The Diplomat
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, celebrated yesterday the creation of the Strategic Project for the Recovery and Economic Transformation (PERTE) New Economy of the Language, an example that the Government has decided to “take seriously” the importance of the language and culture in Spanish. He also ruled out, for the time being, the closure of the Instituto Cervantes in Moscow, affected by the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
“We form a family of 600 million speakers and that gives immense possibilities,” said García Montero during a breakfast briefing at New Economy Forum in Madrid, a day after the Council of Ministers approved the PERTE Nueva Economía de la Lengua (New Economy of the Language), which has an investment of 1.1 billion euros in order to mobilize public and private investment to maximize the value of Spanish and the co-official languages in the process of digital transformation worldwide.
This project, he stressed, represents an “awareness” of the importance of a language that ranks second in the world in terms of the number of native speakers, only behind Mandarin Chinese, and third in the cultural and communicative fields, behind English and Chinese. “Investing in culture is fundamental” and, in this sense, PERTE will help leading institutions (ministries, Royal Spanish Academy-RAE, universities, etc.) “to collaborate in a project that makes Spanish a fundamental knowledge base” and to increase the presence of Spanish and the co-official languages “in this new digital era”.
For this reason, García Montero celebrated that the Government has decided to “take seriously” the importance of the Spanish language and culture with the launch of this project, and welcomed the appointment of the former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Ibero-America Cristina Gallach to the position of Special Commissioner for the Alliance for a New Language Economy. He also announced the creation of the Spanish Language Observatory, which will serve as a guide for Cervantes’ strategy to promote the language around the world and will be part of PERTE.
Luis García Montero also dedicated a few words to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is showing that “the worst of the 20th century is appearing in the 21st century”, and ruled out, a priori, the closure of the Instituto Cervantes in Moscow, since any decision in this regard will be taken in coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Spanish Embassy. In any case, he assured that he is in “permanent contact” with the director of the headquarters to know his needs and that the sanctions against Russia are creating problems in the payment of the salaries of its workers.
