"The requirement to speak Catalan well is the problem."

Barcelona–Higher up, hands up everyone, as if this were a robbery, ah!

With this return, the class warms up the classmates who have been assigned to rap. In groups of four, they must quickly rattle off phrases with words that appear on a screen. Skin, brain, camel, yolk.

–You look very different.

–You're doing it very badly!

–You're a delinquent.

Boys and girls get the words out of their system with simple, weak sentences. Some don't know a word, and read it and below: "I don't understand Catalan.", a boy excuses himself. When they manage to connect the verses thematically and respond, the teacher encourages them.

–Good one!

The end of the school year is approaching and today is the last day of the improvised rap workshop that the Versembrant cooperative has taught at the headquarters of the Versembrant cooperative. Twenty fourth-year ESO students are participating in the final competition, in which a class jury will choose the best rappers.

–I didn't know that was a funeeeal.

For a decade, Versembrant has been bringing rap written in Catalan to classrooms across the country, and has now launched a pilot program to perform improvised rap in two centers in Barcelona to encourage young people's oral spontaneity in Catalan. The initiative has been dubbed "Catalunya Rookies" because it should serve as a breeding ground for young people. Catalonia Freestyle, the Catalan improvised rap competition that is gaining audiences and sharp-tongued rappers.

The director of INS Quatre Cantons, Óscar Altide, affirms that there are "strong families from the center who preserve Catalan at home," but the kids change languages at school: "You go to the playground and you see that they basically interact in Spanish. I suppose social media has an influence." The use of Spanish. The center's teachers have been trained to reverse this. Versembrant workshop leaders encounter the same problem: "The surveys say it and the students tell us when we ask them, almost 100% do not use Catalan as their habitual language. It's our challenge and our success: while we do the workshop, these young people express themselves artistically in Catalan in the classroom, with us, and among themselves. We see that the language is Estivill, musician from Lágrimas de Sangre and workshop leader.

The final argument: Rosalia vs. Jan

The judges' face is like a stone, as Risto Mejide eliminates groups until the final, which is contested by Rosalia and Jan. "I'm completely bilingual: I have no trouble switching languages, and I do it unconsciously," she explains. What does it depend on? "I speak Catalan or Spanish depending on who I'm talking to, where people are from, and the topic. But we go out and with friends, we'll talk whatever we want," she states. For her, the poor quality of Catalan is a matter of dislike: "The problem is that they force you to speak Catalan well and they really scold us for not speaking it well. Catalan is the problem," she predicts.

Rosalía's opponent, Jan Llorca, also 15, explains to ARA that he speaks Catalan with his father and Spanish with his mother, Catalan during extracurricular activities, and Spanish with his friends at school. He's aware that "years ago, people spoke Catalan on the street. Schools either teach you Catalan or you don't learn it," he says. What does he think? "These are times and trends that change, like everything in life."

The rap workshop continues. "It's about stimulating the language, especially the more informal register," says the director. Linguistic quality isn't taken into account here. "With the freestyle We want them to see that Catalan is not always something institutional, boring or academic, but a street language," says Estivill. The two workshop leaders are musicians and one of their goals is also to give the students references of the hip-hop and urban scene in Catalan, which they don't know and might like. "In Terres de l'Ebre or Lleida, the problem is that newcomers acquire Catalan naturally and fluently, but rather the cultural desert and the isolation from what's happening in the scene," says Joel Prieto, who with Versembrant has toured 34 regions. "I think they lack references. They feed on networks, on YouTubers and extrimeros, of which there are few in Catalan and they are buried by the avalanche of content in other languages, so their references are not only in Spanish but they channel them towards a specific political thought, sometimes even carrying out campaigns against Catalan," laments Estivill.