Life of a Catalan speaker
Forty years ago, RS walked into a bar in the Sants neighborhood, ordered a café con leche, and the owner didn't understand him. He repeated it in Catalan. But the owner told him that "we are in Spain". A person next to him told him he should be more understanding with newcomers. He added: After all, Catalan is the language of the majority, and the majority should show solidarity with the minority."
RS had grown up in a metropolitan city that had more than doubled its population. Thousands of poor families had been forced into commuter neighborhoods without essential services. By legal imperative, this was already the case in schools, in the media, in the administration. Catalan speakers were still the majority, yes, but their language had no rights.
With the arrival of autonomy and linguistic normalization, politicians and intellectuals told RS that it was time to be generous. They said the immigrants had come to "lift Catalonia," while Catalan speakers were the heirs of an exploitative bourgeoisie. Some children of the newcomers began to proclaim their pride. charnego and present themselves as part of an oppressed minority. RS had Catalan grandparents; he couldn't boast of Charnego pride, but neither could he boast of Catalan pride, because in that case he'd be accused of supremacism and, who knows, even xenophobia. His grandparents were workers or shopkeepers; they'd worked hard and had suffered Franco's repression, not only as citizens but as Catalan speakers. But the victims were others.
RS citizens were told that Catalonia had always been a bilingual country, and that now, with Catalan in schools, the issue was resolved. However, statistics showed that Catalan was declining. Meanwhile, in Madrid, the press reported that Spanish was being persecuted in Catalonia. With the turn of the century, more immigration arrived, coming from all corners of the world where poverty or war expelled citizens. grocery store lifelong now belonged to some Pakistanis, and Miguel's bar, where his parents had lunch, was owned by some Chinese, who did not call him "we are in Spain", because that didn't matter to them, but they only spoke Spanish with a parish that was already very Castilianized, where the natives changed languages out of laziness.
When RS said that this would lead to the disappearance of Catalan, he received criticism from all sides. Some accused him of not accepting the virtues of multiculturalism, others of endangering the country's civil unity, or of fomenting hatred in Spain. If he remained steadfast in using Catalan, they called him exclusionary. And if he gave in, they told him it was his fault for changing languages. Meanwhile, Catalan was now only the language of a third of the population, and his children spoke Spanish with their friends because it made their lives easier, since Spanish speakers, despite decades of schooling in Catalan, remained largely monolingual, and foreigners learned Spanish because it was the only true language.
Last week, citizen RS walked into the same bar in Sants, the one he had entered forty years ago, and still had the courage to order a café con leche in Catalan. The Argentinian waiter didn't understand him. A person next to him told him he should be more understanding with newcomers. He added: After all, Catalan is now the language of a minority, and minorities shouldn't want to impose themselves on the majority.