Barcelona will inspect (for the first time) that shops 'speak' Catalan

BarcelonaBarcelona City Council has never inspected or sanctioned any business for failing to comply with regulations regarding the Catalan language. Although the Consumer Code dates back to 2010 and the linguistic policy law dates back to 1998, in all these years the council has never sanctioned any company for not labeling shops in Catalan, not serving in Catalan, or not offering the menu in Catalan to customers, despite the fact that non-compliance is evident on the streets and in the city's businesses. Why? Although city councils have inspection and sanctioning powers, until now, Barcelona's inspectors had not taken language into account in their actions. The law recognizes the customer's right to be served in Catalan, and also to receive communications (signage, invoices, menus, instructions, advertising) at least in Catalan.

This disconnection between theory and practice is what the capital's council has committed to correcting. "The City Council will incorporate language into ordinary inspections throughout 2027 to ensure compliance with linguistic policy regulations in consumption," announces the Commissioner for the Social Use of Catalan, Marta Salicrú, to ARA, admitting that she was also surprised to discover that in Barcelona "this regulation had never been inspected," one of the objectives that she set as a priority when she was appointed a year ago.

The first step will be on La Rambla. After the information campaign that the council has carried out to improve the image of shops in the summer, the inspection will be carried out this quarter, before it is inaugurated in February. Afterwards, the inspections will expand to the rest of the districts, to which the inspection corps reports. In Gràcia, the plan to boost Catalan in commerce and catering begins to be applied on Monday, in which a door-to-door campaign will be carried out for 850 establishments to urge them to correct the non-compliance detected.

Until now, the City Council's protocol had only been to send informative letters to businesses that violated the regulations and about which they had received complaints, indicating the regulations and potential sanctions to them. There are Catalan municipalities, such as Vic, that have already applied linguistic inspections and requirements to businesses so that they comply with the regulations. And there are others, such as Olot, that have gone further and have announced fines for 26 shops, fines that can range from 300 to 3,000 euros. Barcelona is not considering the sanctioning path in the first phase. The Catalan Consumer Agency until now was the only body that inspected and sanctioned companies for not complying with the linguistic regulation of the Consumer Code. "The goal is not the sanction but the impact, we want rapid transformations," says Salicrú.

Where do the complaints end up?

Complaints for not being served in Catalan or for not labeling in Catalan have skyrocketed in recent years. "The sociolinguistic context meant that there was spontaneous compliance with the regulations, and in recent years, whether due to migratory pressure or focusing the city model towards tourism, it has become a problem for the citizenry, who had normalized situations that now seem intolerable to us," states Salicrú. The latest blatant case is that of a language activist, Miquel Mola, who reported 76 establishments in Barcelona for labeling only in Spanish but did not receive a response from the City Council and reached the ombudsman. The council admitted that, effectively, until now, businesses were not linguistically inspected, they were only informed.

One of the drawbacks is that there are multiple windows to report it, so it is even difficult to quantify the number of linguistic violations. The City Council acknowledges that it does not have an updated figure for complaints, which are "a trickle." Complaints come in through the Catalan Consumer Agency, via municipal consumer service offices, the Barcelona Office for Non-Discrimination, and even civic entities like Plataforma per la Llengua. The Generalitat has announced an office for the protection of linguistic rights to unify the system of complaints and reports of linguistic violations of the Generalitat. And the City Council has also announced the creation of a Mailbox for Catalan.