Transcript of the speech delivered by the President of the Government at the Cervantes Institute. The value of Spanish

Beijing (China)

Greetings and thanks: public authorities, the Cervantes Institute, etc.

I thank Professor Dong for his generous presentation. I would also like to thank him for the passion with which he has been spreading and promoting Spanish and Portuguese culture on this side of the world for so many years.

As the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago wrote, in both Spanish and Portuguese, since that's how he wanted it to be, "writers make national literature, and translators make it universal", and thanks to the work of Professor Dong, our books have reached the hearts of Chinese readers. A great work inspired by an illusion rewarded by the Order of the Arts and Humanities - the highest cultural distinction bestowed by the Government of Spain - and for which I would like to convey, on behalf of my country, our recognition and our gratitude.

Through this deserved recognition, I would also like to express my gratitude and my admiration to all Hispanists, whether scholars or students, who are passionate about the Spanish language and literature, some of whom are here today in this Cervantes Institute.

Thank you for appreciating Spanish. Thank you for your devotion and your exemplary work in spreading the Spanish language and culture in this country, multiplying its voice and extending its wealth.

The precept of the wise teacher Lao-Tsé says that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". It will be six years, this July, since we signed a letter of intent, here in Beijing, to open Spanish cultural centres in China and Chinese cultural centres in Spain. One year later, in July 2006, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Asturias inaugurated this very Cervantes Institute in Beijing. In turn, the first Chinese cultural centre in Spain - its counterpart - will be inaugurated this very year in Madrid - in the heart of the capital of Spain.

Allow me to mention now some other initiatives which are undoubtedly of interest, particularly to the young people of our two countries. One of them is the Quetzal Route 2012, which will be organised in China; the first time it will be held outside of Ibero-America.

We can thus see the will of the two governments - Chinese and Spanish - to narrow the gap between our countries and bring a whole universe of relations between the two societies closer: political, commercial, social, and of course, cultural.

This is a meeting of two worlds that have viewed each other until now from a distance marked by the map of the world, but which have always felt a certain attraction to one another.

This Cervantes Institute, one of the main hubs of the network of 77 centres that this institution - which I consider fundamental for Spanish Cultural Action overseas - is spread around the world; it is one more stopping place in a journey of knowledge and understanding that we all trust will be long and profitable.

And I can assure you that, as President of the Government of Spain, I feel very emotional to recognise signs of love for the culture of my country: 20,000 students of Spanish in this land offer, in this sense, a fine example of the interest in learning our language and getting to know our culture.

I would like to express my gratitude. To them and to the 18 million people who throughout the world share an attraction to the Spanish language and culture.

In the case of China, this is the continuation of an on-going trend of interest over the last few decades, since that very first translation of Don Quixote in the nineteen twenties, to the most recent by Professor Dong Yansheng, or the books in the "Antonio Machado" library of the Cervantes Institute, with a collection of works by more than 160 authors from our literary history who have come to rest among you.

For our part, we have endeavoured to correspond with this task of translating Chinese literary works into our language, bringing to our own ocean of words the poetry of Tang, the wisdom of Confucius and Laozi, and many more teachers and creators.

When any new speaker is welcomed to a language, he receives a key, an explanation of its past, from those who used it to tell their story.

The Spanish language hence belongs to all those Spanish speakers. To those who speak it in Spain and in all Hispanic countries, and those in the United States, where 40 million people use Spanish as their mother tongue. To those who speak and write it in any corner of the globe.

Spain is only (or no less than) a province of this territory that Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican writer, called "the land of La Mancha", in which Cervantes, Cortázar, Quevedo, Gabriela Mistral, Borges, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Ana María Matute, Octavio Paz, Juan Gelman and Antonio Gamoneda live on.

That is how Spanish literature is also perceived from outside, as a universal display of admirable singular voices.

Don Quijote, Lorca, García Márquez or the latest Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, are symbols and icons of our culture, but they are also presents that we are delighted to be able to offer to the whole world. And together with them, the paintings of Velázquez or Goya; the films of Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar; the music of Manuel de Falla, the studies of Severo Ochoa and Ramón y Cajal; the flight of a dancer such as María Pagés or the gastronomic find of Ferrán Adrià; they all represent the creative universe called Spain.

When a child at school in Tianjin or Shanghai, a university student at one of the 60 Chinese universities where Spanish is taught, or a student at this Cervantes Institute, learns to say 'friend' or 'peace' in our language, he is starting to sprout the seed of our language, which opens the door to a language spoken by more than 400 million people in 21 countries, and a rich culture exuded over the course of centuries.

And if I have chosen "the value of Spanish" as today's subject of my speech, it is not by chance. It is to highlight that Spanish, in addition to being the language of millions of Spanish speakers that use it as a vehicle for communication, creation and cohesion, is also a vehicle for economic development and the creation of inarguable wealth.

Much thought and debate has gone into this matter of the economic value of Spanish in recent years.

I myself have referred on various occasions to the meaning that language has to our balance of payments, not only because of what it represents for revenue derived from the teaching of our language, but also because of what we know as industries of language: editorial production, cinema and television, and other secondary productions associated therewith.

A study a few years ago valued the amount of the overall wealth deriving from cultural industries that use the language of Cervantes at 15% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Spain.

The book, cinema, music and communication media industries are particularly dynamic at a national and international level. One of today's most important challenges for major world languages is the Internet and emerging technologies, given their great potential for connecting with a large number of people around the world.

We are witnessing the creation of a dense framework of networks in continuous expansion that gathers together millions of individuals in new and unexpected virtual communities without frontiers, which have multiplied exponentially in their forms of creation and dissemination, with a previously-unknown dimension.

Spanish is, indeed, as His Royal Highness, Prince Felipe de Borbón said in the last meeting of the directors of the Cervantes Institute, "the great highway which allows those who speak it to move swiftly in our global society". In this respect, the Cervantes Institute has also sought to launch itself into the future through its Virtual Classrooms, true centres of reference in distance teaching and advice for students of Spanish around the world.

If the Spanish language has a role to play in tomorrow's world, it will be due to its attraction as a second language, the other language of the west, which has sprouted not only as a result of the size of its group of speakers, but also because of its effectiveness and international standing.

"There is no international language that isn't the language of science and technology". Language is a tool with which thoughts are built.

That is why this project, that we have called "Think in Spanish", driven by the Government of Spain, with the invaluable support of universities all around Latin America, intends to ensure the presence of Spanish in thought, science and research, as one of the major languages of international communication for the scientific community in the coming years.

A language with which the future is created and named.

With this objective in mind, we are working from different State institutions to promote forums and meetings at the highest academic level, and specialised publications and journals, both on and off the Internet, as well as in the search for international agreements to assess and validate scientific publications in Spanish.

We are working with China in various areas. Relations in education matters are excellent; there are already different joint projects after holding, in 2010, the "Year of the Spanish and Chinese Languages" in the two countries. The nature and strength of said relations have recently been promoted and the teams at the Ministries of Education are working to study and foster the agreements necessary to start up new Spanish Sections in Chinese centres as soon as possible. The first results will be seen in the next academic year, in which there will be two new Spanish Sections. We will hence move from having a total of three to five, and we want to see this number grow.

And at a university level, there are now more than 60 universities with Spanish departments offering the Spanish language as a specialised subject as part of Hispanic Philology, as a second foreign language or as complementary studies, compared with only 25 in 2005.

We should add to this offer the more than 160 agreements signed between Spanish and Chinese universities. Furthermore, each year the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Spain, through the Spanish Agency for Cooperation and Development, sends assistants to these universities. We have almost doubled the number of assistantships in the Asian-Pacific area in the last few years.

It is my Government's desire to see the 14 assistantships that currently exist in China increased as much as possible in the coming years; the various departments involved are already working towards this end.

Ladies and gentlemen, on a closing note,

Miguel de Unamuno spoke about the Spanish-speaking world in the following terms:

Spanish […] the Spanish of Spain, the Spanish of America and the Spanish of the Asian Rim. It is not our intention to impose our language, but rather to spread it and share with the rest of the world certain values that are associated with a wealth of tradition that already form a part of the legacy that the Spanish and Hispanic cultures offer to the rest of the world.

It is an objective fact that the number of Spanish speakers is significantly increasing, which goes to show that our language, the language of us all, is a gateway to the future.

We are aware of the inheritance that we leave behind. Our language, our culture, are revealed through time and in all fields of creation and knowledge; a great wealth, a great treasure, and one of the main elements for our current and future development. The inspiration that unites millions of people and one of the greatest heritages of all humanity.

The Spanish language is the common home of all Spanish speakers, and it also seeks to be so to all those who come to it, because we feel that, being the heirs to such an intrinsically valuable legacy, its value increases the more it is used.

This common home is in Spain, in Latin America, in the United States; it is wherever there is a student of Spanish. It is here, in this Cervantes Institute, which is your home.

Thanks to all those who study, love and appreciate Spanish. Thank you. And I would whole-heartedly encourage you to continue contributing, with your passion and your effort, to the energy and wealth of our language.

Thank you all very much.