The Balearic Cultural Work Organization requests explicit support from Foreign Minister Merz for the official status of Catalan in Europe.
Antoni Llabrés has sent you a letter in which he explains why Catalan should be recognized as an official language.
PalmThe president of the OCB, Antoni Llabrés, has sent a letter to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz asking his government to support the declaration of official status and "not frustrate the expectations of millions of speakers who refuse to resign themselves to being second-class Europeans." Taking advantage of Merz's recent visit to Mallorca, Llabrés sent him a letter outlining the reasons why Catalan should be recognized as an official language in the European Union.
In the letter, Llabrés noted that Catalan would be the 25th official language, far ahead of other recognized languages in terms of the number of speakers. Currently, there are 12 languages with fewer speakers than Catalan, such as Swedish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Irish, Luxembourgish, and Maltese, among others.
Likewise, the president of the OCB has referred to the ties established for decades between Germany and Mallorca, an island visited annually by more than four and a half million Germans, according to data from 2024, and where tens of thousands of German citizens reside, permanently or temporarily.
Llabrés has expressed to the chancellor the need to take advantage of the negotiations that have been reopened between the governments of Spain and Germany in order to avoid further delays on this issue and to respond to the linguistic aspirations of nearly 10 million European citizens.
In his letter, the president of the OCB recalled that last July, a group of German professors, researchers, and scholars specialized in Romance languages also asked the federal government of their country not to block the proposal for Catalan to be declared an official language of the European Union, along with Galician and Basque.
