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?”

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.

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 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.

Despite the PP's efforts to avoid any controversy before the November 29 elections, this Monday Alberto Núñez Feijóo once again took aim at the Catalan school language immersion system. Although his "Contract with Spain" only contains a generic commitment to "guarantee the teaching of Spanish throughout Spain" (as if that were not already guaranteed), in reality, what is being prepared, according to party sources, is the intervention of the Catalan system so that it more closely resembles the Galician one. And what is this Galician school system that Núñez Feijóo defends? Well, it is a system with 50% in each language and where the core subjects, such as mathematics, are taught exclusively in Spanish.

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.

"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.

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.

The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has a clear answer. One of the "greatest obstacles" to making Catalan, Basque, and Galician official in the European Union is his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. Or, put another way, the pressure that the Spanish PP exerts on its partners. This is what he stated in a speech this Wednesday at the plenary session of Congress, in which he accused Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party of influencing the European People's Party to "halt" this initiative. "The gentleman from Italy whom you invite to your congresses and whom Feijóo is always hugging is one of the biggest obstacles to these languages not yet being official –he asserted–. Have you reproached him for doing this? I have".

The episode of the supposed Catalan-to-Spanish interpreter who was unable to translate even a couple of simple sentences in the trial against the four police officers who put out the eye of activist Roger Español, causing the Catalan lawyers to have to self-translate or switch directly to Spanish, is by no means anecdotal. In the case of a political trial like this one (a trial is political when a victim of police violence for political reasons still has to go through the ordeal of being revictimized to claim the recognition that is owed to them), a fact like this must be understood as an added, or at the very least, subsequent aggression that should have been avoided by all means. Instead of this, the aggression occurred with all the harshness and all the absurdity that characterize the eternal contempt of the Spanish justice system for linguistic diversity, that is, for any language other than Spanish. Because this is the other circumstance that makes the scene at the trial against the police officers who mutilated Español impossible to consider an isolated or anecdotal event: the list not only of slights, but also of judicial actions in the form of resolutions and sentences, by the Spanish justice system against the Catalan language is already endless, uncountable, and unacceptable. And it reaches exactly to this very day.

One of the headlines left this Thursday by the Roger Español case trial has to do with the interpreters who were in the courtroom, unable to translate the lawyers' questions from Catalan to Spanish. The lawyers for the private and popular accusations, exercised by Irídia, Òmnium and the ANC, ended up self-translating or questioning the police directly in Spanish after up to two interpreters could not do their job, a fact that the entities have denounced for "violation of linguistic rights". But how could this situation have occurred?

The afternoon begins dully with a heat that only seems tolerable because the permanent state of exception of the climate has forced us to lower our standards. It is a public holiday Friday and Catalan politics has accumulated so many years of apathy that I admit I arrive loaded with preventive pessimism at Plaça Universitat, and I sink into prejudice when I find the ANC stalls full of white hair. Then I cling to the lifeline of a group of teenagers with estelades who pass by me. They are shy, they explain to me that they have come down by train from Os de Balaguer and say they don't know much about politics. To shake them up a bit, I ask them to compare this Diada with the previous ones they have experienced, and they all agree on one point: "There are more young people than ever." As I get closer to the heart of the matter, I realize they are absolutely right: I haven't missed a single protest since 2012 and I had never seen so many young people. Although the rational part of my brain knows that the absolute number cannot be compared to that of the epic years, the impression of seeing a proportion of young people higher than that of older people completely changes the emotional color of the Diada.

Júlia Riera (Alt Empordà, 1999) is the creator of Daily Catalan, the largest online Catalan learning channel for foreigners. She has just published her first book, Let's Speak Català! (Penguin), which mixes history, language, culture and, as it could not be otherwise, gastronomy.

Languages are not only useful for conversation, but also for legislating, negotiating, defending rights, and building societies. Catalan is one of them. And in the Balearic Islands, this reality takes on a special dimension: the native language coexists with a rich legal tradition that is part of the identity of the Islands and remains fully in force.

Rubén Viñuales (Tarragona, 1983) left Ciutadans six years ago for the PSC, with whom he reached the mayoralty of Tarragona in 2023. Since then, he has governed in minority, but has been able to approve, with relative ease, the budgets by closing pacts with different parties. In this interview conducted at the Diari ARA newsroom, he talks about his city, but also about the far-right, judges, and the use of Catalan.

The Spanish Supreme Court rules “the use of Spanish in the signage of educational centers” supported by public funds cannot be excluded. In the ruling, therefore, an entire section of the document on the organization and management of educational centers (approved by the Department of Education in July 2022) is annulled, which stated that “the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan, Occitan in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable”. It annuls it (and thus shows us that what can be decreed by a government is useless) due to an appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School, and which the high court has “upheld”. I say “upheld” because that is what is said in legal language, but the polysemy in our language does not bother me.

The history of Spanish state nationalism is a history of repressions against minorities. One of the most persistent repressive fronts is the linguistic one: if we were to print all the jurisprudence that has been generated —only in democracy: we don't need to go back to the Decree of Nova Planta— to deprotect Catalan and relegate it from social use, and to reinforce, on the contrary, the presence and use of Spanish, we would have paper to wallpaper the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, and the High Court of Justice of Catalonia. And with all certainty, there would still be some left over.The new ruling is from the Supreme Court, and it corrects the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), which has imposed with various rulings the 25% of Spanish in teaching hours, even —or especially— against the linguistic regulations set by the Generalitat. But the brand new ruling from the Supreme Court comes to say that the TSJC's efforts are not enough: now they also rule on the language in which the signage of schools and educational centers must be done. As they themselves say, “signage is not irrelevant”. The ruling states that school signage can be in the bilingual Spanish/Catalan version, but what is certain is that, at a minimum, it must be in Spanish. Argument to support this? “Spanish is the official language throughout Spain, which means it is a language that cannot be excluded from communications between public authorities and citizens". This is an argument that closely approaches the phrase that serves as the title of this article, a slogan that the Spanish state disseminated in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Valencian Community during the Franco dictatorship. It resembles it perhaps not so much in letter, but in spirit.That Spanish is “the official language throughout Spain”, as the ruling emphasizes, is not an accidental fact nor the fruit of divine grace. Without going back to historical explanations, Spanish is “the official language throughout Spain” because the Constitution of '78, in an article 3 that the ruling also cites, establishes it as such in the current democratic stage: Spanish is official throughout the Spanish state and it is a duty for Spanish citizens to know it, while “other languages” (not mentioned by name) are recognized the “right to be used” and to be “also official in their respective autonomous communities” (not co-official, this is a term that further diminishes the official presence of Catalan and which incomprehensibly many repeat like parrots).Therefore, the Constitution enshrines a principle of inequality that serves as a legal argument for a ruling that is ideological and political. There is in this ruling a component of the day and another of substance. Of the day: whoever can do it, let them do it, that is, a bombardment of rulings that could destabilize the Sánchez government through its relationship with Catalan partners, especially Junts. Of substance: an eternal nationalism whose raison d'être lies in the fight against diversity in all its forms. Also (perhaps especially) against linguistic and cultural diversity.

Shaun Debnath (Barcelona, 2004) was born and raised in El Raval. He is a content creator and defines himself as "Catalan, Indian, and gay: triple threat". We meet in the gardens of the Historic Building of the University of Barcelona, where, between study hours for his computer engineering exams (a detail he mentions in a low voice so as not to reinforce stereotypes), he grants us some time to talk about his experience on social media.

It often happens to me – and I take for granted it's a generational thing – that in my circle, the fact that my husband and I don't watch series or movies together is met with surprise. I say it must be generational because only people our age remember when families used to gather to watch TV, all at the same time and on the same channel.

We tend to think that Europe has been as it is for a long time. But no. The Europe we know, with its countries and languages, was born dizzyingly between 1870 and 1871. And this continental Big Bang exploded because of a Catalan, General Joan Prim.