In the endless debate about the state of health of the Catalan language, it happens, as in so many other areas, that we often guide ourselves by our perceptions and impressions rather than by careful analysis of the data. In the case of language, moreover, it seems to be true that every Catalan carries a sociolinguist within. It is evident, in any case, that it is not a debate that we can face with complete coolness, free from worries and even anxieties, because we have the perception that too much is at stake: we project into the uncertain future of the language the uncertain future of all of us as a society.

3Cat's SX3, with funding from Grup Transversal, this week opened the doors of Fantàstix, a new cultural, family, and immersive experience focused on the power of stories, imagination, and the active participation of children. Located in the Sagrada Família neighborhood, the space, which was a former 2,000-square-meter parking lot, has been transformed into a "factory of imagination," where the narrative focuses on the premise of recovering the power of storytelling, which has disappeared from the world. The project's intention is to become a new meeting point for families, the educational world, and Catalan children's and youth culture.

The Archbishop of Tarragona, Joan Planellas, attends to ARA from the Archbishop's Palace, seven years after taking office. He is also president of the Tarraconense Episcopal Conference, which brings together Catalan bishops.

Today is the first day of the teachers' strikes with which the school year will end badly. There are conversations between the Government and the teachers' unions, but publicly we are still in the phase of a tug-of-war between the two positions and, therefore, the end of the conflict is not in sight. The counselor went to TV3 this morning, she put on a brave face (as President Illa did in the last control session) and, apparently, we are in a “let's see who lasts longer”. And, despite everything, the Government is seeing firsthand the bitter reality of all the governments that have preceded it: Catalonia is very poorly financed and has no more room for maneuver.The future hangs from the school, which is almost like saying that everything hangs from it, including that of the Catalan language. In recent times, worried voices are heard about the ease with which Catalan-speaking children from Catalan-speaking families play, sing, and communicate in Spanish, or switch languages very easily, and there are people who suggest whether it would be better to separate students by language, so that teaching in Catalan is as little interfered with as possible. On this, I recommend the article signed today by political scientist Jordi Muñoz, which, under the title “Linguistic segregation?”, provides some data: Catalan is not losing speakers, it continues to gain new ones, but it lives in contact with a language, Spanish, which is gaining even more, and all the new Catalan speakers, of which there are some, do not compensate for the growth of the Spanish-speaking population. But Muñoz also says that “reducing contact between linguistic communities would further limit the incorporation of new speakers”. And he concludes by adding a surprising piece of data: “If only a third of Catalan speakers stopped switching languages when interacting with Spanish speakers, this would have the same impact on the social use of the language as a 10 percentage point increase in the demographic weight of Catalan speakers”. So, if only one third of Catalans kept speaking Catalan, this would have the effect of 10% more Catalan speakers. It would be good for Professor Muñoz to develop the idea, but it has to do with an empirical evidence that Carme Junyent already spoke about, who in an interview with Vilaweb four years ago said the following: “The best thing Catalan has now, and which is the great hope, is that more than half of those who speak it do not have it as their first language. This is a gift that is difficult to achieve.” And she added: “Therefore, we should know how to value the fact that so many people have made the effort to learn Catalan, with all the dimension it has. But this means that we need a little patience, that we must be open to the possibility that they do not speak well while they speak. If people speak and we give them the opportunity to do so because we don't change languages, they will end up speaking well.”  We have said here many times that if Catalan is not legally essential to earn a living, it has a harder time being hegemonic. And that it is unfair to have to demand individual attitudes to make efforts that Spanish speakers do not have to make. But no one said that life was fair, much less perfect. It's no use demanding everything without doing anything. Or not doing much. And this, as Carme Junyent said: “Basically, it means always speaking in Catalan. Speaking in Catalan by default and if there are problems, we will solve them.”Good morning.

On the 9th, the last stage of the Correllengua Agermanat will take place in Brussels, a mobilization that has managed to unite the Catalan Countries, from end to end, in a popular race that is actually a declaration of collective esteem for the Catalan language. The Flame of Language has been passed on, from relay to relay, from hand to hand, through towns, cities, and islands, symbolically drawing a cultural and civic community that recognizes itself by the Catalan language. Everywhere (in Catalonia, in the Valencian Country, in the Balearic Islands, in L'Alguer), participation has been massive and has made the Correllengua Agermanat an act of self-affirmation with a truly massive mobilization capacity. And with a tone —as in Estellés's verse— festive, joyful, and combative, the result of the organization's excellent work, which has also taken up the baton from the history of the different Correllenguas, first celebrated in Mallorca in 1993.Just last Sunday, the Flame arrived in Palma, and the citizens' reception was once again enthusiastic and massive, as it was during the Yes to Language two years ago. The songs of the group Música Nostra (with the singing of La Balanguera as the closing act) and the speeches of the organizers —far from routine, certainly powerful— set the tone for a great civic affirmation of a feeling, but above all of a right: the inalienable right to live fully in one's own language and, therefore, to be the country we are and not another. The Palma event was so successful that the next day the spokesperson for Marga Prohens' party, Sebastià Sagreras, came out to congratulate the organizers of the Correllengua Agermanat and try to put a good face on it. Naturally, the Popular Party (which governs in the Balearic Islands not with the support, but on the orders of Vox) had turned a deaf ear to the call precisely until the moment of seeing (once again) thousands of people clamoring in the street for the language. The linguistic policy of the PP-Vox government in the Balearic Islands consists of suppressing or marginalizing Catalan from public life (in healthcare, in administrations, in education), although at the same time they try to perform a balancing act by avoiding what they call “linguistic confrontation”.Whatever the rulers do, the Correllengua Agermanat leaves a decisive message: there is a living, awake, and organized citizenry and civil society, with a large base of young people who are both children of deeply rooted families and recent immigrants, willing to defend Catalan and Catalan culture as a way of living and being in the world, and who will not allow it to be taken away from them. This realization should not lead to any triumphalism (the very existence of governments with Vox in the Catalan Countries makes the magnitude of the problem quite clear), but above all it nullifies the catastrophic discourses and hate speeches that want to present Catalan as a semi-dead language due to immigration. Enough whining and finger-pointing, and much more Flame.

Happy coincidence: the two books most sold by Sant Jordi share the fact of being written with a lot of humor. The fiction of Crispetes de matinada is a wisely managed festival of hilarious situations, conversations, and thoughts, and the non-fiction of Manual de defensa del català (yes, unfortunately, it is non-fiction) presents itself to readers with humor that acts like the mustard and ketchup that make a shoe-sole type burger digestible.

Today the day breathes the happiness of a festival, of a festival that has a unique particularity: it is simultaneously a national festival and a universal festival. And, frankly, as the world is (and with the busy day that awaits us), with this we would have enough to analyze this April 23rd, which today could have a very simple title: Long live Saint George.But current events are what they are, imperative and capricious, to the point that today it brings us the other side of life. If Sant Jordi is the perfume of a rose and the smell of a new book, the pact between the PP and Vox in Aragon is as if it rained shit and the air had been smeared with the stench of rot.The PP and Vox have agreed in Aragon to demand "freeing Aragon from the imposition of Catalan" to invest Jorge Azcón, from the PP, as president. Yes, as it sounds: "Freeing Aragon from Catalan." There is a section of the agreement titled "Freedom in the face of indoctrination and imposition." The law stating that Aragonese Catalan is a co-official language is being reformed, and the Aragonese Institute of Catalan, which oversees the application of Catalan norms and the social use of the language, is being abolished. Let's see, the PP already invented the name LAPAO to avoid saying Catalan, but now they are not hiding anything and are talking about "freeing Aragon from Catalan," as if one were talking about freeing it from a foreign invasion or a disease, as if it were not the language spoken and that has been spoken for centuries by the Aragonese who live in La Franja.  

Thirty years ago, CIEMEN and PEN Català launched the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights with the conviction that linguistic diversity is a heritage of humanity. Today, this conviction remains valid, because the situation has gone from worrying to alarming.

The Agermanat Correllengua will celebrate its central event on April 21st at Plaça Comercial in Barcelona with various musical groups from the Catalan Countries. This musical and cultural day will be a key point in the journey of the Flame of the Language, and will feature Auxili, Els Catarres, La Fúmiga, and Companyia Elèctrica Dharma, among other well-known groups and artists such as Júlia Colom, Mar Grimalt, La Maria, Pèl de Gall, Pitxorines and Xanguito, Abril, and Maxime Cayuela.According to the presentation, this event will take place at eight in the evening, after the arrival of the flame in the Catalan capital has already made its way through the city streets all afternoon. Beyond musical enjoyment, the Correllengua manifesto will also be read, in favor of the Catalan language and linguistic rights. Immediately after, the collective performance of the Correllengua song, Amb el cor, interpreted by the participating artists, can be seen. This song was featured by about twenty groups, among which La Gossa Sorda is also included, which is one of the few that will not attend the central event, according to the forecast. The day will conclude with the final concert by Auxili, which will close the celebration.The Correllengua Agermanat is a non-competitive popular relay race that aims to bring the Flame of the Catalan Language throughout the linguistic domain, with more than 1,500 kilometers to cover. The initiative, which was conceived by Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua in collaboration with a hundred entities, will start on April 19th in Perpignan and will end on May 5th in L'Alguer. Registrations to participate in the Correllengua have been open since March on its website.

It had not been long since the Constitutional Court's ruling on the new Statute, when Professor Marc Carrillo, a professor of constitutional law at the UPF and a great expert in the contemporary legal history of Spain, warned us, in a work meeting of the Research Group on the Francoist and Democratic Eras (GREFD-UAB; currently, Research Group on Dictatorships and Democracies, GReDD-UAB), that everything that referred to the Catalan language in the public sphere had come out profoundly affected. In non-legal terms, in this area of the TC ruling, the most radical and retrograde Spanish nationalism had prevailed, the kind that has always maintained, since imperial times (returned to the present and for which King Felipe VI does not have to apologize because, as a very beloved novelist in Spain wrote, his predecessors brought them urban planning, sewers, and something else) until our days (more than 500 years!), that the nation is founded on language and religion; that is, the Spanish language and the most rancid Catholicism. With Catholicism fallen into disgrace, the language remained (and remains). The final result was a foregone conclusion.

A simple question to ChatGPT (“What is the approximate number of unfavorable rulings against the Catalan language that have occurred during the democratic period?”) gives us a rather long and, above all, disheartening answer. The AI does not dare to give a specific number, but it distinguishes: if we stick to rulings that have limited Catalan normalization policies, especially in the educational and administrative spheres, the figure ranges between twenty and thirty rulings against the Catalan language. However, if we broaden the focus (which must be broadened) to interlocutory orders and resolutions considered minor (precautionary measures, enforcement of judgments, etc.), the figure easily rises to “diverse dozens” of judicial decisions against Catalan issued during the democratic period, that is, from 1978 onwards. The areas affected by rulings that limit the use of Catalan are, for the most part, the educational system, followed by regional linguistic regulations, linguistic requirements for civil servants, institutional use, and signage. In summary, a sustained judicial effort over time to minimize or erase the presence of the Catalan language from public spaces, especially in schools. That linguistic diversity be politically attacked, vilified in the media, and pursued judicially and even policed almost as if it were a crime, is an unacceptable situation for anyone with a minimum of democratic sensibility and common sense. It is, plain and simple, a disgrace.Judges are people who have been able to win the competitive examinations to become judges, and therefore are perfectly capable of understanding that Catalan is the language of Catalonia, with all that this entails. It is another matter that they decide not to accept it. The fallacious reasoning that attempts to present Spanish as if it were a language in danger due to linguistic immersion in Catalan is exactly the same (equally unacceptable) as those that say that feminist demands are a danger to men, or that the integration of immigrants endangers the continuity of Western cultures and societies. They are expressions of supremacism, and this is what the judges who issue jurisprudence against an official language, as fully deserving of respect as any other, do: spit supremacism with a stroke of the pen. To use justice and place it at the service of a political ideology, in this case that of state Spanish nationalism.

From this ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia against Catalan (I say “against Catalan” because it seeks to prevent our language from being “armored” in classrooms) a clear conclusion can be drawn: only a state of its own guarantees the legal protection that any official language has in its own territory. It shouldn't necessarily be this way: in a truly plurinational state, Catalan would be as Spanish as Castilian. But that's not the case, and I don't think I'm mistaken if I say it never will be. The only language we have a constitutional duty to know is Castilian. This is proclaimed by Article 3 of the 1978 Constitution, which at the end also states that “the different linguistic modalities of Spain” are a richness “that will be the object of special respect and protection”. Well, it's good that they protect Catalan!  

I've been able to see and hear, on social media, the speech given by TV3 sports journalist Xavier Bonastre to say goodbye to his colleagues on the day he retired (for months now I've only been seeing people from my own circle). fifth (who are retiring, and it's a somewhat unsettling reminder). From here, I congratulate Xavier Bonastre on his retirement and for so many years of good work, and, especially, I congratulate him on the words he spoke at his moving farewell.

We're ending the week with gasoline prices climbing and the war escalating. To give you an idea, the US Treasury Department has announced it will temporarily authorize countries to buy Russian oil from tankers in transit.Iran's new supreme leader, son of the previous one, says the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed While Netanyahu remains silent and bombs, Trump speaks to continue occupying the center of the stage alone and says things like the increase in fuel prices is bringing many benefits to American companies.

This is the story of a sleepy girl and a bouncy fish. Many years ago, in a place called Catalonia, some grumpy gentlemen with mustaches and beards the color of shoe polish, or nuclear detergent, believed that Catalan wasn't dead but rather a Sleeping Beauty. They set up franchised stores throughout the country and christened them "La Renaixença" (The Catalan Renaissance). What did they want to sell? Salt spray! No, just kidding. They believed that Catalan would awaken after its narcolepsy of 1714, possessing a literary language, a language of culture. And how would they achieve this? With sex.

The Valencian Academy of Language (AVL) issued a ruling a few days ago in which – as could not be otherwise – it rejected the Valencia City Council's intention to use two forms of the city's name from now on: one in Castilian (Valencia) and another invented one (Valencia, with an acute accent on the andThis spelling, according to the governing coalition—comprised of the PP and Vox parties—best reflects how Valencians pronounce the name of the capital of the Valencian Community. The Valencian Language Academy (AVL) presents all the relevant philological arguments to conclude that Valencia only has one name: it is in Valencian (that is, Catalan) and is written with an open accent, not a closed one. There is absolutely no need or justification for using a Castilian version of the city's name. And even less so for circulating this monstrosity, "Valencia," which is simply a serious spelling mistake and a gratuitous display of the rudeness and anti-Catalan fanaticism of the PP and Vox leaders. Because it is common knowledge that the aim of these two ultranationalist parties is not to write "how Valencians speak" (there is no language in the world that is written "how its speakers speak"; if you'd like to learn more philological information, I recommend reading the AVL's opinion), but rather to practice secessionism. that there is a distinct "Valencian language" separate from the Catalan language. Why? Because they think that by doing so they are acting against Catalonia and in favor of Spain. The reasoning is completely delusional, and simply transcribing it is embarrassing, but it is what Spanish ultranationalism has always defended and proclaimed. They are deniers and enemies of science, culture, and knowledge in all areas, but in this one (regarding the Catalan language and the hatred they harbor for it) more than any other, because they believe that the existence and vitality of Catalan are incompatible with the existence and vitality of Spain.

The battle for the language has returned to the forefront in the Valencian Country with the PP government with the support of Vox, but also in the municipal government of the capital city, where the mayor María José Catalá has waged a war against Catalan and the toponym of her city. The first year of her term already announced that she wanted to Castilianize València and its toponym to include a bilingual designation with Valencia in Spanish and a secessionist Valencian version, Valéncia, with the endorsement of Vox and anti-Catalanist groups; last July the City Council approved it, sending the proposal to the Valencian government; and this Friday the Valencian Academy of Language (AVL) has issued a harsh report in which it rejects the change, as reported by Levante and confirmed by ARA.

The battle over language has resurfaced in the Valencian Community under the PP government, supported by Vox, but also in the city council of the capital, where Mayor María José Catalá has launched a campaign against the Catalan language and the city's name. This marks the first year of her term. He already announced that he wanted to Castilianize Valencia and its toponym to include a bilingual name with Valencia in Castilian Spanish and a secessionist Valencian version, Valencia, with the support of Vox and anti-Catalan groups; and in July of last year the City Council He approved it and sent the proposal to the Valencian government.But this Friday the Valencian Language Academy (AVL) issued a harsh report rejecting the change, as has been reported. Levant And the ARA has confirmed it.

I was reading the editorial for Three Kings' DayFrom the newspaper AHORA, about the momentous events unfolding in the world. I believe that editorials, like reviews (literary, musical, etc.), like what we call "opinion" pieces, should not only provide content. They should also be well-written. And so, I come across this sentence: "But, indirectly, the alarm also affects a Europe that is hesitant and incapable of asserting its collective power and its democratic and humanist values, as has been seen recently with its staunch resistance to the contempt with which Trump has treated the EU." There is a word here that makes me shudder, for its precision, its boldness, its erudition. Stagnates. I know it, not from family tradition, but thanks to a book. "Estantiz" or shelf. A "spoiled" food item, one that "is not fresh," says the DIEC (Dictionary of the Spanish Language). The dictionary's example of figurative language, by extension, is precisely about politicians. I read this word, also used figuratively, in a passage from a zarzuela (Spanish operetta). The Remei collectionFrom Anselmo Clavé (yes, yes, the one with the hearts). I'm quoting from memory. La Tuietes, the protagonist of the play, written in verse and set in Caldes de Montbui, refers to a suitor as "a gentleman more stingy than the game they throw in the town square."

This slogan alone would suffice to respond to the constant (and well-intentioned) suggestions that Catalan should try to become a more "friendly" language. The argument, as is well known, stems from the unease of some sectors (almost always Spanish-speaking) regarding the existence of coercive or punitive measures to protect the use of their own language. They say this, of course, for our own good and for the good of the language. We have no doubt about that. But since it is fitting to respond with the same empathy and the same selfless good faith, here comes yet another attempt. This time, it's not to justify the coercion or sanctions, but also to justify the desire for primacy: Catalan is not just any language. It is not only official. It is not even merely "our own." It also possesses a universal value, inherent in itself, which is the fact that it can be identified as the language of freedom.