Valencià

Numenius returned from his geospatial conference full of tales about the Open Source work being done by a group of geeks from Valencia and showed me the website for the Generalitat’s (regional government’s) geographic information system, which is very impressive and which is available in Valenciano (or Valencià) , Spanish (Castilian), Basque, Gallego, Catalan, English, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese.

Valenciano isn’t a language; it’s a dialect of Catalan. It’s spoken widely on the eastern/southeast coast of Spain but never was a written language (there is no literature in Valenciano, just Catalan; the de-facto official novelist of the Valencian region, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, wrote in Castilian). The people of the region have more in common culturally with their Murcia neighbors to the south and their La Mancha neighbors to the west than with the clever, proud, progressive Catalans to the north. There’s a certain amount of mutual distrust and disdain. (Not unlike that felt by both the French and the Dutch for the Belgians, for instance, with the prickliness that ensues on the part of the Belgians.)

My sister was married for a while to a Valenciano and lived in Valencia, spending time at weekends and holidays in his village in Alicante. Joaquín’s grandmother spoke Spanish with difficulty but was chatty in Valencià. At the time of the creation of regional autonomies post-Franco, when they married, I remember one member of the enormous lunch party (this is paella country, and no paella is ever cooked that serves fewer than 18 people, because it’s a lot of work and you have to make it count), bemoaning the forced introduction of Valenciano into the school curriculum, because now the schoolkids were going to have to waste their time on the (implied worthless) Catalan authors at the expense of Cervantes, Góngora, Garcilaso de la Vega, Calderón, and the rest. He was grumpy in a particularly jovial Spanish way that involves a lot of shouting and gesticulating over lunch which is amicable and ultimately tolerant. It has certainly stuck with me…

I like it that this language is now in official use by Open Source geekery. It feels fresh, subversive, and very cool. Almost as subversive and cool as the persistence of the medieval (or possibly even Roman) Tribunal de las Aguas, the court held outside the Cathedral on Thursday at noon every week since, that decides the fate of irrigation in the region and punishes those that take more than their alloted share, a court that is presided over by judges dressed in black.