I wish I could write this post in Catalan, but I don’t want to write in catanyol or just use a translator, so I’m using English. I came to Catalunya to do my master’s and PhD after finishing a bachelor’s in Spanish Literature, and found myself in a place that is somehow similar to home. What I’ve seen here also reminds me of my own experience.

To keep my personal information vague, and to make it easier to understand, I’d like to share my experience by moving it into a fictional setting. (I got some help from Claude finding the corresponding details, since I wanted to find good pairs between the places I knew and Catalan-speaking places. I wrote this post by myself. Please let me know if anything is off.)

Álex’s great-grandparents lived in La Franja. The family was once poor. Álex’s father and his brothers learned to read, write and paint from an educated aunt. Some of Álex’s grandparents worked in local government. Álex’s parents met at the same high school in Fraga, speaking Catalan with the local accent.

At the end of the 90s, Álex’s father found a job in Barcelona. Their mother later found a job there too, leaving Álex with their grandparents. Álex was brought to Barcelona to live with their parents at around three years old.

At home, the parents spoke only Spanish, both with Álex and with each other, thinking it was the more “proper” language, even though they had already learned Barcelona Catalan. People often mistook their mother for someone born in Barcelona; their father still had a bit of his accent, and their mother sometimes laughed about it. They put on Spanish TV for Álex, and Álex ended up with a very standard Spanish accent. From kindergarten to middle school, the teachers taught in Catalan. Álex understood them, but still believed that Barcelona was not their city, and Catalan was not their language.

Later, Álex went to Madrid for university, and then even farther, to other countries. In other Spanish-speaking places, people asked if they were from Madrid. In Madrid, people asked where they were from. At some point, far from home, they realised they had started listening to Catalan content again. They suddenly remembered that the Catalan morning news had always been on during breakfast when they were a child, the only time Catalan was ever on at home.

They decided to speak Catalan again. It wasn’t easy, and it had never been easy, even long before that. As a child, whenever Álex tried to speak Catalan, their parents corrected their accent. At school, their local classmates refused to speak Catalan with them, saying “it’s not necessary” and “your accent is weird.” As an adult, the staff at the district office saw their name and surname and switched to Spanish. Álex couldn’t even really blame them, since they themselves often found other people’s Catalan accents “strange” too. They knew their own Catalan sounded “wrong” as well.

The people who really helped were Catalan speakers from Mallorca, from Valencia, and an Italian from l’Alguer. In that group of friends, everyone’s Catalan was different, and nobody cared whose was “correct.”

But at the same time, whenever Álex came back to Barcelona, they heard more young people speaking Spanish than Catalan. When they spoke Catalan to waiters in restaurants, the waiters often answered in Spanish.

When Álex told their parents about it, their mother said: “Back in our day, who came here and didn't learn to speak it like the locals?”

Álex didn’t answer.

End of the story. As for my real experience, a few things are different:

- Unlike Catalan, my city’s language has no official status. It isn’t required, or even encouraged, in schools or local government.

- For a speaker of the national language, I think learning it is harder than learning Catalan is for a Spanish speaker. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak it at all if I’d only started learning it as an adult. To me it’s more like learning French from Spanish: similar words and grammar, easier to read, but harder to speak because of the pronunciation.

- The writing system doesn’t tell you how to pronounce a word. So my parents kept a pronunciation dictionary for this language at home, and actually used it. They cared that much about saying it right, and still they never spoke it to me.

- In the city I grew up in, around four in ten residents are officially registered as being from somewhere else. Many younger locals have mostly stopped using this language.

Although I majored in Spanish Literature, Spanish isn’t my working language right now. When I learn a language, I’m good at listening, reading and writing; speaking is always my weak spot, and it gets rusty quickly when I don’t use it. I think I could learn some Catalan (I took a mandatory one-semester course many years ago), but I doubt I’ll ever speak it well enough.

On social media I read a lot of posts about Catalan language policy, and there seem to be two opposite extremes: either everyone has to speak Catalan to stay in Catalunya, or Catalan stays at home and Spanish is for public life. Neither is the future I want, not for Catalan, and not for my city’s language.

I’m not writing this to propose a solution. I’m writing it in the hope that these languages can stay living languages, not dying ones, and that they can be languages people are allowed to enter with an accent. So if you ever hear me, or someone like me, stumbling in Catalan, please don’t switch to Spanish right away.

Parlant s’entén la gent.

La paraula garbuix ve de l'italià garbuglio, segle XIX. Vol dir un embolic, una cosa enredada o confusa. Per exemple: «Tinc un garbuix de papers damunt la taula que no sé per on començar». Vosaltres la feu servir? Al vostre poble en dieu garbuix o teniu una altra paraula per dir-ne un embolic?

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Més llengua a Bluesky (@somcultura.bsky.social) i a X (@somcultura_cat)