The new taxi law will incorporate the requirement for taxi drivers to know Catalan.

BarcelonaThe draft of the new taxi law, which the Generalitat (Catalan Government) will present this Wednesday to the Taxi Council and must be brought to Parliament next week, will incorporate the mandatory requirement for all taxi drivers to demonstrate a minimum level of Catalan. The Catalan promotion organization Plataforma per la Llengua (Language Platform) and the taxi drivers' association Élite Taxi have "succeeded" in ensuring that the future legislation "broadly and generally regulates the sector linguistically," according to a statement issued Tuesday by the former.

Until now, the law did not incorporate any language requirements beyond what is determined by the consumer code ("users have the right to express themselves in Catalan"), but some city councils have regulated it, as is the case in the Barcelona metropolitan area, where it is specified that drivers must demonstrate proficiency in both co-official languages.

The novelty of the text is that it should be registered this week in the Parliament is that it would extend the language requirement to all drivers retroactively: it would affect all active workers in the sector, who would have a two-year moratorium to be able to prove their language skills, according to Plataforma per la Llengua. The requirement included in the bill is proof of a level of Catalan equivalent to B1, the third highest (out of a total of six) on the scale of linguistic competences of the Common European Framework of Reference, equivalent to a level of comprehension and elementary expression for everyday situations.

However, Plataforma por la Lengua and Élite Taxi, who have worked together on the proposal with the political parties, warn that they will work becauseincrease the level from B1 to B2, which includes sufficient knowledge of the language to express oneself fluently both orally and in writing. "The Catalan language advocacy organization has been working with Élite Taxi since 2023 to introduce the B2 Catalan certificate as a requirement for obtaining the professional credential to work as a taxi or VTC driver," explains Plataforma.

"The incorporation of a language requirement in the sector could represent a historic change in terms of users' language rights, and should inspire other professional sectors to also regulate themselves linguistically," the statement added. This is the second attempt to introduce a new law for the taxi sector, which was close to being introduced in the Catalan Parliament during Pere Aragonès's presidency, but ultimately fell through with the change of government.