30 years ago, the Instituto Cervantes took off with a well-assumed mission: to favor the spread of Spanish in the world with the power of a language that then added (to rounding) almost 500 millions of speakers – so 591 million people understand it
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Three decades after the Boot, the Cervantes is one of the most popular linguistic and cultural international projects in the world, next to the British Council, the Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut.
The annual meeting of the Board of the Institution in the Palace of El Pardo had yesterday a celebratory spirit.
King Felipe VI presided over the meeting with the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Ministers of Culture, Miquel Iceta, and Education, Pilar Alegría.
And then the official lunch was held with the ambassadors of the Latin American countries, where the king, accompanied by Doña Letizia, has deployed a speech around the language as a tool of cohesion.
He recalled that the appearance of the Cervantes, who today directs the poet Luis García Montero, is linked to the confirmation of democratic Spain.
“A young, an entrepreneur, identified with the best values and with diversity. An open and solidly twinned Spain on the other side of the Atlantic,” he said.
Only in the last decade, Spanish speakers have grown 30% and 60% foreign students interested in language.
But this not only indicates a linguistic interest, but an increase in cultural interest surrounding the scope of the panhispanic.
“Teaching Spanish is more than teaching a syntax and a dictionary,” said Felipe Vi.
“It is to teach the set of values that are expressed in it, the values that unite us in a cultural diversity that speaks in this language that we can be proudly as universal”.
This is what has also led to successively expanding the Cervantes Spaces in the world.
Before the end of the year, the center of Dakar (Senegal) will open.
In 2022 that of Los Angeles (USA).
And in 2023 that of Seoul (South Korea).
Don Felipe has also asked not to forget the technological challenges in we must also be a linguistic reference.
And in this line Don Felipe has placed to undertake the challenge of “teaching Spanish to the machines, because they dictate the times. We do not want to stay behind. Cervantes knows very well that a language is much more than a collection of rules and words
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To this meeting, two of the last winners of the Cervantes Award were also invited, the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez (2017) and the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale (2019).
Both with newly released books: Tongolele did not know how to dance ‘and time without keys’ respectively.
She celebrates 98 years on November 2.
