2023-06-02 10:10:15
“I would love that this year all the studies be done and it could be taken to the Council of Ministers so that in 2024 or at the beginning of 2025 there will be a Cervantes center,” said García Montero, who is in Canada to meet with government representatives and inaugurate the Annual Congress of Hispanists of the North American country.
García Montero declared in an interview that Cervantes has a “historic debt” with Canada, although he also justified that the public institution, founded in 1991, is “very young, much more than the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute.”
“Toronto is a city that interests us a lot. Because Canada is one of the great countries where there is no Cervantes Institute. Because Toronto is an economic and cultural reference with a great future”, explained García Montero.
“And because there is one thing that the Instituto Cervantes is interested in, which is responding to the growth of Spanish and the Hispanic-American community,” he added.
García Montero also highlighted the multicultural character of Toronto, considered one of the most diverse cities in the world and in which more than half of its population was not born in the country.
“Multiculturalism has become a sign of identity and that is very interesting for those of us who believe that teaching a language is more than teaching a vocabulary,” he explained.
“And that many things fit in words and there must be social understanding, the defense of human rights, the idea of progress where democracy and economic development go hand in hand,” added the poet and academic.
The director of Cervantes, who met today in Toronto with representatives of the economic, social, cultural and artistic world of the city’s Spanish-speaking community, stressed that Spanish is, after English and French, the two official languages of the country, Canada’s third language.
According to García Montero, with the arrival of the Cervantes Institute in Toronto, “a triangle” formed by the opening of centers in Los Angeles (EE. UU.) in 2022 and Seoul (South Korea) this year.
Data from Cervantes indicate that in Canada more than 730,000 people speak Spanish, a language that is the first foreign language in secondary and university education in the country, with more than 92,000 students.
Gacía Montero ended by pointing out that “Spanish has to fill us with pride, but not with complacency.”
“Proudly because we are the second language in the world in terms of native speakers after Mandarin Chinese. There are up to 600 million Spanish speakers in the world », he declared.
«Pride, a lot. problems too. We have to ensure that Spanish has a notable social and economic development, for example in the United States, where there is already a Hispanic community that is close to 60 million », he concluded.
#Instituto #Cervantes #installed #Toronto #early