Foreign Perspectives

It used to be pretty handy living here and learning Spanish. After all, we’re just 30 miles or so from Spain and we get a lot of guests from Barcelona so it’s obviously easy to get a lot of practice in, isn’t it?

Well, no actually, it isn’t. Up until about 18 months ago it certainly used to be but the Catalans have become a whole lot more militant about their language since then. The immediately obvious impact of that was that since around then brochures in shops are only available in Catalan instead of being in Spanish too as they were previously. Similarly all signs are only in Catalan these days.

In the last 12 months we’ve found that the Catalans quite simply refuse to serve us in shops if we speak Spanish. I think that’s because we come across as residents of the area and therefore they expect us to speak Catalan. However, that’s not possible for us because even though we live in French Catalonia the French have all but stamped out that language.

Recently we even had a Catalan guest who insisted on speaking in very bad English rather than Spanish so we expect that it will get worse in the coming years.

It’s getting quite difficult for us because although we get a lot of guests from Barcelona, not all of them are Catalan and neither do all of them speak or read English yet all of them speak and read Spanish (or Castillian as the Catalans call it). Therefore we acknowledge reservations from Spain in Spanish.

Will they eventually become as militant as the Basques? Who knows, but it certainly seems to be heading that way.