A step forward to ensure that all teachers in Catalonia have the C2 level of Catalan, as stipulated by the 2009 Education Act. As ARA has learned, this academic year teacher competitive examinations will finally be called – for both preschool/primary and secondary education – and, as a new development, the C2 level of Catalan will become mandatory. Although this information is still to be presented to the sectoral board with the unions scheduled for November 12th, the current forecast on the table is for the exams to be held during the month of March 2027.

The Barcelona City Council has done what it had to do by suspending the City Guard officer who, when a person asked him to speak to them in Catalan, replied: “It is very fascist to force people to speak in a language they don't want to.” And he even added: “In the exercise of freedom, we speak as we wish. Just like you, who speaks as you wish and nobody tells you in which language you have to speak.” And he finished off with an authoritarian “Agreed?”

The Barcelona City Council has sanctioned a Guàrdia Urbana officer with 24 days of suspension of salary and employment following a linguistic conflict with some citizens. The municipal police officer branded as "fascist" and "totalitarian" the fact that the woman asked them to address them in Catalan as the public officials they are. The video that Plataforma per la Llengua published this Thursday has been key to the complaint and forcing the city council to sanction the officer.

44% of Northern Catalans understand Catalan, but only 15% know how to speak it and 3% speak it habitually. The sociolinguistic survey carried out by the Public Office of the Catalan Language (OPLC) confirms a general decline in the use of the language in Northern Catalonia. In the last study from 11 years ago, and even in the one from 22 years ago, the result was that six out of ten Northern Catalans understood it and 35%-37% could speak it well. The percentage of people who speak it habitually has fallen from 6% to 3% in a decade.

For the first time in the history of the Gaudí Awards, there will be more candidate titles in the best film category, which groups together films in their original Catalan version, than in the best non-Catalan language film category. Specifically, 21 feature films are vying for the nomination for best film, the highest figure in the history of the awards, compared to 20 feature films vying for the nomination for best non-Catalan language film. The production of cinema in the Catalan version has grown by 50% compared to the 14 films of the previous edition, which was already the highest figure in a decade that began with the historic low of six candidates for best film in the 2020, 2021, and 2022 Gaudí Awards.

Taking a look at reality, I believe that today a reflection is needed on the discomfort that the world we live in causes us. Every day gives us a different reason. For example, I find the cyberattack that has affected dozens of supermarkets in Europe to be of a particularly refined evil. At night, someone ordered the machines to go from sub-zero temperatures to 50 degrees. The result is that tons and tons of food have been spoiled. I say that I find it of a particularly refined evil in the sense of being psychologically refined. No one was hurt, the attack caused financial damage, but above all, it has made us feel vulnerable where it hurts the most: making a reality of the dystopia of going shopping and seeing that there is no food. If someone wanted to send the message that they have us in their hands with a simple cyberattack, they have succeeded.

The new Law on the own and official language has not managed to stop the decline of Catalan in Andorra. The Government made public this Monday the study on linguistic knowledge and uses of the population, from which two headlines stand out. On one hand, the social use of Catalan falls eight points in four years (from 63.7 to 55.9%) and practically ties with the habitual use of Spanish, which grows six points (from 48.6 to 55%). On the other hand, the number of citizens who have Spanish as their mother tongue rises significantly: 47% have Spanish as their initial language and 39% have Catalan as their mother tongue. This reverses the figures from the previous survey four years ago, when 44% of respondents had Catalan as their initial language and 40%, Spanish.

This October marks 57 years since Salah Jamal arrived in Barcelona to study medicine. He was supposed to return to the West Bank afterwards, but he never left Gràcia, hence the photo on his WhatsApp with the bell tower of the Plaça de la Vila in the background. A dermatologist, writer, historian, and university professor of Arab culture, this year he received the Creu de Sant Jordi. With an affable demeanor and iron convictions, he is one of the protagonists of the documentary Arrelats, directed by Isona Passola, which will premiere during the Migraccions congress organized by the Ateneu Barcelonès from November 19th to 21st.

A Barcelona court has summoned a doctor from a private hospital to testify as an investigated party for the alleged discrimination suffered by a patient when he spoke in Catalan during an emergency room visit, as reported by the ACN. According to the complainant, the woman said she would not attend to the man if he did not speak to her in Spanish. The court order complies with the mandate of the Barcelona Court, which revoked the initial dismissal and demanded an investigation into the events. The patient, a victim of the alleged linguistic aggression, will testify on the same day, December 1stas reported by Acció Cassandra.

A study from Pompeu Fabra University reveals that young people can improve their Catalan thanks to short videos on TikTok and Instagram. The research analyzed the quality of short videos on social networks and surveyed 76 users aged 14 to 25. The result: 8 out of 10 Catalan speakers claim that their Catalan has improved thanks to this content.

The leading German Catalanist, Til Stegmann, has died at the age of 85. A professor of Romance philology at the University of Frankfurt, where a memorial service was held this weekend, Stegmann was the great Ambassador of Catalonia to Germany (Pagès Editors, 2015), as his memoirs were titled. He dedicated a good part of his life to civic diplomacy, spreading Catalan culture, language, and the political situation in that country. In his role as a cultural bridge, he was one of the key instigators behind the guest literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007 being Catalan, one of the peaks in the dissemination of our language. In 1980, his appearance on the program Vostè pregunta had a great media impact.

We read in ARA that the mayor of Badalona and head of the PP list in Catalonia for November 29th, Xavier García Albiol, has told RTVE that there is a “very serious problem” due to the “setback” of Catalan and is asking for “action to be taken to reverse the trend”. It is lucky he is a tough man, because the fury of the Spanish nationalist entities that heard him will reach higher than the arboreal element with which he does a “Decorando Badalona”, every year. It is believed that the scheme the PP is working with is based on the report by the ERC member Josep Bargalló, who was Minister of Education.

The use of Catalan does not stop retreating and many eyes are turning to the school, where the trend is not reversed despite the linguistic immersion of the students. But immersion is also threatened: the courts have been collecting the demands of various entities and parties to increase the use of Spanish up to 25% and, if the PP governs from November 29, the plan of the populars involves exporting the Galician model —which requires a minimum of 50% Spanish— to Catalan classrooms. And this is despite the fact that this same week the mayor of Badalona and head of the PP list in Catalonia on 29-N, Xavier García Albiol, acknowledged that there is "a very serious problem" due to the "retreat" of Catalan and asked that action be taken to reverse the trend – words, on RTVE, that sparked the fury of various Spanish nationalist entities–. For the moment, the scheme with which the party leadership in Catalonia works is inspired by the report that in 2018 was drawn up, curiously, by an ERC minister: Josep Bargalló.

The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun (Barcelona, 1982), visits the ARA newsroom a few days after it was made public that he will be number 2 on the Sumar candidacy for Barcelona in the upcoming general elections.

"It is very hard to find people who speak Catalan, it depends on the environment you move in –claims Martí Vila from Manresa–. And it is also a drag to hook up at parties, it is very superficial and there are people who are wasted". Faced with this double problem, this 20-year-old programmer and his friend Teo Garcia, a mathematics student, decided to seek a solution. This summer they shut themselves in a house in Rupit to devise, from the epicenter of our beloved Catalonia, an application for hooking up exclusively in Catalan.

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.