Content creators... you choose!
Whether from institutions, social forums, or personal opinions like the one you're reading now, there's a tendency to promote content creators in our language, eager to project a positive spirit and optimistic expectations regarding the health of the Catalan language, which we so often tend to view through a victim mentality, or even from a negative one. And it's important to do so! I recommend following the Parlars Mallorquins page, which began as a website focused almost exclusively on linguistics, dialectology, and other philological curiosities, and has become a national reference point, and I would even say an anti-capitalist one. I also like to follow what @CasHorrach says from time to time; he's quite witty, that guy. Or President Àngel Aguiló, whose words are as eloquent as they are forceful. These are our own cases, with a lot of influence on social media and which also resonate in conventional media, such as IB3, which finds a creative source of information and a connection to the reality of the internet—a reality that is no longer clear whether it also reflects the reality of the street or not.
The point, however, is that this humble columnist came to talk to you today about the others, about those who decide that our language is not a market, or that, at the very least, it is too small a market for them. I recently received a link to an Instagram account belonging to two Mallorcan teachers who speak Catalan and have decided to conduct all, absolutely all, of their communication through this network exclusively in Spanish. Cases like this, at least among those of us who live in Manacor, are becoming increasingly rare. I try to put myself in their shoes to understand what must be going on inside the minds of these people who consider the Catalan language useless for them to say what they think, to say what they want to say. And the first concept that comes to mind when we think about it is self-hatred. They must consider the Catalan language provincial, the language of the old, of the closed-minded, of those who can't see beyond the pebble they've always lived on, of those who "haven't traveled." All the arguments fall flat... or is there anything more provincial than adopting the language of the colonizers, arguing that one's own doesn't have enough substance, enough scope, or enough of whatever?
Some others do it thinking about the market. They're people who have businesses. People who crunch numbers. People who, supposedly, have a nose for knowing where there's money to be made. Some will say they do it to survive. Some will do it because, they say, they don't want to create conflict. Because yes, because some people think that speaking Catalan is problematic... and they don't realize that the problem isn't with us, but with those who get angry when they hear our language spoken here. Of course, since we Catalan speakers are the best bilinguals in the world, we don't get angry when our fellow Catalan speakers decide to betray it to embrace, once again, the language of the colonizers... Others will say that this opens up the market. They must be close cousins of those who say that Spanish is useful for traveling the world. Even English, as the lingua franca it is today thanks to, or because of, the capitalist empire that instills it in us. However, if you ask these same people how many times they've been to Argentina in the last twenty years, they'll tell you never. Or how many times they've been to Denmark or Switzerland or even Spain, they'll tell you once, or twice, or three times. And so, in the name of a cosmopolitanism they don't practice, we kill it.
Then there are the franchisees. It turns out they have to communicate in Spanish because it seems to be a requirement of the franchise they work with, or for. Perfumes, essential oils, and cosmetics apparently can't be self-centered; they can't be made, spoken about, or conveyed in the language of Mallorca. And so, the bilinguals of the moment lower their heads and accept the standard. Some say that believing is nurturing... Do you see that in this case too?
Finally, there are the rank-and-file content creators, who communicate solely with the intention of making likes and followersMany opt for the path we explained in the first paragraph. Others, however, for reasons unknown, prefer to make their public communications in Spanish.
In all cases, I'm referring to people who, in their most current and intense daily lives, their most familiar and social interactions, their most complete and absolute interactions, speak in Catalan. It's a shame they don't realize that their clients, their followers, are here, right beside them, among the people they live with in this world where, increasingly, it seems harder for us to uphold the old adage of 'think globally, act locally'. We are all sensitive to the extinction of whales in the Pacific; we are all sensitive to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Everyone is concerned about what is happening in the Arctic with the hole in the ozone layer. And people shudder to see the images of slavery among workers in the coltan mines. But who thinks in the language we Catalans speak? How many of us betray it every day? Do we not care that a way of being and a way of understanding the world is dying out?
