All the indicators of the use of Catalan show a setback that has alarmed the Government. For example, a button: the Enquesta d'Usos Lingüístics de la Població of 2018 and that of Joventut of 2021 published 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 26% state that they never use it and 27% do so sporadically. This afternoon, the Executive of Pere Aragonès has met in the extraordinary Executive Council at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC) to address the situation in Catalonia and has analyzed more than 92 initiatives that are already being implemented to a lesser or greater extent and have announced eight new ones, including the possibility of substituting fines for companies for not using Catalan with language awareness courses.
Economic sanctions against companies for ruling out the Catalan language have been a source of controversy since the Law of the Consum Code was approved in 2010. The controversy, however, has decreased in recent years and, in fact, the fines for violating language rights accounted for only 17,350 euros, 0.52% of the total sanctions for not conforming to the norm of twelve years ago, which includes points outside the language, such as unfair commercial practices, adulteration, fraud or deceit, or abusive clauses and practices. The report of the Catalan Consumer Agency for the month of March 2022 points to fines that totaled 3.3 million euros last year.
The Government assures that the economic sanctions for infringing the linguistic rights of consumers are not tax revenue. For this reason, it has decided that all those companies fined will have the option of reversing the amount in training and linguistic awareness of their staff and in resources to guarantee linguistic availability.
In any case, the new measures are not limited to this aspect alone and include other points and Pere Aragonès and the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, have highlighted a few:
A working group is created to publicize the Catalan school model internationally. It will be made up of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Education and Culture. Its objective will be to make known in the international arena "the linguistic situation of Catalan and, more specifically, the Catalan school model and the functioning of the educational model in the last 30 years".
Training in immersion and management of multilingualism is introduced in all the specialties of the secondary teacher training master's degree and it is intended to guarantee that this training is given in the teacher training degrees. 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.
In this way, the Government points out that the Departments of Education and Research and Universities have agreed that, from the 2023-2024 school year, teachers who finish the degree in Education or who finish the master's degree that qualifies them for teaching (and who have taken degrees other than those of education), can accredit this training by means of the corresponding credits.
The Government will carry out a plan to promote Catalan in driving schools. For this, more materials will be provided in Catalan for the students who study the theoretical exam. In addition, it is intended that anyone who wants to take the exam in Catalan can do so without the need for any prerequisites.
The Government is also working on a plan to promote the use of the Catalan language in the entire health system. However, this measure 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 linguistic reference of the health center, that is, a person responsible for the linguistic management of each center.
Likewise, the Government wants to promote the learning, awareness and use of Catalan in services for the elderly, including residences, day centres, home services and civic centers and services for people with disabilities.
In parallel, actions are also promoted to spread Catalan in the cinema and series. The Government considers it a priority. As for production, and as a novelty for 2022, the Department of Culture ensures that the maximum amount of aid to create films and series in Catalan has been increased so that all of them are also large-format.
Almost 700 new titles in Catalan on the platforms in one year. The Generalitat affirms that thanks to the line of work opened with the audiovisual platforms, it is intended that they incorporate in their catalogs the content already dubbed and subtitled previously by the CCMA and the Department of Culture; that they incorporate dubbing and subtitling in Catalan into their productions from the very beginning; and that they enter into the co-production of films and series in the Catalan language. In the last year, the platforms have incorporated 696 titles with audio in Catalan, affirms the Catalan Executive.
The meeting at the IEC takes place in a delicate context. In the first semester, there were intense and borderline negotiations between the ERC, the PSC and Junts to make the pertinent legislative changes in the form of a decree and a bill in order to stop 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).
