linguistic division means calls for independence from Spain are an important part of the political landscape. Yet, one thing notably absent from Valencia, considering the fervent localism, is a strong nationalist movement. Nevertheless, localism has manifested in support for the politics of anti-immigration. After electoral success in 2023, the far-right VOX party has become part of a coalition that currently leads the local government. It is the first time VOX has gained power in Valencia in the party’s short history.
Initially, a link between localism and support for anti-immigration policies did not seem immediately obvious. When I arrived in La Vall D’Uixó in 2019, the town had become home to many migrants and refugees. The school where I taught had students from not just Valencia but North Africa, Romania, and Palestine, as well. I recall a huge banner displayed over the Town Hall in Castelló that read, ‘Refugees welcome,’ in English. In schools, these new arrivals learned not just Spanish and English but Valencian, too. The rise of VOX with its anti-immigration platform demonstrated that perhaps this seemingly idyllic multicultural situation, where children from far-flung places spoke in dialects inexorably linked to certain towns, was not as widely accepted as I had thought. Evidently, there was something lurking beneath the surface that I could not recognize, partly because I do not speak Valencian.
This inability to understand due to a lack of linguistic skill is a persistent problem for the outside observer. A criticism often levelled at George Orwell’s masterful Homage to Catalonia, a book which details his experience fighting alongside Catalan anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War, relates to his ability to communicate in local languages. Orwell’s Spanish was scratchy, his Catalan non-existent. In other words, he could not meaningfully interact with the local combatants. His book (and most likely this article) contained many misinterpretations and misunderstandings born of the opaqueness generated by the incomprehension of a foreign language. Our ability to understand a place is constrained by our ability to communicate with its people. While a local language strengthens bonds within a pre-existing community, the strongest argument for monolingualism is that we communicate best when we speak the same language.
Yet, I cannot help but feel there is something of value in being able to switch codes, even if the code you switch to is spoken only by a small group of people. When I arrived at CEIP Blasco Ibáñez, the children—to avoid detection in their hijinks—whispered to each other in Spanish. Once they realised that I could understand their castellano, they simply switched to Valencian and gleefully continued in their mischief.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 13: Language.
Cameron Bowman is a first year DPhil student in History at Keble College, Oxford. He worked as an English Language Teaching Assistant in Spain for two years.