Catalan Politics: La Gran Butifarrada
22 January, 2006

Believe it or not . . .

The Catalunian government passed a law in October of 2005 that every business must be able to attend its clients in the Catalan language, regardless of whether the business has Catalan clients. And they mean to enforce it. They'll be sending inspectors around -- any business that doesn't have somebody able to speak Catalan gets a big fine. They've also make it easy to tattle against your neighbor's bar. Just dial '012' -- a toll-free number -- and tell them.

A friend of ours owns a few restaurants. One day a client asked for the "complaints book" (a Spain-wide law requires all restaurants to have such a book). Because the book was not in Catalan (provided by the local government), and because the employees didn't speak Catalan well enough (all of them being Philippino), the owner was fined.

My wife went to a public library the other day and asked the librarian a question in Castellano (Spanish, that is). The librarian answered in Catalan. My wife didn't understand and asked her to repeat that. She did, again in Catalan, and again my wife didn't understand. The librarian then whispered that they are required to speak only Catalan.

In the schools, the Catalan government has realized that maybe it's good that students learn a second language. Did they choose Spanish, perhaps? No, of course not. French. While half of Catalunya speaks Spanish (known as Castellano in Spain) as their first language, it is almost impossible to find a Spanish class in the schools here. We know of only one school in Catalunya with Spanish as the main language.

There's a law that store signs must be in Catalan. A hair salon said "peluqueria" instead of "perruqueria": they got a fine.

In public schools, they now put people in the recess to discourage kids from talking Spanish.

In movie theatres, they now have a law that movies can no longer be dubbed in Spanish. Only in Catalan.

My opinion? Catalan is fine, but enforcing Catalan this way is committing the same crime that Franco committed in enforcing Castellano. The current politicians are using the Catalan language as their tool to say "if you don't support us, you don't support Catalunya."