A conference entitled "25 years of Spanish Constitution: a linguistic model to evaluate" will be held on Friday 7th May. This event has been organized by the Sociolinguistics and Communication University Centre (CUSC), part of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), located in the Parc Científic de Barcelona (PCB, Barcelona Science Park). During the conference, professors from disciplines such as philology, anthropology or law will evaluate the development of multilingualism, particularly Catalan, in Spain since the establishment of the Constitution in 1978. The conference will be held in the PCB Auditorium (c/Baldiri Reixac, 4-6).

The conference will include presentations by Emili Boix-Fuster, professor of the Dept. of Catalan Philology at the UB and president of the Catalan Sociolinguistics Group, who will summarize the sociolinguistics of this period from the perspective of the Catalan-speaking regions, and by Albert Branchadell, professor of the Dept. of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and president of the Organisation for Multilingualism, who will give a speech on the constitutional regulation of multilingualism in Spain.

In addition, the conference will include the participation of Andrés Barrera, professor of the Dept. of Social Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Antoni Milan, senior professor of Administrative Law at the UAB and director of the journal ” Llengua i Dret”. These speakers will address the diversity of languages in Spain from the perspective of a monolingual territory and true and effective plurilingualism in public institutions and organizations, respectively.

Finally, the senior professor of General Linguistics at the UB and director of the CUSC, Albert Bastardas, will coordinate a round table with a session on “Points that can be improved, possibility of reinterpretation and/or proposals for new constitutional principles for the regulation of multilingualism in Spain”. This session will include the participation of Xavier Arbós, senior professor of Constitutional Law at the Universitat de Girona; Isidor Mari, director of the Dept. of Humanities at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and ex-subdirector general of Linguistic Policy of the Generalitat de Catalunya (GENCAT, Autonomous Government); Joan Melià, professor of the Dept of Catalan Philology at the Universitat de les Illes Balears and ex-director general of Linguistic Policy of the Balearic Isles Government; Joan-Ramon Soler, Head of Judicial studies at the Catalan Institute of Sociolinguistcs, part of the Secretariat for Linguistic Policy of the GENCAT and Jaume Vernet, senior professor of Constitutional Law at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili and member of the Advisory Council to the GENCAT.

The conference is supported by the Dept. of Universities, Research and Information Society and the GENCAT Secretariat of Linguistic Policy, the Division of Human and Social Sciences of the UB and the thematic network “Dialectologia, Pragmàtica i Sociolingüística”.

For more information and inscriptions: cusc@pcb.ub.es, Tel. 934034509.