Captivated by Catalan
As many as 150 universities around the world offer Catalan studies; career opportunities and curiosity about linguistic diversity are the main reasons given by students
Everywhere we are wanted, we now have a presence.” The Institut Ramon Llull took over management of language studies at foreign universities twenty years ago. The initiative, promoted by the Catalan government in the 1980s, has grown and established itself as a network of around 150 study centres around the world interested not only in learning Catalan, but in promoting the country’s culture. Ariadna Puiggené, Director of the Language and Universities Department, explains the effort involved in ensuring the language is present outside our borders. “Public funding of Catalan around the world is of vital importance to ensure its presence as a language and as a culture in the international academic field,” she explains. “Mostly, we are in countries closest to our own cultural sphere: Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, because there’s more tradition of studying Romance languages there,” she says, adding that, despite it being an optative subject, “Catalan has more students than Portuguese” at some universities. But the Institute’s goal goes beyond training students to be proficient in the language. Puiggené stresses the interest in helping to train foreign professionals who see Catalan as a job option for the future. “We are the first link in a chain for translators or cultural managers. If you want your work to be read further afield and be studied abroad, you need to get yourself known, and who better than the people who have studied you?” she asks.
The teaching work done by the Ramon Llull network goes further than that, however. “Our teachers do not merely give language classes; they are representatives of a culture and a country,” Puiggené says, noting that learning is complemented by an attractive range of academic and cultural activities, “since they contribute to creating this necessary environment for students to be immersed in our language.” In this respect, an attempt is made to include Catalan in specific seminars and conferences. “The online activity forced by the pandemic has allowed us to contact a larger number of students, who have been able to have live discussions with prominent names from Catalan cinema, such as Isona Passola or Sergi López,” she says.
At the moment, there is no intention to expand the network of universities, “but rather to consolidate” the existing ones. “We are in those countries that are of interest to us because they are important from the point of view of cultural strategy or because Catalan universities have an interest in maintaining a relationship with them,” Puiggené adds.
But what motivates the 6,000 students who enrol each semester to study a language like Catalan? The answers are varied, but academic interest and career prospects top the list. “Some people see job opportunities in learning Catalan, such as translation or teaching,” explains Guillem Castanar, a professor at St. Petersburg State University. According to Anna Tudela, from the Autonomous University of Madrid, “there are people who enrol for practical reasons, either because they want to prepare for exams in a Catalan-speaking territory or because they would like to study a Master’s degree at a Catalan-speaking university.” And for Anna Escofet, at the Geesteswetenschappen Faculty in Amsterdam, there are also students who approach her “out of curiosity, out of simple attraction, or because they want to travel to Barcelona and have been told that they have a language of their own there.”
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“They ask us to integrate and then don’t make it easy to”
Senegalese Diebana Balde arrived in Catalonia in 1993 and was surprised to find that everything was written in two different ways on the road signs. “That’s how I discovered that there were two languages in Catalonia,” she recalls. She quickly set out to learn Catalan, enrolling on courses at the Adult Education School in Salt and participating in social groups in which Catalan was the dominant language. But her efforts often met with the initial refusal of the native population to address her in the new language: “Everyone speaks Spanish to me, even today, because they relate my black skin to my foreign origin and assume I don’t understand or speak Catalan,” she complains. She says this behaviour, which is very typical of the native population, upsets her a little, especially because she proudly displays her knowledge of the language whenever possible. “I really like this desire to allow everyone to integrate here and that knowledge of Catalan helps us to feel part of the community and also find work”, she stresses.
Diebana does not understand, however, how the same people who call on newcomers to make an effort to integrate “are the ones who then do not facilitate linguistic integration, as they normally address outsiders in Spanish, even if they’ve lived here for decades.”
Diebana’s three daughters have grown up in Catalonia and have a perfect mastery of Catalan and Spanish. However, they have had to get used to hearing the typical ignorant comments: “How come you speak it so well? How well you speak Catalan!” “Of course they speak it well if they’ve been to school here!” she says.
Say it in Catalan, please
The platform No em canviïs la llengua has been working to try and change firmly ingrained attitudes in society for four years
Some time ago, Rosario Palomino was queuing up at a sausage party in the Clot neighbourhood. She was astonished when the person serving the meal changed to Spanish when it was her turn, having observed her very characteristic South American features. Then she heard someone correct the person serving the food: “No li canviïs la llengua (Don’t change languages for her)”. This became the inspiration and the beginning of the movement No em canviïs la llengua (Don’t change languages for me), although gaining in popularity, it still has a lot of work to do. The first challenge is to recruit more people to speak Catalan as a first choice to newcomers.
The fact is that immigrants often come up against the prejudices of many Catalan speakers, who address them in Spanish without even stopping to ask them if they speak Catalan or, at least, whether they understand it, in order to have a bilingual dialogue. This avoidance of Catalan usually prevails from the first meeting. In an attempt to address this recurring situation, Rosario recruited four prestigious volunteers, creating an advocacy group that, in addition to this Peruvian-born psychologist, includes writer Matthew Tree, actors Carme Sansa and Toni Albà, and journalist Aleix Renyé. We met them in Barcelona, although Albà was absent for work reasons.
After Rosario had recalled the beginnings of the movement, Carme Sansa explained that throughout her life, she has chosen Catalan to interact with people from the outset. She recounts some anecdotes: “I ordered red wine (vi negre) and the waiter brought me vinegar (vinagre), and I often see people unconsciously changing their language, like one day I took a taxi with a friend… My companion talked to the driver in Spanish. When I asked why, she said ‘Because he doesn’t look like here’s from here’.”
The group believes that education is the key and that people only turn to Spanish “out of good intentions, thinking they’re helping the other person”. Matthew Tree, who has been writing in Catalan for many years, said “thousands of new arrivals have made the effort to learn Catalan and the natives thank them by speaking to them in Spanish.”
Aleix Renyé fled to northern Catalonia in 1981 as a political refugee. He does not have Spanish ID. When someone sees his French passport, Catalan is never their first choice. He is offended by comments he reads on social networks when immigrants are blamed for all the ills of the language. What we need is for Catalan to be a useful language for newcomers,”he says. The group offers some advice and urges everyone to put it into practice: encourage people who are just starting out with Catalan to not be embarrassed and use it even if they make mistakes, and never laugh at them, but rather applaud their effort.
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