Catalan, the Balearic Islands and the Constitutional Court

It is common to fall into the error of speaking about the situation of the Catalan language by autonomous communities of the Spanish state, as if what happens in any place of the Catalanophony (to use the term of Miquel Àngel Pradilla: to understand the current situation of Catalan, and have arguments to think, his book is absolutely recommended) Sociolinguistic reflections from the Catalanophonic environment) will not also affect the rest. In the case of Catalonia, the fact that the government is promoting a National Language Pact, or that the Spanish government is promoting the official status of Catalan in Europe—two important pieces of news that could be decisive if everyone manages to overcome partisan tantrums—should not make us forget that, without the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community, any initiative on Catalan is hopeless. In the case of the National Language Pact, it is obvious that we cannot count on the support, in any form, of the current governments of the Balearic Islands or the Generalitat Valenciana: moreover, in the extremely unlikely event that such support could be proposed, it would in any case be counterproductive. However, we can try to seek links with other institutions—universities are of key importance—or the various entities that work in favor of the language from civil society, such as the Cultural Action of the Valencian Country, the Escola Valenciana, the Joan Lluís Vives Interuniversity Institute, or the Balearic Cultural Work.

This very weekend, the Balearic Cultural Work (OBB) had to deny another false, or at least biased, report from the Balearic Government regarding Catalan. Indeed, it is not true, as the Government spread, that the Constitutional Court has endorsed its measure to eliminate the Catalan requirement for public healthcare in the Balearic Islands. What the Constitutional Court did last week was rule on a purely formal issue arising from a first appeal, filed by the OCB (Central Chamber of Deputies) through 50 Socialist and Sumar representatives. However, the court does not address the grounds for unconstitutionality of the elimination of Catalan from public healthcare, which it will have to do so when it assesses the second appeal filed by the OCB itself, after the PP repealed its own decree due to a legislative mess caused by its own parliamentary group, when it mistakenly voted in favor of a package of .

The whole thing is convoluted (and absurd and grotesque), but the bottom line is that what the Prohens government cannot say is that the Constitutional Court approves its language policy, which is contrary to the linguistic rights of Catalan speakers, because that hasn't happened. It's not the case that everyone, and to the extent possible, everyone at once and everywhere. We already know that the framework of autonomous regions also harms the normality of the Catalan language;