Instituto Cervantes will create in Mexico the Observatory of Spanish for Latin America and the Caribbean

Eduardo González The Instituto Cervantes and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) will sign an agreement in December, within the framework of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), for the creation of an Observatory of Spanish in Mexico that will cover the Latin American and Caribbean area. The director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, announced this project last Monday, during the institutional presentation of the Global Observatory of Spanish (OGE), which will act as “coordinator” of a network that already includes the Observatory of the Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures at Harvard and the Observatory of the Diffusion of Spanish in Japan, which will be launched soon. In addition, the institution continues to work on the launch of the Observatory of Spanish in Africa, in Equatorial Guinea. “The links between Spanish and Mexican culture are very strong, now more than ever and regardless of any capricious situation,” said García Montero, who also stressed the importance of creating a network of observatories to “take a long and collective step” in the situation of Spanish in the world. This was one of the points discussed during the plenary meeting of the Council of the Global Observatory of Spanish, which preceded the presentation of the OGE at the Cervantes headquarters in Madrid and was attended by Luis García Montero, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel, President of the Autonomous Community of La Rioja, as well as the rest of the representatives of the institutions that form part of this centre. In addition to the coordinating function of the Observatory, the plenary session brought forward the publication of new analyses of the situation of Spanish in Morocco and Brazil (where there have been no updated studies since 2014) and the importance of paying special attention to the USA, where the teaching of foreign languages is “declining alarmingly”, among other matters. In addition, the Observatory incorporates, for the first time, the preparation of the Cervantes Institute’s Yearbook ‘Spanish in the World’ as one of its first tasks. In December 2022, an agreement was signed between the Instituto Cervantes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Government of La Rioja, to launch this project, in an event coinciding with the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the declaration as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO of the monasteries of Yuso and Suso, in San Millán de la Cogolla, considered the "cradle of Spanish".

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