Following Corsica’s court ban on use of the Corsican language in the public institutions, protests have erupted on the island, Trend reports, citing an article in The Guardian.

The decision was made because the administration of Emmanuel Macron was negotiating with local politicians to grant Corsica greater autonomy. The lawsuit was filed by the Prefect of Corsica, the highest official of the central government on the island.

“This decision amounts to stripping Corsican parliament members of the right to speak their language during debates,” the island’s executive council president, Gilles Simeoni, and Corsican assembly president, Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, said.

“Accepting this state of affairs is unthinkable for us,” they said in a joint statement, announcing an appeal against the verdict. The Corsican language needed to be given official status alongside French for it to survive and develop, they added.

As the article noted, Core in Fronte, pro-independence party tweeted, in Corsican, that it considers the verdict “shameful”.

“Corsica has a fraught relationship with France’s central government, with nationalist movements having demanded more autonomy or even outright independence for several decades,” the article said.

The Guardian noted that Last month, Macron stated that he had “no taboo” to change the status of Corsica, which is a sunny Mediterranean island, a favorite holiday destination. But he insisted that Corsica should remain part of France.

“New negotiations between Paris and Corsican leaders appear to have been unblocked by the conditional release of two men convicted of participating in the 1998 murder of the island’s prefect Claude Érignac, the highest-ranking French official to have ever been assassinated,” the article added.

Meanwhile, the UNESCO Cultural Agency believes that the Corsican language, which is similar to standard Italian and has about 150,000 speakers, is endangered.

Source: Trend News Agency