Adania Shibli (Arab al-Shibli, Palestine, 1974) asks that her books not be read from a political angle but rather a literary one, yet it is practically impossible to decouple the stories she recounts from the current situation in Palestine. With her previous novel, Minor Detail (Navona, 2024), Shibli was a finalist for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. She also experienced the controversy firsthand, when the Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled her. Her new book, Deception (La Magrana / Random House, translated from Arabic to Catalan by Mohammad Bittari) travels to the Palestine of the 90s through the hands of two nameless young people. Each of them carries out a clandestine action: the boy is caught and locked in prison, the girl is never caught. Based on these events, Shibli traces their existences and constructs a poignant story that reflects on the search for an individual future in a situation of oppression and collective exclusion.

Granted that the Eixample is full of streets dedicated to the exploits of the soldiers of the Crown of Aragon –from Calabria to Sardinia and from Corsica to Aragon–, but if today a taxi driver is looking for Almogavars, they shouldn't head towards Razzmatazz but towards the Arc de Triomf, at the Catalan Book Week. This is what the Valencian sociolinguist Toni Mollà says, who presents The languages of tomorrow (Bromera) on a crowded afternoon of La Mercè dedicated to Catalan. "Surely those of us here are staunch Almogavars, but there are global linguistic uses that we should take into account when designing official and non-official linguistic policies," he warns. He argues that Catalan will only be a language of tomorrow if it moves out of the school and folkloric environment and adapts to what is structural: capitalism, globalization, and algorithms. This is in addition to maintaining the individual linguistic loyalty of speakers.

Back to basics. Back to basics. This is the foundation of the learning reinforcement measures presented this Thursday by the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó. These measures will be focused on improving how the two main pillars of learning are taught: language and reading comprehension, and mathematics. Among the guidelines, a significant change has been announced: next year there will once again be mandatory readings in baccalaureate, and all schools and high schools will be required to have a school reading plan.

Spain, the lack of self-esteem and Spanish nationalist fervor marked this Tuesday's colloquium at the Círculo Ecuestre, where languages were the protagonists. "Ayusism" fully permeated the Barcelona club in front of about sixty attendees, and served to comment on the existential obsessions typical of a nation-state that is not France and refuses to be Switzerland. It did so with a key person from the Madrid president's inner circle, the deputy spokesperson for the PP in the regional Parliament, Rafa Núñez, who created the Vox brand but was signed in 2022 by Isabel Díaz Ayuso. He was accompanied by the leader of the Catalan PP, Alejandro Fernández, and the party's brain and senator Juan Milián.

Spain has returned to bring this Tuesday the official status of Catalan to the European Union. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, had already announced, the Spanish executive has explained to the EU General Affairs Council that it links the recognition of Basque, Galician, and Catalan to the accession of new states to the community club. It considers it "unthinkable" that another language be added to the official regime of the EU (such as Montenegrin or Albanian) if the official status of the co-official languages of the Spanish state has not been accepted beforehand.

Catalan is residual in the sports and leisure activities of young people in Barcelona. Only 11% of conversations between young people are exclusively in Catalan and 76% are exclusively in Spanish (the remaining 13% are bilingual uses), according to a pilot study conducted by the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) on the use of Catalan in 14 municipal sports and leisure entities in the capital. In contrast, the percentages flip when it comes to conversation between instructors: 32% of instructors converse exclusively in Spanish among themselves, but the majority, 68%, speak in Catalan.

Barcelona City Council has never inspected or sanctioned any business for failing to comply with regulations regarding the Catalan language. Although the Consumer Code dates back to 2010 and the linguistic policy law dates back to 1998, in all these years the council has never sanctioned any company for not labeling shops in Catalan, not serving in Catalan, or not offering the menu in Catalan to customers, despite the fact that non-compliance is evident on the streets and in the city's businesses. Why? Although city councils have inspection and sanctioning powers, until now, Barcelona's inspectors had not taken language into account in their actions. The law recognizes the customer's right to be served in Catalan, and also to receive communications (signage, invoices, menus, instructions, advertising) at least in Catalan.

Aitana offered yesterday the last concert of the four she had scheduled at the Palau Sant Jordi. And she did it with a show in which she spoke more Catalan than ever, throughout the whole concert, after days of training with her friends. "I would like to take Catalan classes, I would like to maintain the language, because it is the most important thing we have here in Catalonia. We are bilingual. We speak Spanish but also Catalan," she said.

There are words we use every day and yet we are not entirely sure how to spell them or what they mean. Sometimes we look them up to resolve a grammatical doubt; other times, because we have just found them in a text and they have sparked our curiosity. The searches on Diccionari.cat during 2025 leave us with a very particular photograph. "Déu-n’hi-do", "senyal", "anàlisi", and "compte" are the most consulted words, followed by "provar", "comptar", "badar", "corrent", "biaix", and "il·lusió".

It's July, but classes haven't ended for everyone. There are 143 secondary school students from Barcelona (and their teachers) who, defying the temperatures, have extended the school year for three extra weeks to do an intensive Catalan course. After last year's pilot program, this summer the Barcelona Education Consortium has expanded the initiative with seven groups of about twenty students between 12 and 16 years old, most of whom need to consolidate their B1 Catalan level. They are all young people who have arrived in the city in the last year, mostly from Latin America but also from Morocco, China, Pakistan, or Ukraine. During the school year, they have attended one of the ten accelerated welcome classrooms (AAA) in Barcelona's high schools. Unlike the 238 ordinary welcome classrooms in public and private schools, the AAAs are designed for newly arrived secondary students to have an intensive immersion in Catalan for four months before joining their assigned educational center.

New ruling against Catalan in schools. The Supreme Court (TS) has ruled that Spanish cannot be excluded from the signage of public educational centers in Catalonia. It does so by annulling a section of a document on the organization and management of educational centers for the 2022/23 academic year, which was approved by the Generalitat in July 2022 and stated that "the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan, Occitan in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable, which are the reference languages of the educational system." The Supreme Court rules against a judgment by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), following an appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia with the support of the Prosecutor's Office.

Most of the world's languages use the same patterns when naming the things around us. An international study led by Pompeu Fabra University and published in Nature Human Behaviour states that languages tend towards lexical economy and, therefore, try to reuse known words or parts of words, as long as the context allows and does not generate confusion. According to the researcher from the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Thomas Brochhagen, language economy is "a cognitive bias" that over time shapes all languages, which speakers do not do consciously or plannedly. The brain tends to seek the fastest routes for communication.

Plataforma per la Llengua has filed a complaint with the Labour Inspectorate against the office and co-working space company Aticco "for having dismissed a worker for habitually speaking Catalan at work, in Barcelona", they explain in a statement. The entity hopes that an investigation will be opened into the Catalan company "to investigate whether it has imposed Spanish as the mandatory language of communication and has limited the use of Catalan" and, if pertinent, for corrective and sanctioning measures to be adopted. Plataforma will also take the case to the Ombudsman of Barcelona and will report Aticco to the new Office for the Protection of Linguistic Rights of the Generalitat de Catalunya because the signs and fixed information in the premises must appear, at least, in Catalan. The company has assured ARA that it regrets "the biased interpretation" of the facts and the fact that "a strictly labor decision has been presented as a linguistic conflict, which is non-existent". The Minister of Linguistic Policy has ordered the Office for the Protection of Linguistic Rights "to study the case and adopt the appropriate measures".

A new editorial category has emerged this summer in bookstores: books for playing in Catalan. Shops have even set up a new arrivals table to accommodate the avalanche of illustrated activity book publications, which are already climbing the bestseller lists.

The same day that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) backed the 25% of Spanish in classrooms, Barcelona brought together the main experts in linguistic diversity in an international forum organized by Linguapax and financed, precisely, with European Union funds. One of the speakers was the Welsh sociolinguist Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, president of the European Language Equality Network (ELEN) and director of the Centre for Welsh and Celtic Studies, who knows the Catalan case in depth – and, moreover, also speaks it.

He has a slight accent and a cadence that suggest he comes from very far away and that Catalan is not his mother tongue. Nevertheless, both the pronunciation and vocabulary of Alejandro González, a 25-year-old Hispanic-Colombian, are excellent. And even more so considering that he has never lived in Catalonia nor, for now, does he have any intention of settling there. He is not driven by need, nor obligation, nor even love, which are the factors that usually push someone to learn a language. In fact, it wasn't until he landed in Toulouse to study a master's degree four years ago that he became curious about the language and culture of a friend who introduced herself as "a Catalan from Barcelona".

The Catalan linguistic immersion model, which has weakened over the years and with social changes, is one of the fronts that needs to be reformulated to improve the situation of Catalan. When asked how, the Minister of Linguistic Policy points to Northern Catalonia. "La Bressola has an immersion model that, with 2% Catalan-speaking students, manages to make Catalan the language among equals without adult supervision. If this is possible in its context, it must be possible in other centers," he stated in the last interview with ARA. In Catalonia, only half of 6th graders always speak Catalan with teachers and only one in four always speaks Catalan when doing group work with classmates. Outside the classroom, 60% of students do not use Catalan with their peers. How do they manage at La Bressola to ensure students actually converse in Catalan in the classroom, playground, and dining hall?

From Catalonia, we observe with attention how Euskera has rejuvenated its speaker pyramid thanks to the school, but the language is far from being majority in the streets. Imanol Larrea is the director of the Soziolinguistika Klusterra, the research and revitalization center for Euskera that is financed with public and university funds and thanks to pro-language entities. A sociologist and doctor in communication from UPF, he is a great connoisseur of the Catalan reality – he lived in Catalonia from 2008 to 2015: he speaks Catalan perfectly – because he did his thesis here, worked in linguistic reception, and has collaborated with Catalan research groups. He now dedicates all his efforts to creating knowledge about Euskera to outline policies that will lift Basque out of a worrying stagnation. From June 17 to 20, he participates in the Forum on Linguistic Diversity, organized by Linguapax International, with dozens of experts to analyze the global linguistic diversity crisis and how to reverse it.

A passenger traveling from Girona - Costa Brava airport to Brussels last Wednesday was shouted at and reprimanded by a security control agent for asking for instructions in Catalan. According to what he explained to ARA and also stated in the complaint filed with Aena, after passing through the scanner, the man had to stop to go through the explosive substances control. The agent who was checking the luggage asked him "In what language?", to know how to give him the instructions. "Catalan", he said. That's when the shouts started. "I'm not a call center where you press five and I speak whatever language you want!", she told him. And she shouted towards the other security colleagues "They don't pay me enough to learn Catalan!", and other phrases of this kind, with an attitude that the other security colleagues supported.