Alex Trelinski
KING Felipe VI has criticised US President Donald Trump’s administration for scrubbing out Spanish from the White House’s official communications, website and social networks.
Speaking in Madrid at the AGM of the Cervantes Institute, the monarch described the move as ‘striking’.
The Institute is a worldwide non-profit organisation created by the Spanish government in 1991 dedicated to Spanish culture and language.
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Saying there are five Institute centres in the US, King Felipe noted that Spanish far surpasses other foreign languages in secondary and university education in the country.
He also said the number of Spanish speakers in America will reach 100 million by 2050.
The king said he hoped the decision is temporary because Spanish will become the second most spoken language and will continue to consolidate as a language of influence in the US.
He emphasised that the teaching of Spanish is ‘inseparable’ from the dissemination of culture, celebrating the fact that last year, the Insitutute carried out more than 7,800 activities around the world.
Luis Garcia Montero, the director general of the institute, said Trump ‘insulted’ nearly 60 million people in the US by presenting Spanish as the ‘language of the poor and immigrants’.
Last month, within hours of Trump’s inauguration, his administration took down the Spanish version of the official White House website, while its Spanish account on X was also shut down.
“It is not only about defending the prestige of the Spanish language, which is being pulled down in a derogatory way, and is a dynamic that is worryingly spreading around the world,” Garcia Montero added.
