Language secessionism not willing to stop

Time and again the unity of the Catalan language has been attacked and threatened by the spanish nationalism, but luckily enough both Spanish and Valencian tribunals have showed the evident: Catalan and Valencian are different varieties of the same language.  The attempts to promote language secessionism are normally leaded by 'blaverists', spanish nationalist people. However, politicians from the two main spanish nationalist parties,PSOE and specially from PP, also are commonly involved in it.

This time, the Valencian High Court of Justice has ratified the validity of the Catalan Philology degree  to accredit the knowlege of Valencian in civil service examinations, saying that there is no reason to consider the Catalan Philology degree invalid and condemns the Valencian Government to pay for all court costs of the process.

This is the fiveteenth sentence in the same direction but the PP Government doesn't seem to care about. But neither does PSOE. Both parties have agreed to hire Catalan and Valencian translators for a debate in the  Senate, not much of a surprise when the official site of the Senate already distinguishes the to varieties of Catalan as if they were different languanges.

In fact, the official language academy of the Valencian Community (the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua) considers Catalan and Valencian simply to be two names for the same language. All universities teaching Romance languages, and virtually all linguists, consider these two to be linguistic variants of the same language (similar to Canadian French versus Metropolitan French, and European versus Brazilian Portuguese).

There is a roughly continuous set of dialects covering the various regional forms of Catalan/Valencian, with no break at the border between Catalonia and the Valencian Community,[citation needed] and the various forms of Catalan and Valencian are mutually intelligible even between the most eastern and western varieties.[citation needed] This is not to say that there are no differences between the two and the speech of Valencians is recognizable both in pronunciation as well as in morphological and lexical peculiarities. However, these differences are not any wider than among North-Western Catalan and Eastern Catalan. In fact, Northern Valencian (spoken in the Castelló province and Matarranya valley, a strip of Aragon) is more similar to the Catalan of the lower Ebro basin (spoken in southern half of Tarragona province and another strip of Aragon) than to apitxat Valencian (spoken in the area of L'Horta, in the province of Valencia).

What gets called a language (as opposed to a dialect) is defined partly by mutual comprehensibility as well as political and cultural factors. In this case, the perceived status of Valencian as a dialect of Catalan has historically had important political implications including Catalan nationalism and the idea of the Països Catalans or Catalan countries. Arguing that Valencian is a separate language may sometimes be part of an effort by Valencians to resist a perceived Catalan nationalist agenda aimed at incorporating Valencians into what they feel is a "constructed" nationality centered around Barcelona.[citation needed] As such, the issue of whether Catalan and Valencian constitute different languages or merely dialects has been the subject of political agitation several times since the end of the Franco era.[citation needed]

The latest main political controversy regarding Valencian occurred on the occasion of the drafting of the European Constitution in 2004. The Spanish government supplied the EU with translations of the text into Basque, Galician, Catalan, and Valencian, but the Catalan and Valencian versions were identical [10]. While professing the unity of the Catalan language, the Spanish government claimed to be constitutionally bound to produce distinct Catalan and Valencian versions because the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Community refers to the language as Valencian. In practice, the Catalan, Valencian, and Balearic versions of the EU constitution are identical: the government of Catalonia accepted the Valencian translation without any changes under the premise that the Valencian standard is accepted by the norms set forth by the IEC.

Source: Catalonia Blog + Wikipedia