The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers yesterday appointed former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Ibero-America Cristina Gallach as Special Commissioner for the Alliance for a New Language Economy, a plan to make Spanish a language of reference in the field of knowledge and artificial intelligence.
Gallach was the ‘number two’ in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the time that Arancha González Laya headed the department and had previously been High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda. She was also Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations and spokesperson for the European institutions and NATO, when Javier Solana was Secretary General of the Alliance.
The task that the Government has now entrusted her with is to promote public-private cooperation for the implementation of the Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE), also approved yesterday by the Council of Ministers, and which will mobilise 1.1 billion euros of public investment, mainly from EU Recovery Plan funding.
At least 30 million will be earmarked exclusively to support projects in co-official languages, as explained yesterday at the press conference following the Cabinet meeting, the First Vice-President and Minister for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, who highlighted the “inclusive and multilingual” nature of this strategic project.
With this PERTE, the Government aims for artificial intelligence to “think in Spanish” and for Spain to position itself as a benchmark for Spanish both in the EU and worldwide, said Calviño.
The Vice-President stressed that this is a great opportunity to invest in the effective deployment of Spanish as an international asset, bearing in mind that it is a language spoken by almost 600 million people (7.5% of the world’s population), that it is the second mother tongue in terms of number of speakers and the third most used language on the Internet.
Furthermore, this PERTE is expected to have “a significant qualitative and intangible impact” and to reinforce Spain’s position as a bridge between Europe and Latin America, as well as the internationalisation of Spanish companies.
The project is structured around five strategic axes, the largest budget being for learning Spanish and Spanish in the world with 475 million, followed by the promotion of artificial intelligence in Spanish with 330 million.
The other three axes are the creation of a knowledge base in Spanish and co-official languages with a budget of 90 million, the dissemination of science in Spanish and the generation of Spanish-speaking knowledge with 130 million, and the promotion of cultural industries such as audiovisual or video games and the digitisation of heritage with 70 million.
In order to make the plan more effective, there will be an advisory council of personalities linked to the promotion of the language and its digitisation in the fields of technology, science and culture, which will also include institutions such as the Cervantes Institute, the National Library, the General Secretariat of Ibero-American States and the Organisation of Ibero-American States, among others.
