The Council of Menorca confronts Catalan and Menorcan

MahónJoan Pons Torres, the gonella councilor of Culture, Education, Youth and Sport to the Council of Menorca from the PP who outside of politics promoted insular variants of Catalan against the standard, now driven by the Consell de Menorca, that Menorcan and the article 'salat' be declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Menorca (BICIM). He assures that “young people are already too influenced by central Catalan,” that “they say 'soc' and not, 'som'” and that attention must be paid to the statute, which defends the need to "promote our linguistic varieties". "Menorcan unites and identifies us and we cannot lose it," he adds.

To staff it, he has hired the civil servant and former PP councilor who was teaching the Minorcan courses that Pons Torres promoted as director of Sa Fundació, Sili Pons Sabater, and has detached the initiative from the Consell's Language Advisory Service (SAL) to avoid the contrary report that would surely have stopped the proposal internally.

Nor has consulted the Menorcan Institute of Studies (IME), the reference academic institution attached to your ministry and, as no philologist has been found who wanted to get involved, the elaboration of the report and the annex sheets has been commissioned to Sili Pons, of whom it is unknown if she has homologated studies to draft these documents. Més per Menorca doubts, in fact, that she can accredit technical solvency and has already questioned the island government in this regard.

The fact, however, is that the former councilor has delivered the reports commissioned by the Ministry, has submitted an invoice of 8,125 euros, and has managed to get the technician from the institution's Historical Heritage service to give the green light to the initiative. Now, only the commissions for Immaterial Heritage of Menorca and the Balearic Islands, and the IME itself, need to believe it too, so that the proposal can be brought to a plenary session and be approved with the support of the PP and the councilor expelled from Vox.

Unity of language

But the distrust within the Menorcan Institute of Studies is so great that founding members like the economist Guillem López Casasnovas himself have pushed the president of the Scientific Council, the jurist Josep Maria Quintana, to publicly question the minister's proposal.

Quintana has written a public letter in which he has warned the Council that he will only consider the initiative if it does not harm the unity of the language. “Protecting Menorcan, yes; making its protection a tool to separate it from Catalan, no,” he concludes. In his opinion, “this is the line we must never cross.” “We must not fall into the false dilemma of having to choose between defending Menorcan or Catalan. The legal system obliges us, precisely, to make both compatible. We can preserve Menorcan words and expressions that run the risk of disappearing, but not build a Menorcan linguistic individuality separate from the whole of the Catalan language.”

Josep Maria Quintana wants to first know the scope of the file to determine “if we are facing a legitimate act of conservation of Menorca's linguistic heritage or an initiative that, under the will to protect it, may end up questioning the unity of the language of which it forms part.”

Loss of the island dialect

The precedent of the new Council's linguistic uses regulation, which Pons Torres himself promoted last year to introduce Spanish into the institution and prioritize Menorcan, does not invite optimism. Even then, Quintana had to send a letter of complaint to the President of the Council, Adolfo Vilafranca, which seems to have had no effect. The island government has not moved forward with the regulation, blocked by the 158 objections filed against it by the UIB, entities, political parties, town councils, unions, and individuals, but it has not changed its opinion on the language either.

This is made clear by the double report that Sili Pons has produced on Menorcan and the "article salat", which points to the increasing standardisation and “homogenisation” of Catalan as one of the causes of the progressive loss of the island dialect. “It favours the marginalisation of proper dialectal forms and the progressive loss of traditional vocabulary. Increasingly, there is a tendency to speak a more uniform Catalan, Menorcan forms are used less and words are being lost,” he comments. Menorcan “has little presence on the internet and social networks, and is underrepresented in educational materials in schools”.

Més per Menorca, however, disagrees and, through its coordinator, Esteve Barceló, makes it clear that “Menorcan is not in danger from standard Catalan but from other languages that are imposed in our territory”. Barceló also questions the desire to protect the “article salat” “when it is not exclusive to Menorcan” and denounces the attempts by the island government and its councillor to “divide the language”.

The latest example is the new professional career regulation that has been negotiated with the unions and will involve an annual expenditure of 3.7 million euros to compensate the more than 600 Council officials with a maximum bonus of 12,000 euros per person that they had not previously recognised. The labour agreement has been approved without votes against, but Més there is another linguistic rift in the fine print.

Indefinite moratorium

A transitional provision exempts the institution's public personnel from having to prove their Catalan level while the Staffing Plan (RLT) is not approved, which has not even begun to be negotiated. Menorquinists and other entities such as Plataforma per la Llengua and Fem-ho en Català see an indefinite moratorium that has also motivated the UIB's rejection. An opinion from the UIB's technical commission for Linguistic Advice concludes that "professional career cannot finance or reward the lack of training of public employees who cannot fulfill the citizens' right to be attended in the official and native language of the Balearic Islands".

The report, signed by president Maria Isabel Ripoll, considers that the provision "violates the statutory framework, the Law of Linguistic Normalization, the consolidated jurisprudence of the TSJIB and international treaties". More than sufficient reasons to eliminate the moratorium and the permanent exemption sought for personnel who entered the insular administration before the Catalan requirement was imposed. "The personal circumstances or origin of a worker do not justify an indefinite waiver of the linguistic requirement", she emphasizes, and only admits that, at most, they be given one year to obtain the qualification. "After this period, the requirement must be immediate and indispensable", she highlights.

Elimination of '.cat' domains

It is clear that, furthermore, the Minister of Culture has had all the domains removed .cat of the institution's web pages with the argument that they supposed "doubling costs", when the annual maintenance cost of each one does not exceed 24 euros. In fact, that is what Fem-ho en Català pays, which has managed to rescue 14 of them. The IME arrived late and the portal ime.cat has now become a football page. Only the Socio-Environmental Observatory has managed to maintain, until now, its .cat.

The PSOE sees the solution clearly. It asks the Council to be guided by consensus and scientific criteria and not to use the language any longer as "a weapon of political confrontation". It says that what is most needed is not to protect Menorcan, but "to confront the growing reduction in the social use of Catalan, and of what is spoken in Menorca". This, it understands, deserves institutional support.