This man who is running for the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Catalonia to explain something he calls Contrato con España and which amounts to the most notable measures he intends to implement if Spain hires him as president of the government. They are a series of dreadfully stale right-wing things, which include the defense of national sovereignty (banal nationalism and not so banal in abundance), the “lightening” of the state (cuts in the labor, social, and cultural spheres), “organizing” immigration (open bar for xenophobia and aporophobia), the “guarantee” of pensions (they want to privatize them), the “strengthening” of public healthcare (they want to cut it even more), and a stellar, dazzling measure, without which the “good people,” who are the ones Feijóo addresses, cannot live: guaranteeing the teaching of Spanish in Catalonia, and it is understood that also in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, where there are also natives who insist on speaking (and teaching in school!) the Catalan language. In the clause of the “contract” referring to education, there is also a commitment that candidate Feijóo assumes and that I cannot refrain from reproducing, because it constitutes a singular and enormous absurdity: “[...] education must reward effort, increase requirements, and reinforce the authority of the teacher. The contents will be developed by the royal academies”. The royal academies do not perform nor have they ever performed any type of educational or pedagogical task, and the works they produce have nothing to do with primary or secondary school. Now all that is missing is for the students to have to complete their training with a year on the Juan Sebastián Elcano.

In the midst of the pre-campaign, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has personally committed to "guaranteeing Spanish" in classrooms. In practice, this means following the model that the PP leader applied in Galicia when he governed there and which, in Catalonia, would entail reducing teaching hours in Catalan. Let's review how the linguistic model of the schools in the autonomous region currently presided over by the Popular Party's Alfonso Rueda, successor to the now candidate for the Moncloa on November 29th, works, and which entities in defense of Galician and experts in sociolinguistics label as "disastrous" and "catastrophic".

A study by Pompeu Fabra University that has analyzed the State's written press for ten years shows that the language discourses of conservative Spanish media "generate and perpetuate an image of negativization towards the Catalan language, because they link it to concepts such as closed-mindedness, radicalism, lack of freedom, lack of democracy, coercion and obligation," explains Dr. Vicent Climent Ferrando, professor in the translation department at UPF and one of the authors of the study together with Albert Morales.

Globalization and the rise of remote work have reformulated the linguistic component of the Catalan labor market. This is revealed by a study from Pimec and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) presented this very Tuesday, which points out that English now surpasses Catalan as the language in which job offers are published in the country. In fact, this has been happening since the pandemic: 2020 was the last year in which there were still more job proposals written in Catalan than in English, according to the same barometer.

Getting an interview with Shakira is not easy at all, and Thursday's episode of La revuelta, on RTVE, was proof of that. According to David Broncano's team, they received confirmation of the meeting with only one day's notice and an appointment at 5 p.m. at Macondo Park, the Madrid complex where the artist holds her concerts. Without time to prepare a set or a conventional setup, always according to La revuelta, the presenter, who decided to show the whole process, grabbed a sandwich, a bottle of water, and a small team to head to the venue.

A meager 6.28% of teaching in Valencian at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) compared to 8.04% in English and 84.79% in Spanish. These are the data made public by the Linguistic Promotion and Normalization Service of the same center and which have been denounced by the Teaching and Research Staff for Valencian (PDIxValencià), a group of professors that has launched a signature collection campaign to demand a reversal of the situation suffered by the native language at the institution.

The Secondary School Teachers' union (aspepc·sps) has launched an offensive against "giving away" the advanced level Catalan certificate (the C1) when passing 4th year of ESO, at 16 years old. The campaign aims to collect signatures to break this automatic process, which they believe certifies students with an advanced level of language that they do not actually have.

"Speak Catalan, damn it!" said the grandmother of Miki Fonde, an influencer who has accumulated nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, in the middle of a cooking video that has gone viral on social media. The young man is filming a recipe from his grandmother—bread with sobrassada, a little honey, two eggs, and beaten egg white—when she asks him who he is talking to. When she discovers that he is addressing a "massive audience," she asks him in a very expressive way to do it in Catalan.

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.