He who changes his head scratches himself
Last week, Professor Gabriel Bibiloni, whom we who knew him when we studied Catalan Philology at the University of the Balearic Islands held in high esteem, He was the protagonist of an event which, beyond the annoyance it caused him, the shop assistant who served him and the managers of the establishment where it happened, is a reflection of the humiliating agony and scandalous contempt that we Catalan speakers must live with when we leave our tribal pebble, what is now called "the comfort zone".
These are the undeniable effects of the colonizing mentality and the process of language shift that seems to have gained momentum in the last two or three decades. In the foreign part of Mallorca, we have gone from a practically monolingual society, barely three-quarters of a century ago, to one where we cannot take a single step without encountering the omnipresence of Spanish.
Dr. Bibiloni filed a complaint about the case with the Directorate General of Consumer Affairs and published it on his Twitter account. The news spread like wildfire, and the two major Mallorcan newspapers quickly picked up the story. These are two newspapers with a centrist slant, far from the extremes, and especially far from the far right. Their readers are another matter. We can be pleased to see that two media outlets with the reach ofBreaking News and Daily of Mallorca They echo a situation of linguistic conflict, but seeing the results of the publication leaves one speechless (and believe me, that's saying something, in my case). Today's world is a world of headlines, instant tweets, prejudice, and a suffocating lack of space for reflection. The comments from colonizers, immigrants, undocumented immigrants, anonymous profiles, and other questionable characters tend toward infinity. Everyone feels entitled to have their say in this new democracy that is based more on noise than on words, more on the isolated individual than on the community, more on the glorification of ignorance than on knowledge and respect.
We can't quite tell, then, whether the publication of this news satisfies us because it brings visibility to the problem, or shocks us because it puts us in the crosshairs of these snipers of folly. There are hundreds of comments directed at Gabriel Bibiloni and the situation he has had to endure. If we were to count them all, there would probably be thousands. People are furious.
Of all of them, one caught my attention. It talked about offering Catalan courses for people who didn't know it, about empathy, a positive attitude, and goodwill, but it warned that it wasn't right to force anyone to speak a language. Of course, the comment was written in Spanish.
And it's curious, because it wasn't, isn't, and won't be the only case. Every time a situation like this arises, the poor Spanish speakers come out crying to the world that we can't force them to speak Catalan. And everyone, without exception, forgets that each of these linguistic conflicts, without exception, stems from the fact that one person (a Spanish speaker) is forcing another (a Catalan speaker) to switch languages. Dr. Bibiloni didn't ask the shop assistant to speak to him in Catalan. He only asked her to understand him. The education sector also chimes in. Since, as part of the language replacement process, they've already managed to make all Catalan speakers know Spanish (the law requires it: see Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution), it turns out that it's very rude not to switch languages, because if we want to communicate, we should do so in the language we have in common.
Today we can say that a significant number of students leave our schools with sufficient proficiency (let's be generous) in both Spanish and Catalan. They are bilingual, although many of them, for the most part, have Spanish or another foreign language as their first or family language. But be warned: to find a conversation in Catalan between two students in a school, it is essential that both identify themselves as Catalan speakers (as their first language). Otherwise, the conversation will be in Spanish, something that, unfortunately, we must also extend to the rest of society.
This doesn't happen by chance. It's called "usage norms," and it takes root in the minds of Catalan speakers (as a colonized people) from the very first moment of socialization. They reproduce the stereotypes they've seen their parents and everyone in their Catalan-speaking environment enact without hesitation. They use their language sparingly in front of Spanish speakers, in front of the unknown, the outsider, the stranger. In short, in front of anyone who doesn't belong to the tribe.
It is a form of linguistic subjugation, but also of exclusion, because it does not allow the person listening to us to have contact with the Catalan language, nor knowledge of its existence.
It is here that linguistic awareness and the voluntary reversal of usage norms emerge, both necessary and urgent. Just as Professor Bibiloni did last week at Leroy Merlin, and as hundreds, hopefully thousands, of people in Mallorca do every day, knowing that our attitude will generate controversy, and that it will find support and a foothold among people who live and work here and who have no problem hearing English, German, or French spoken, and who use any linguistic resources available to them to make communication possible. Only someone with a colonizing mentality would even consider asking us to speak to them in one language or another. Therefore, gestures and attitudes like Gabriel Bibiloni's are not only commendable, but absolutely necessary to make our language present in all areas of society and to make everyone who lives here understand that the language of the land is Catalan, and not knowing it or not wanting to know it is a sign of contempt for the land and for the people who have spoken it.
