The stubbornness of the councilor gonella Joan Pons Torres to declare menorquí and the salted article as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Menorca (BICIM), and thus protect it from the 'threat' of standard Catalan, is about to explode in his hands. The legal subterfuges he has sought in order to impose his initiative against the official linguistic and academic criteria of entities and institutions have backfired.

How many of you have started a conversation in Catalan and, after a short while, ended up speaking in Spanish? Perhaps the other person had answered you in Spanish but understood you perfectly. Perhaps you didn't know if they spoke Catalan. Perhaps it was someone you had just met and didn't want to make them feel uncomfortable, or perhaps, quite simply, it just came out that way.

Imagine you are on a terrace, with the heat sticking to your skin, a glass with ice in front of you, and you ask your companions if they want to go for a swim. One of them replies: “No, thank you. Consequently, I will proceed to leave the establishment.” You will probably look at them strangely, not because you haven't understood the sentence or because there's any problem with the syntax, but because it's hard to imagine someone speaking like that in that situation. The most probable thing would have been for them to say “No, I’m going home” or simply “I’m leaving”.

Have you ever heard of the inchoative increment? If it doesn't ring a bell, neither do false inchoative verbs... But if you have ever heard in Central Catalan a construction similar to 'No 'I know this boy' and the verbal conjugation has sounded strange to you, it’s a very good sign: implicitly you know that something is creaking (because the conjugation admitted by the regulations is precisely the one shared by all dialects: ‘conec’).

A few weeks ago there was a historic demonstration in Palma against tourist saturation. Beyond the slogans and demands, there was an underlying idea that I believe almost no one disputes: there are too many tourists in the Balearic Islands. Or, at least, that's what most Majorcans would say. However, what if someone claimed there are too many tourists? Should we understand that they are mistaken?

Why do we say ‘abe[j]a’ and ‘ore[j]a’ if we write ‘abella’ and ‘orella’? The most intuitive answer would be to say that, in some dialects, ‘ll’ is pronounced like an ‘i’ (which, in this article, we will represent with [j]). The explanation seems convincing, but it collapses as soon as we look into it a little.

The majority of families in the Balearic Islands continue to choose Catalan as the primary language of instruction for children starting the fourth year of Early Childhood Education (3 years old) next academic year. However, the percentage has dropped for the second consecutive year. According to data released this Thursday by the Ministry of Education and Universities, 78.5% of families who have formalized their enrollment in public centers have chosen Catalan, while 21.4% have opted for Spanish. (83% in the 2024-2025 academic year and 80% in the 2025-2026 academic year). These results need to be contextualized.

Some time ago I went to a party full of people from Manacor with a friend from out of town. A guy who wanted to meet her asked her to repeat “What color is Saint James’ white horse?” This apparently harmless phrase is a shibboleth, a formula that characterizes members of a linguistic group because it repeats a sound unknown to speakers of another language or dialect. Curiously, the word ‘xibòlet’ comes from the Bible, from the book of Judges, in which it is explained how forty-two thousand Ephraimites died for not being able to pronounce like our ‘x’ the initial consonant of the word, which they emitted as an ‘s’, which differentiated them from the rest of the Hebrews.

When we think about verbs, we almost always think of those that describe actions, such as ‘sing’, ‘dance’, and ‘run’; processes, like ‘grow’ and ‘fall in love’, or states, like ‘know’ or ‘understand’. However, there are others that do not carry any implicit meaning, such as the verb ‘to be’. Let’s say we are with friends and decide to play the classic game of charades. When we read a verb similar to those in the first group on our slip of paper, we all breathe a sigh of relief: they are easily imitable verbs because a meaning can be extracted from them. Now, what happens when the word we draw is the verb ‘to be’? How can we represent verbs that do not express any action?

The most popular expressions from the Balearic Islands now have a version for WhatsApp. 'Això és mel!', 'Bona nit, caragol!', 'Tanmateix' or 'Més pesat que un sac de martells' are part of the collection of 35 illustrated stickers that the Institut d'Estudis Baleàrics (IEB) has presented and that can be downloaded for free.

A pear is a pear, or at least that's how it seems. The fruit is the same whether you buy it at the market in Inca, order it at a greengrocer's in Valencia, or at a stall in La Boqueria. The word is also spelled the same everywhere. However, it's enough to hear how it's pronounced for something to change. If you buy it in Inca, they will probably ask if you want it very ripe and you'll hear a 'p[ə]ra' (neutral 'e'). If you are in Valencia, it will be a 'p[é]ra' (closed 'e'), and in Barcelona, no one will hesitate to offer you a 'p[è]ra' (open 'e'). Now comes the question you might be asking yourselves in light of this: how is it possible that such a common word sounds in three ways? And, above all, which one is the original?

I never thought it would happen, but this year I've become a Barça fan (and a big one!). I've followed them all season and celebrated the League title like any other culer. At home, everyone had to watch the Super Cup and Champions League matches. I even dragged a friend to Barcelona to watch the last League match. It was the first time – and also the last – that we were able to see Alexia Putellas play for Barça and, even though the League was already more than won, the blaugranes played a very good match. I don't want to detract from Hansi Flick's team in any way, but the ones who, at 24 years old, have made me a Barça follower are Cata, Patri, Mapi, Pina, Kika, and Alexia. For me, and for many others, 'Barça' is the Women's team, without the adjective, by default; it's the unmarked form, even if it goes against the norm.

Those of us who grew up with Indiana Jones films often fantasized as youngsters about treasure chambers, golden idol heads, and endless questions that were never answered. How did he know so many languages? How did he get into that chamber? In which other film was his research on that shown? Indiana Jones was always surrounded by ancient papyri, medieval books, stone inscriptions, which made young people's imaginations soar.

The deputy for MÉS per Mallorca and Més per Menorca in Congress, Vicenç Vidal, has called on RTVE to rectify or eliminate the program La gran aventura de la lengua española, broadcast in collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy, considering that it disseminates a narrative that is “Spanish ultranationalist” and “contrary to the multilingual reality of the State”.

There are verses that go in one ear and out the other. And there are those that, on any given day, make you stop. The other day, stuck in one of the usual traffic jams on the Mallorcan motorways, I noticed a line from Tobogan, by Zoo: “He had to work it out”. I noticed it because the same group, in Vull, sings: “If someone has to cry, let them cry”. It’s not that the line grated on me, nor was it (obviously!) the first time I had heard it. However, it made me think about the hesitation that still exists today in one of the most emblematic constructions of syntactic grammar.

The Obra Cultural Balear (OCB) has launched, coinciding with the imminent start of the enrollment process for the 2026-2027 academic year, a new information campaign aimed at families and the management teams of educational centers to remind them of the importance of the linguistic model chosen during the educational stage and to raise awareness among families to opt for the Catalan language.

For years we have been returning to the same examples: the neutral ‘lo’’, direct complements with ‘a’, prepositions that appear before ‘que’ when grammars insist they shouldn't be there, etc. The examples are well-known and the arguments too. Sometimes, in fact, it gives the impression that the Catalan linguistic conversation is trapped in a kind of loop in which we always end up discussing the same things.