Hearing by the Esperanto Radical Association
Cultural Commission of Chamber of Deputies, Wed 8th of February
Giorgio Pagano, Secretary of the Esperanto Radical Association, has been heard today from the Cultural Commission of the Chamber of deputies with reference to the parliamentarian debate on the Bills 5714 and 6065 about the teaching of Esperanto.
The hearing was chaired by Mr. Scardino, member of Forza Italia; Lapo Orlandi and Ranieri Clerici took part at the hearing, in front of some members of Parliament, as Gabriella Carlucci.
In his report, Giorgio Pagano reminded that, in her last legislative passage, Mrs Moratti reformed the teaching of a second communitarian language in schools with English, which now has become the second language of State, with a consequent risk of job instability for thousands that teach other communitarian languages and, in future, for the Italian language to become a dialect.
English is not and will never be a socially fair language, a shared public good but it will always produce discriminations between English mother tongue and others: the Grin Report, a report published in France by the Higher Council for the of Appraisal in School, shows that the shifting of resources from the European countries to United Kingdom amounts to 18 billions Euros per year. Moreover, while our children spend a big amount of energy and time in learning English language, English youth deepen their computer skills and study business.
Therefore, it is necessary to review this policy whether on national or European level in order to avoid to become a future colony: as in Bretton Woods it was created an international monetary system that would have carried to the first international agreements on trade, today it is necessary a “linguistic” Bretton Woods able to rule on the prescribed international linguistic exchanges and to eventually sanction the dominant positions.
Pagano said: “we considered us members of a community for the first time when we realized that an organized supranational area that we can cohabit and in which something that advantages me doesn’t necessarily disadvantages others, can exist”.
The Esperanto language constitutes the transposition, in linguistic terms, of the communitarian method. As an auxiliary language in communitarian domain, Esperanto represents the communitarian method, the European method applied to the resolution of the fight for the linguistic hegemony: giving a fair language the role of intra-European instrument of communication would mean to place it side by side to our national languages.
Finally, Mr. Colasio, Member of Parliament for La Margherita, emphasized the relevance and the importance of this complex issue, wishing that such a debate could resume, after the political elections, a meaningful legislative participation with a sufficient temporary perspective and finally win.