While in the Balearic Islands Catalan loses a great battle, if it finally ceases to be compulsory in the educational system as a vehicular language and a requirement to work in the public service, the disappearance this Saturday of the philologist Carme Junyent i Figuerasa staunch defender of the language, comes to strengthen her cry of alarm for the survival of the catalan, a cry that already launched in the nineties. “To my grandchildren who I don’t know if they exist or if they will speak Catalan, but the iaia loves you,” he wrote as a dedication in one of his reference books, ‘El futur del català depèn de tu’ (La Campana, 2020).
Victim of pancreatic cancer, Carme Junyent died this Saturday at the age of 68. Her children announced her death on Twitter at 8:51 in the morning and will communicate the details of her funeral in the coming days. The commotion was not long in coming since Junyent had become a benchmark, respected and appreciated philologist for her scientific contributions, spokesperson for a profoundly pessimistic discourse regarding the future of Catalan and which he maintained until the end. The ‘president’ of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, lamented the death de Junyent and defined it as a “wise and tenacious fighter in defense and projection of the tongue“. Xavier Antich, president of Òminum Cultural, wrote on Twitter: “The country and Catalan letters, but also all the languages of the world, will greatly miss the commitment, rigor and enthusiasm of Carme». Izaskun Arretxe, director of the Institute of Catalan Letters, described Junyent as a “donassa”, a “wise woman who never gave up”. Indeed, Junyent never tired of denouncing, always with a smile on her lips and in her eyes, the indifference of Catalan speakers towards their own languagewhich he saw inevitably on the verge of extinction if they did not become aware of the situation and mobilized to change it.
Born in 1955 in Masquefa, Anoia, Carme Junyent was a great connoisseur of world linguistic diversity, Africanism, endangered languages, linguistic anthropology and migrations in Catalonia. This was his field of research at the Faculty of Catalan Philology of the University of Barcelona, where he developed his career as Professor of General Linguistics and researcher, after completing her training at the German universities of Cologne and Marburg, and then at California, in the United States. From her academic career, the creation and direction of the Group of Threatened Languages (GELA) stands out.
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Author of about thirty books, the last one of which she was the editor stands out, ‘We are gifted, we are linguists, we are moltes i diem prou’ (Vic: Eumo, 2021), in which she defended the feminine plural in the midst of a debate on linguistics and gender. In this sense, She was very critical of the dualization of masculine and feminine and the use of generics or of the third gender because he thought that they made the discrimination even more evident. So Junyent did not shy away from any controversy and participated in many debates becoming a public figure of reference, listened to and admired. She was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2019 “for his long career in the study and defense of linguistic diversity in Catalonia and in the world”.
In a posthumous article that he deposited in the digital newspaper Vilaweb, Junyent even defended the right to die in catalan and the importance of being able to express oneself in one’s own language in the final stage of life in front of Spanish-speaking health personnel.