Foreign Perspectives

In common with all Spanish holidays, we’re completely full with Spanish guests this evening thanks to the Spanish holidays on December 6th (Constitution Day) and December 8th (Immaculate Conception).

Or, rather, we’re full of people from Spain but going by those that arrived last night not all of them will be Spanish. Thanks to the rising nationalism in Catalonia, the Spanish language isn’t actually taught in the schools just south of the border and it’s becoming increasingly common to have “Spanish” guests arrive who can’t speak Spanish. Unfortunately, the emphasis on Catalan means that it’s the only language that they can speak truly fluently and we’ve been reduced to hand signals on a couple of occasions in the recent past.

In fact, the introduction of Catalan only schools from around 1983 looks like it will have the effect of cutting off Catalona not only from Spain but from the rest of the world too. That date of introduction means that the first generation of workers who only speak Catalan have been coming into the workforce over the last couple of years and with that it’s becoming more and more difficult to deal with shop assistants who are, of course, at the younger end of the workforce.

Although, it’s nice to see that a local language is on the rise, the concentration on Catalán to the exclusion of other languages seems likely merely to alienate all the non-Catalans. Whereas elsewhere in Spain it’s expected that the locals will speak English, in fact most of the younger guests that we’ve had over recent months couldn’t speak English well and for that matter couldn’t speak French well and Spanish not at all.

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