On September 16, the so-called "group of Friends of Spanish at the UN" was officially established at the United Nations, bringing together representatives of Spanish-speaking member states, who, in a declaration of intent sent in February of this year to University Secretary of the UN, said they felt convinced, committed, encouraged and encouraged in the work of promoting and preserving the use of Spanish, language universal - according to their words - that can be a vehicle for peace and tolerance. In the same letter, the Friends of Spanish recalled that Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. agreement Of course, they could also have recalled, for example, that Spanish is, according to the latest data published by Ethnologue.com, the second most spoken language as a mother tongue language in the world, after Chinese and ahead of English. Or that, outside the borders of Spanish-speaking countries, Spanish is consolidating its position as a highly demanded and constantly expanding language .

Today, October 12, Día de la Hispanidad, the group of Friends of Spanish joins the celebration of the "Day of the Spanish language at the United Nations", which has equivalents in the other official languages of the UN (English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Russian). With these celebrations, the United Nations aims to make it even clearer that the promotion of multilingualism is closely linked to respect for cultural diversity and the promotion of intercultural dialogue (report A/65/488 of October 4, 2010). One does not have to go far to put faces and names to these abstract concepts: the UN' s own website effortlessly offers 17 stories of people of some 10 nationalities praising the usefulness and encouragement of learning and teaching Spanish.

"The RAE dissociates itself from the offensive to impose the Spanish language"."Enllaçats per la llengua qualifies as unfair the egalitarian attention of the Wert law". "Is Wert the good guy or the bad guy for defending Spanish? I too have been able to effortlessly find a good handful of recent headlines that, without a doubt, transform the linguistic reality of Spain into a battlefield. And if I, for example, affirm between shots that I am happy speaking one or the other language, I automatically earn the distrust -or worse, the hatred- of those who say they prefer to speak another language.

It is easy to see that this status has little to do with the real palpitation of languages: with the verses and stories to which they have given rise; with the first words of those who learn them from their parents; or with the terms that are incorporated or end up disappearing in languages. And this palpitation cannot be accompanied by political or economic interests because, quite simply, it transcends them. In other words, we cannot call enemies two, or three, or four languages that have the good fortune to coexist and share words, referents and values in the same territory. We should not prevent our children and grandchildren from being perfectly bilingual, or trilingual, or multilingual -scientific evidence has always shown that the human brain is perfectly prepared for this-. Because -eye- it is as bad and barbaric to attack a language that is understood as unjustly majority (Spanish, perhaps?) as it is to try to atrophy the life of languages that, among other aspects, and always by mere chance, did not have the fortune of being disseminated or exported a hundred or thousands of kilometers away.

If we return to the reasoning proposed by the UN (one celebrates the good health of one's language precisely because it is capable of coexisting and dialoguing with others), won't it turn out that some defend their language with the wrong strategy? Wouldn't it be more coherent to be a friend of other languages in order to give a better life to our own? After all, all language -my own, that of my neighbor, that of someone I don't even know- is born for that purpose: to unite and communicate.