Catalonian separation from Spain: How guilty is the Royal Spanish Academy?

Allan Tépper
10 min readNov 2, 2017

Here’s the perspective of a non-European, non-Hispanic author who has been writing and speaking publicly about the topic for many years.

In case you didn’t notice, Catalonia declared its independence from Spain last Friday. There are many factors that caused a substantial number of Catalonians to want to separate from Spain. This article is about an important one not being discussed in the general media. I’ll start out by explaining what Catalonia is today, how Catalonia is properly called and written in Castilian, Catalán and English, as well as the relevance of each of those three languages in this discussion. Finally, I’ll demonstrate the Royal Spanish Academy’s (Real Academia Española) guilt by sparking this situation in 1925 and then ignoring the related Constitutional decree of 1978, which finally caused the eruption last week.

What is Catalonia today?

What Catalonia is today depends upon which Wikipedia language page you check: the Castilian one, the Catalán one… or the English one.

  • The Castilian-language page says that Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain.
  • The Catalán-language page says that Catalonia is an independent European country since October 27, 2017.
  • The English-language page says that Catalonia is a region in the Iberian peninsula whose status is currently in dispute: The Spanish central government maintains that Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, while the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) views it as an independent republic following a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain on October 27, 2017.

This published information might change if you go to verify it, since the quite-valued Wikipedia contributors represent different opinions, and the situation itself could change in any possible direction.

The different spellings and pronunciations of Catalonia among the 3 relevant languages

I wrote this article in English, so that’s why its title has the name written in…

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Allan Tépper

Author, consultant, pro audio/video specialist, tech journalist, broadcaster, translator & language activist. AllanTepper.com — en castellano en AllanTépper.soy