The Power of a Language is the Power of those who Speak it.

 The Power of a Language is the Power of those who Speak it.

By Alberto Buela

taken from: http://articulosforoarbil.blogspot.com/2013/07/el-poder-de-una-lengua-es-el-poder-de.html

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

When we speak about languages and about tongues, topic about which there are thousands and thousands of written works, we are conscious that the teaching of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who said that each language fosters its own thinking scheme and its own mental structures, is still current. Tell me in which language you express yourself and I will tell you how you see the world.

Thus, speakers model a language, and language models the mind projecting a model of thinking which acquires its maximum expression in national or regional identities. In the case of Spanish, this is the expression of some twenty consolidated national identities. 

But the language is not the one learned, it is not the second language. Language as source of power is the one assumed existentially. In this way we can understand why, the French-speaking countries being 56, but only 22 the Spanish speaking ones, Spanish has a greater international weight than French.

This is because, of 56 French-speaking countries, only three or four have vitally assumed French; the rest use it as a matter of convenience, in general, to request credits from the metropolis.

Something similar happens with English, but in a smaller degree because the weight of population is greater (USA, England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand), no matter that most of the countries which have declared English as their official language, 59 in total, actually use numberless other local languages, which reduce the expression of what is national in English. For example, in Nigeria, 521 languages are spoken. Or in India, in what does the English language express the national identity? In nothing.

Then we assert that a language is an instrument of power when it is assumed existentially, otherwise, it is a simple communications vehicle, as is English in airports.

In this sense, Spanish, as a Western language, has an infinite advantage with respect to English and French. Since aside from it surpassing English, its greatest competitor, in over one hundred million speakers, it has the infinite advantage of being the official language of twenty-two nations.

If we add to that the linguistic proximity of the Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, et al) a critical mass is formed of 800 million people which can communicate among themselves without any great effort and, what is of greater importance, with similar mental structures. 

This is not a joke, nor an anecdote, it is a geopolitical fact of crucial importance to understand the current world in profundity,

It is incomprehensible how, of 31 States (22 Spanish speaking and 9 Portuguese speaking), there is not at least one which follows an international policy of defense of the Castilian-Lusitanian linguistic expression. 

It is incomprehensible that French theoreticians, so subtle in other matters, have not become aware that the greater presence of Spanish as an international working language guarantees a greater presence of the French against the English language.

In this specific realm, we are surrounded by a crowd of inept leaders, like the "elegant hunter king" who, at the last Hispanic American Summit, asserted that we are four hundred million Spanish speakers, or like the authorities of the Instituto Cervantes who claim that we are 450 million Spanish speakers (when we are actually 550 million) and, to make matters worse, that Spanish is the second language after English: stultorum infinitus est numerus.

Beyond the Bourbon king and the Instituto Cervantes, habitual users of Spanish have invaded the heart of the thalattocratic empire, and thus, they number 45 million in the USA. This brute, real and indubitable fact has made strategist Samuel Huntington, in The Spanish Challenge, one of his most recent works, exclaim: 

"Americans have been allowing to transform themselves into two peoples, with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish)...  For the first time in the history of the United States, there are more and more citizens (especially black) which cannot find work or the salary that they should expect, because they can only communicate in English... If the expansion of Spanish as the second language spoken in the US keeps on advancing, this could have grave consequences for politics and for government over time."

It is that Spanish is a multicentric language since, contrary to English or French, as to which London and Paris have constituted themselves as the centers of linguistic power, Madrid has no vocation for linguistic centrality.

It is time that our governments assume an international language policy: That Spanish be used as a working language in the international realm. Information tells us that, in China, Spanish is the most studied foreign language today; that it is not one but ten million the number of Spanish speakers in the Philippines; that Spanish is not considered as a foreign language in universities in Brazil, since its use among faculty is commonplace. In summary, we definitely count with a very powerful geopolitical and meta-political instrument that is not being exploited [1].

[1] Noblesse oblige and we should give homage here to the effort of Professor Renato Epifanio and his fellow members of the Movimiento Internacional Lusófono, who for years has been working in consolidating Portuguese as an international language (www,zefiro,pt)