The Government has announced after the Council of Ministers on Tuesday the creation of fourteen economic investment measures in the Spanish language with a budget of 1,100 million euros, a PERTE (Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation) called New Economy of the Tongue. Of the total investment, at least 30 million euros will be used exclusively to support projects in co-official languages.
Among these measures, the Minister of Economic Affairs Nadia Calviño has announced the creation of a Spanish Observatory and a technological platform to learn Spanish from abroad. With this injection it is also hoped to promote the digitization of the Cervantes Institute.
The Government seeks to attract private financing, a collaboration with the public sector that will be articulated through the Alliance for the New Economy of the Language. Also for this, the figure of a Special Commissioner has been sought, who will occupy Cristina Gallach, journalist by training and former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and for Ibero-America and the Caribbean of the Government of Spain, and former High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda (appointed by Pedro Sánchez in 2018 and ceased when the Secretary of State for the 2030 Agenda was created in January 2020).
The objective of this strategic project is to convert Spanish and the co-official languages into “driving elements of digital transformation”, as well as promoting a new “economy of knowledge and Artificial Intelligence”.
It is not the first project within the framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promoted by Spain, since the Royal Academy of Language is already working with technology companies so that “the AI speaks Spanish and speaks it well”.
According to Calviño, this “PERTE of the language” will reinforce Spain’s position as a “bridge between Europe and Latin America”, as well as “the internationalization of companies” and the reinforcement of the “country brand”. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has stressed on Twitter that it is a project to “maximize the value of Spanish”.
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