Reasonable expectations

I was re­cently hav­ing a chat with an ac­quain­tance from an­other coun­try who men­tioned she was in a par­ents’ What­sapp group for her child’s school and at the be­gin­ning the Cata­lan par­ents had made a big ef­fort to put mes­sages in Span­ish as well as Cata­lan while still com­mu­ni­cat­ing mainly in their na­tive tongue. The same was true of their meet­ings out­side the school gates — the con­ver­sa­tion was in Cata­lan un­less she was di­rectly ad­dressed, in which case they would change to Span­ish be­fore re­vert­ing to Cata­lan. I told her I had ex­pe­ri­enced the same thing when my son was grow­ing up, and what had al­ways sur­prised me was non-Cata­lans ex­pect­ing Cata­lan par­ents to change their lan­guage of com­mu­ni­ca­tion from their na­tive tongue to Span­ish, es­sen­tially an im­posed lan­guage for many of them, as a mat­ter of course rather than what it ac­tu­ally was, an ef­fort. My ac­quain­tance shared my be­lief and ac­knowl­edged the ef­fort the other par­ents had made, at least at the be­gin­ning, to in­te­grate her into the group, whether in con­ver­sa­tion or in the chat group.

It led me to again con­sider just what a sin­gu­lar sit­u­a­tion we live in here and peo­ple’s at­ti­tudes to­wards it. I move in many so­cial and pro­fes­sional cir­cles in Cat­alo­nia, and I have found that the pre­vail­ing at­ti­tude of those not born here is that Cata­lans should adapt and speak Span­ish when non-Cata­lans are pre­sent, view­ing the issue solely as one of cour­tesy and com­pletely ig­nor­ing the fact that this is a sit­u­a­tion you rarely find in other places. I often ask non-Cata­lans when this arises, “How would you feel if you had to speak a lan­guage other than your own with your own peo­ple in your own coun­try, and on top of that change to a lan­guage you see as one of re­pres­sion, that was im­posed upon your par­ents and grand­par­ents by a dic­ta­to­r­ial regime for most of their lives?” Of course, it’s not a ques­tion peo­ple can read­ily an­swer, hav­ing never been ex­posed to those cir­cum­stances, but I be­lieve they should at least con­sider what it might be like to feel that. The gen­eral re­sponse is that peo­ple here are bilin­gual and com­mu­ni­cat­ing in Span­ish is there­fore as easy for Cata­lans as com­mu­ni­cat­ing in Cata­lan. Well first of all that’s not true, Span­ish being more of a chal­lenge for those raised in purely Cata­lan-speak­ing fam­i­lies, and sec­ondly it com­pletely ig­nores the emo­tional fac­tor of being forced to ditch your own mother tongue for one you may be able to speak, but may also be ret­i­cent to.

As far as my ac­quain­tance was con­cerned, she ap­pre­ci­ated the ef­fort that was made ini­tially and thought it was her re­spon­si­bil­ity to now learn enough Cata­lan to at least fol­low the con­ver­sa­tion and then in­ter­ject in Span­ish, which is not her mother tongue ei­ther. That way it is the in­di­vid­ual non-na­tive who is adapt­ing rather than the group of na­tives, and to be per­fectly hon­est, that makes a lot more sense to me than com­plain­ing be­cause you don’t un­der­stand the lan­guage of the coun­try you have de­cided to make your home, even if only tem­porar­ily.