“We want to live fully and freely in Catalan. The Government's commitment is to make Catalan available everywhere without having to justify ourselves for speaking our language”. The President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, reported yesterday on one hundred initiatives to promote the use of Catalan in Catalonia. Of all of them, 92 are already being carried out to a lesser or greater extent, while eight are new. And among the latter, those that seek to promote the language in the health field stand out – an aspect that had been lame – and reinforce it even more at school.
To give more solemnity to the presentation, the Government held an extraordinary Executive Council at the headquarters of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC). The measures cover a multitude of aspects, including actions for the promotion of Aranese and the Catalan sign language.
All the indicators of the use of Catalan show a setback that has alarmed the Government. For example, a button: the Survey of Linguistic Uses of the Population of 2018 and that of Joventut of 2021 indicates that more than half of the population of the city of Barcelona does not use Catalan on a regular basis, to the point that a 26% state that they never use it and 27% do so sporadically.
In any case, the Government is clear that two of the basic areas are the school and the health sector. Regarding the first area, it will introduce multilingual training in the master's degree in secondary teacher training. The Government explains that this measure is intended to "train, raise awareness and provide tools" to the teacher to adapt the didactic response to the linguistic diversity of the classroom.
As for the health field, the promotion of the Catalan language is still in the planning phase. The Cabinet of Aragonès is working on a plan to promote the Catalan language at the Hospital Clínic as a pilot project. Among the actions that are planned is the deployment of the figure of the health center linguistic reference, that is, “a person responsible for the linguistic management of each center”.
Other sectors that will be strengthened is the audiovisual. The president and the councilor assured yesterday that they want to promote Catalan on the new digital platforms, paying special attention to young people, for which they are considering subsidies to produce economic education content in Catalan on Tik Tok.
There is more. The Government has focused attention on driving schools and is also launching the possibility of substituting fines for companies for not using Catalan with language awareness courses.
All this offensive to promote Catalan is a step further than the legislative changes approved by Parliament with the aim of stopping the application of 25% of Spanish in Catalan classrooms. Today only 26 groups of the 72,000 in Catalonia apply that percentage, since the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) decreed precautionary measures in those classrooms where it had already been applied. Now, the decree and the new law are in the hands of the Constitutional Court (TC). In addition, tomorrow, Aragonès will give a presentation at the UN headquarters in Geneva on the situation of Catalan within the framework of the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues.
