In 1964, the writer from Montreal, Hugh Maclennan, published the novel Two Solitudes, which told of the relationship between the two major linguistic communities of Canada. Maclennan presented Francophones and Anglophones as sociocultural groups which only looked at themselves, in the defensive. The Quiet Revolution which was brewing during the decade of the 60’s in the previous century created the discursive foundation of a new linguistic policy based on territoriality. For the Anglophones what was theirs, and the Francophones theirs, with the shared premise of excluding the "indigenous": American Indian, Inuit and mixed races.

Reading the international press you'd be forgiven for thinking that it had been a bad night for the Catalan independence process when the Catalan election results were announced on November 26th. Of course, the opposite is true, pro-independence parties now hold 87 seats to the unionists 48, giving a comfortable, albeit more plural, majority in favour of an independence referendum. Besides the predictable hostility of the press and their focus on the economic issues fuelling support for independence, what much of the media has missed is the importance of language and culture to the debate.

If I were lehendakari (president of the Basque Autonomous Community), I would ask candidates for government ministry leadership to have the C1 in Basque, C1 in Spanish and the B2 in English, among other things.

As the saying goes «all roads lead to Rome» and so it seemed for debate over languages as this past month of October the "eternal city" hosted the Third European Conferences on Plurilingualism.

The great mountain divides usually are, along with island regions, places in which different languages coexist and therefore harbour numerous linguistic minorities. The Alps are the main European orographic reference separating the Italian peninsula from the rest of the continent in an arch which advances from the French Riviera in the west to the Istria Peninsula in the east. we can consider that the Alps mountain range fundamentally crosses five countries: Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia, although its ramifications also affect Monaco, Germany, Liechtenstein and Croatia. Languages from three Indo-European family groups converge in this alpine space: Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.

In sociolinguistics we consider couples where only the mother or father is a Basque speaker as "mixed couples". Meaning that, when families comply with this linguistic model -always in the case of two parent families: one of the parents speaks Basque fluently, while the other does not know how to speak it or, although he/she knows a little, does not speak it.

I get the feeling that the Basque language is coming into its own in the Northern Basque Country and I will explain why I think this, all revolving around a potentially changing linguistic policy. When I talk about linguistic policy, I do not just mean public policy, referring to institutions or, in other words, the Public Basque Language Office. I am also including private agents and implicating society.

Following months of cooperative work by volunteers -a longstanding tradition in the Catalan language, since Softcatalà was set up ten years ago to develop localised Catalan versions of popular open software- the Catalan PC interface of www.twitter.com was launched in July 2012. In linguistic terms, there are some outstanding problems of inconsistence, mainly round the extent to which, if at all, the most exact translations of the word "tweet", "piular" (verb) and "piulada" (noun) should be used alongside "tuitejar" and "tuit".

The Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC) Department of Philology recently celebrated its centenary with a series of events focussed on encouraging the use of Catalan. Its motto was: Any de la paraula viva (Year of the living word).

Who would have thought that the song from the popular Basque songbook which starts «Aldapeko sagarraren adarraren puntan...» would get a bunch of youths and adults from all around the world dancing!