Obliged to live in Spanish: the State refuses to register the child's surname in Catalan

BarcelonaYou have just become the father of your first child, you register him at the Civil Registry and, when his documents arrive a month later, you discover that his surname has been Hispanized, and instead of 'Garcia' like yours, your son is called 'García'. This is the case of a Catalan family that Plataforma per la Llengua has reported after the Civil Registry has ignored the family's repeated requests to correct the error and re-register him with his father's surname, which appears without an accent on his ID, passport, and birth and marriage certificates. After several complaints and exhausting administrative channels, the family has now decided to resort to judicial action to ensure their son's documents bear his surname and not one imposed in Spanish. The organization assures that in the last five years it has received about twenty complaints for violation of linguistic rights at the Civil Registry.

The institution's first response, as explained by Plataforma per la Llengua, was to justify the Hispanization of the surname because the use of the accent complies with the norms of the Royal Spanish Academy, a response that the organization describes as an "act of pure Catalanophobia". They accuse the State of ignoring the request and of showing "manifest linguistic supremacism by prioritizing the norms of a language that did not correspond to that of the surname as an excuse for its arbitrary decision". Furthermore, it argues that parentage is "the only legal criterion" that determines the surnames of the newborn, which is why the orthographic regulations do not apply in this case and "the Administration cannot legally invoke grammatical rules to deny its rectification".

The organization legally assisted the family in filing an appeal before the Directorate General of Public Security and Public Faith Registry of the Ministry of Justice. This appeal, in turn, was also denied with "the same false justification as the first resolution". Therefore, the family will now resort to judicial action to achieve the rectification of the registry and eliminate the imposed accent from their son's surname.

According to Plataforma per la Llengua, this violation "in such a common surname is by no means an isolated incident": since 2021, it has recorded about twenty cases reported by citizens who have found themselves in similar situations in Catalonia and the Valencian Community. For all these reasons, it calls on the competent administrations to "put pressure on the impunity of officials when making these absolutely unjustified arbitrary decisions".