Association

Who we are?

The Civic Association for the Catalan language El Tempir is situated in the city of Elx, at the far south of the Catalan language territory. Elx is an important economic centre of over 230,000 inhabitants in the Valencian Country. The association was born around 1994 to contribute to the linguistic resurgence of Valencian after adverse political conditions –under the Franco Regime 1939-1975– and an impressive population growth –only 50.000 inhabitants in 1950– due to industrialisation and immigration from Castilian Spanish territories in Spain, had jeopardised the traditional situation of Catalan which, until the 1960s, had been the city’s most widely used oral language since the Middle Ages.

This unstable situation was reinforced in the late 1990s, when new economic bonanza and immigration waves have meant an extra strain for Catalan to remain as our everyday communication vehicle –a modern and hegemonic language– amongst Elx’s citizens. Nevertheless, according to the 2001 Official Linguistic Survey, 40% of the population is fluent in Catalan and 88% understands its. Valencian is still spoken by well over 50% of the population in a great part of the city and by over 75% of the population in the city’s country areas. Approximately 60% of teenagers are fluent in Catalan –officially known in the Valencian Country as Valencian– although Castilian Spanish is orally widely used amongst all generations, especially with foreigners or outside of family, friendship or neighbourhood situations due to social reasons. The Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian Government) declared Valencian co-official, next to Castilian Spanish, in 1983 although Catalan had already historically been the only official language in all its territory until the early 18th century.

Our activities are mainly centred in the field of education, promoting the choice, amongst families, of new linguistic immersion classrooms, in primary and secondary schools. This is carried out through recovery activities such as, in the social use field, the organisation of the yearly “Valencian Schools Day”, with over 10,000 people attending on a playful weekend morning in spring. The Association also publishes a prestigious magazine every semester known as El Tempir. It includes both scholarly and more general articles with a variety of topics and studies concerning the south of the Valencian Country: sociolinguistics, history, dialectology, literature, etc. The magazine includes several pages with an “Account Agenda” meant to be a follow-up of all the everyday activities carried out by the Association in order to recover and normalise the Catalan language’s situation. Other activities also include: an exhaustive follow-up of the Elx City Council linguistic policies, books presentations, press releases and letters to the media, lectures and cultural conferences, linguistic integration of immigrants activities and others. The Association now has over 240 members enrolled.

On the other hand, we must also point out that El Tempir is a full member of Escola Valenciana-Federació d’Associacions per la Llengua (Valencian School- Federation of Associations for the Language) and of the Federació d’Organitzacions per la Llengua Catalana (Catalan Language Federation of Organisation) that sums up over sixty associations from all over the Catalan linguistic territory.