What would happen if, within a word, not all vowels were equally autonomous? If one decided how the others should sound? If we listen carefully to how some speakers in the Valencian Country pronounce words like ‘dona’ or ‘cosa’, or ‘conill’ or ‘sortir’ in certain areas of Mallorca or the Ebre Lands, something shifts with respect to what we would expect. On the one hand, where we would expect an 'a' at the end, we can hear a vowel that approaches the stressed vowel: ‘c[o]v[o]’ instead of ‘c[o]v[a]’. On the other hand, a vowel that we would expect to be more open closes due to the influence of another: ‘c[u]nill’ instead of ‘c[o]nill’.

That the plenary sessions of the Manacor City Council are something else is a fact demonstrable with the videos that the council itself uploads each month to its Youtube channel. It is clear that like any good ‘show’, the plenary session has politically boring and administrative procedural moments; but it has others, especially when it comes to the turn of requests and questions, where the emotion skyrockets (and often goes crazy).

The Network for Educational Language has convened a demonstration this Tuesday in front of the Parliament to reject the measure agreed between the PP and Vox that allows teachers who access civil service positions of difficult coverage to be exempted from the Catalan requirement. The initiative, which is part of the agreements between both formations, has opened a new front of tension in the educational and linguistic sphere in the Balearic Islands. "Pacts with fascists, fascist ideas"; "With Prohens, language is not consensus," shouted the fifty or so demonstrators, who attended on behalf of families, unions, teaching directors, among others.

The Educational Network for Language has called a concentration this Tuesday before the Parliament to reject the measure agreed between the PP and Vox that allows exempting Catalan from the requirement for teachers accessing public service in hard-to-fill positions. The initiative, which is part of the agreements between both parties, has opened a new front of tension in the educational and linguistic sphere in the Balearic Islands. "Pacts with fascists, fascist ideas"; "With Prohens, language is not consensus", shouted the fifty or so demonstrators, who attended on behalf of families, unions, school principals, among others.

For Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua, 2026 is a historic year. For the first time in the same year, the entity's two major events will be celebrated: l’Acampallengua and Correllengua. Correllengua will be in a new format, which adds the 'Agermanat' lineage and will travel from north to south through the Catalan Countries between April 19 and May 5.

In discussing linguistic landscape, we refer to the language –or languages– present on street signs, shop windows, restaurant menus displayed outside, or ephemeral signage, such as announcements of cultural events or papers stuck on street furniture offering domestic services. The study of the linguistic landscape was inaugurated in 1997 with the English article by Landry and Bourhis, which in Catalan would be Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study. These authors use the term to analyze the visibility and relevance of languages in shops and advertisements, based on the observation of written linguistic uses in the public space of Quebec. Their fundamental contribution was to consider geographical space as another domain of linguistic use, that is, as a platform for the sociolinguistic study of languages. Subsequently, the study of the physical landscape was joined by the sound linguistic landscape, which expands the concept to encompass everything that is heard in urban centers. Who among us has not stopped to listen, walking through the streets of Palma or our town, to notice which languages are spoken there? Sometimes, you smile inwardly with joy when you hear young people speaking good Catalan on Sant Miquel street.

313 years have passed since the Treaty of Utrecht, an international agreement that the Assemblea Sobiranista de Mallorca still blames on Great Britain and considers “a colonial problem unresolved” with negative consequences still today for the “catalan nation”, including the Balearic Islands.

Catalan has not disappeared from the lives of young people in the Balearic Islands. It is heard in classrooms, in conversations between friends, and in many homes and environments. But it no longer always comes out on its own. Increasingly, speaking it is a choice – and it is here where its immediate future is being played out. The success of initiatives like Acampallengua and the youth presence at language rallies show that the muscle remains active and capable of mobilization. It is not just a symbolic issue: these are spaces where the language is practiced, reinforced, and projected into the future. This year, the first edition of Correllengua Agermanat will test this commitment.

Two large banners hang from the upper balcony of Manacor City Hall. They announce the Acampallengua, which will take place this Saturday, April 11th, and Sunday, April 12th, throughout the city. A weekend that is fun, cultural, but above all, a demand for a fully normalized life in Catalan. It is expected that if last year in Felanitx the number of participants was around 4,500 people, "this year the figure will be similar or slightly higher."

Two large banners hang from the upper balcony of Manacor City Hall. They announce the Acampallengua, which will take place this Saturday, April 11th, and Sunday, April 12th, throughout the city. A weekend that is fun, cultural, but above all, a demand for a fully normalized life in Catalan. It is expected that if last year in Felanitx the number of participants was around 4,500 people, "this year the figure will be similar or slightly higher".

With the arrival of Holy Week, in many homes on the Islands, a well-known scene has been repeated. The kitchen has become the center of everything, with accumulated trays and baked empanadas that have been succeeding each other to the point that, often, production has ended up exceeding any initial forecast. Amidst this rhythm, it may be that a moment has arrived when someone, half jokingly, half seriously, has posed this question: “For whom are all these empanadas?”. Orally, the phrase generates no doubt. No one gets stuck or sees any problem. But when it has to be written, even in a WhatsApp, perhaps we do hesitate a little: ‘por quién’ or ‘para quién’?

In 1956, the Osborne Group, a company dedicated to wines and spirits, placed a billboard in the shape of a bull on the Madrid-Burgos highway. That silhouette, fourteen meters high, had been designed to advertise Veterano brandy. Two years later, the bull expanded to the different roads of the State. The popularity of this animal was so great that, today, it is still a national symbol. For three generations, the idea that the bull is the animal that best represents Spain has been installed in the Spanish collective consciousness. This animal has transcended Spanish culture and symbolism so much that, even in 2017, the Supreme Court had to clarify that the bull is not an official symbol of the State. Even so, very often we still see bovine stickers on cars. In this article, we will see that this animal is much more than a brandy brand or a Spanish nationalist icon. The bull is a living animal in our language, toponymy, and popular parlance. So much so that we could say that the bull also has a Catalan root.

Thirteen more island clubs have joined the Correllengua Agermanat 2026, expanding the support of the sports world to this initiative in defense and promotion of the Catalan language. With these new adhesions, there are now almost thirty sports entities from the Balearic Islands that have joined the project.

Plataforma per la Llengua has submitted allegations to the draft bill for the regulation of the cultural landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana to demand that the regulations explicitly protect and promote the Catalan language.

A teacher at the Guillem Sagrera Secondary School in Palma has sparked controversy after preventing students from submitting assignments in Catalan and urging them to do so in Spanish. The school's language policy explicitly states: "Catalan, as established by current legislation, is the language of instruction and learning at the school and will be used in all organized activities. Consequently, it will be the instrument of teaching and learning and of regular communication in all internal and external areas of the school, and especially in activities with students." However, the document does not specify in which language any subject should be taught and merely states that at the beginning of the school year each teacher will be asked which language they will use and that everything will then be managed to ensure compliance with current regulations.

The educational language model is undergoing a period of accelerated transformation, marked by the set of measures promoted by the Government And specifically, by the Department of Education under Antoni Vera. All of these initiatives have reopened the debate on the role of Catalan in education. From the implementation of the Linguistic Segregation Plan to the relaxation of the Catalan language requirement for teachers, and including the amendment to the Education Law (LEIB) to recognize Spanish as a language of instruction, the Executive's initiatives have generated strong controversy within the educational community. Although the Government maintains that these decisions reflect a desire to guarantee a balance between the two official languages, unions, teachers, and other organizations warn that they could accelerate the decline of Catalan within the education system.

The Balearic Islands' education system is once again revealing its structural deficiencies. This year, 644 substitute teachers are working class without having accredited the level of Catalan This figure, according to data from the Ministry of Education, which does not specify the affected stages or levels, is three times higher than in 2022 and demonstrates how the shortage of professionals has strained the system to the point of having to to make language requirements more flexiblewhich, under normal conditions, would be mandatory.

At school they made us sing 'Cara al Sol' and Catalan was learned in secret. At six years old, I started at the Trinitarian nuns' home in Binissalem. We paid 350 pesetas each month, which was a lot of money back then. My mother wasn't too keen on me studying. She thought our job was to get married, that's all.

The Balearic Islands Health Service (IB-Salut) has incorporated 895 healthcare professionals who did not have to undergo accreditation. knowledge of Catalan Since the government eliminated the requirement in 2023, this figure represents approximately 6% of the total public sector workforce and will increase as new positions are advertised. Upon assuming the presidency of the government, Marga Prohens abolished the requirement via decree-law on August 28, 2023. Since then, knowledge of Catalan has gone from being mandatory to merely an asset for accessing public healthcare positions. This measure is included in the agreement Prohens signed with Vox to be invested as prime minister. However, it actually bears the signature of the People's Party (PP), as they had already committed to its implementation during the campaign.

Among the most frequent verbs in the Catalan language is, without a doubt, 'hacer' and ''Give'. Both have full and clear uses, such as 'to do a job' (in which the verb 'to do' means "to carry out") or 'to give a book' (in which the verb 'to give' has the full meaning of "to transfer to another"), but they also participate in many expressions where the main meaning lies in the accompanying noun. When we say, for example, that we want to 'ask someone a question', the core of the action is 'question'. The same occurs in ''to pay a visit,' 'to do work,' or 'to do an analysis.' The verb 'to do' provides the verbal structure of the sentence (it marks the tense, person, and agreement), but the main semantic content (that is, the meaning) is provided by the noun.