The Cervantes without truce, between the pandemic and the war

The paths of Spanish are so wide and complex that the director of the Cervantes in charge of looking after them looks as soon to Moscow (and how to pay the payroll with the bank blockade of Russia) as to Seoul, which brings as many tourists to Spain as China. The language is alive, and its administration has to follow in its changing wake.

Never has the power of Spanish been so great in the world (as challenged by nationalism at home). But its guardians - the Academy in orthodoxy and the Cervantes Institute in its expansion - have for years been carrying out their functions with diligence, care and a budget that could be improved. Cervantes director Luis García Montero explained the Cervantes' plans at an informative meeting in Madrid, where the word was the protagonist, while Russian weapons silenced the world.

The pandemic was a litmus test for its resilience in its educational activities abroad, and the damage seems to have been cushioned, although the loss of on-site students was high, and so was its direct funding. But like so many other companies, it has been able to jump on the online bandwagon, where Spanish also needs to do battle. 

I remember Ángel Martín Municio, member of the Real Academia de la Lengua and director at the time of the Real Academia de Ciencias, stating that a language is important and survives if it rules in scientific language. García Montero, poet and philologist, knows this very well and seeks to make it so. We must be alert to territorial expansion, to networks and to the sectors that make language important and permanent. For example, in institutional Europe, will the presence of Spanish in the European Union increase with the departure of the United Kingdom and its powerful language? We will have to work on it as hard as the French are working on it.

French - that eternal language of diplomacy - was seen to be in decline in the face of the weight of English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. But while the Hispanic demographic base points to stagnation, African strength and its French hotbeds presage an exponential rise. Cervantes has opened a branch in Dakar and a branch in Côte d'Ivoire. It will have to go further, because this area of migratory flows is crucial for Spain and its language. Nor does it want to lose focus on the large American base, where the largest number of Spanish speakers are concentrated, and it is already beginning to manage the Los Angeles centre in California, which will be based in Hollywood. Cinema is a clear vehicle for the language, and Spanish with a Cruz or Bardem accent is projected all over the world.

The American challenge is crucial, because it is known that second-generation Hispanics are beginning to forget their language because it is English that gives them work. García Montero is clear - in the face of the insulting Trump - that this is not a language of beggars, but the vehicle of a great culture with many accents. 
A welcoming language and a welcoming institution. Like the "Canoa" project, the first word that accepts Spanish of indigenous origin, which aims to be a platform for American languages, as Cervantes already is for the co-official Spanish languages, or even for Portuguese.

Cervantes collaborates with more than a thousand universities around the world, and cares for its 600 million Spanish speakers, helping those who do not speak Spanish to have an accessible and lively language for study, work and communication. The language represents 16% of Spain's GDP and supports at least three million jobs.  This poet-turned-manager knows that "money is the most prosaic thing" when it comes to the cultural industry, and that good state administration is key. But certainly with more funds, at the level of the EU's greats. 

Cervantes must continue to grow because it holds the big key: the external power of a country is based on a strong culture that can be known and enjoyed by the world. The way to captivate and convince others with words, not with weapons. The economic challenges, first because of the pandemic, now because of the war and the boycott of Russia, remain complex. But the Spanish state must be clear that its international investment in the language of Cervantes is the one that can bring the greatest returns for the future back home.