Immigration and Catalan language

In a recent interview on TV3, Maria Teresa Cabré (president of the IEC) argued that, for Catalan to become a truly shared language, new approaches are needed. Among the ideas she proposed, one is particularly suggestive from the outset: hybridization. The proposal is clear: if Catalonia wants immigration to embrace Catalan, it is not enough to demand its learning; a good welcome is necessary, fostering a sense of belonging, and making real affection for the language possible.The idea, formulated like this, is difficult to reject. No society can aspire to turn its language into a common space if it is not capable of welcoming, recognizing, and incorporating. The problem, however, is not the goodness of the premise, but its insufficiency. The approach of hybridization emphasizes the relational and social dimension of the bond with the language, but it leaves in the background what is decisive today: the structural conditions in which immigrants, their descendants, and othered groups live.It is not enough to say that Catalan speakers must “permeabilize” themselves for there to be more interaction, more meeting, and, from there, more adherence to Catalan. This may work in some cases. But turning this intuition into a general answer is, at the very least, a simplification. It assumes that the distance between the language and a part of the population is, above all, a problem of lack of contact, when it is often the expression of a much deeper social fracture.In Catalonia, this fracture cannot be understood without racism. Not only in its explicit and xenophobic expression, but also in more diffuse, normalized, and difficult-to-identify forms, embedded in institutional practices, social expectations, collective imaginaries, and daily classifications. It is a racism that continues to operate, often without being recognized as such, even in spaces that think of themselves as committed to social justice. This blindness is not only moral: it is also epistemological, because it prevents understanding what happens with language in contexts of inequality. If immigrant and otherized people live more exposed to school, residential, and labor segregation, to discrimination in access to housing, to symbolic degradation in public representation, or to forms of selective secularism that fall mainly on certain religious groups, then the relationship with language cannot be thought of solely in terms of affective welcome.

Language does not circulate in a social vacuum, but within a power structure. Therefore, adhesion to a language depends not only on the sympathy it arouses or the quality of interpersonal bonds, but also on the place from which each person is looked at, recognized, or excluded. Asking for appreciation for Catalan without facing the material and symbolic conditions of exclusion is to rely too much on the effects of proximity and too little on the weight of inequality. This is shown by the fact that today in Catalonia there are many young people who speak excellent Catalan and who, nevertheless, have decided not to use it: knowing a language does not imply feeling it as one's own, especially when social experience is marked by suspicion, humiliation, or the persistent perception of not belonging to the us that language symbolizes.Here there is an important blind spot in the discourse on cohesion: it is often taken for granted that language is, in itself, a means of integration. But for many young people it represents a painful contradiction: they master Catalan, they speak it, they learned it at school, but they do not feel recognized and continue to encounter very specific social and racial barriers. In these conditions, abandoning the language can express distance, fatigue, or resentment. For this reason, one must be careful with kind metaphors: hybridization can be a suggestive ideal, but it runs the risk of remaining a naive vision if it does not incorporate the real social conflict that crosses the country. A society does not become “hybrid” solely through contact between groups, but also when it transforms the conditions that turn difference into inequality.If we want Catalan to be a shared language, a language for everyone, it is not enough to demand relational openness. We must confront what erodes belonging: the segregation, discrimination, and racial hierarchy that structures a part of Catalan social life. Without this perspective, the defense of Catalan risks confusing cohesion with voluntarism. And without social and racial justice, the promise of a common language will be, for many, little more than a rhetorical invitation.