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.

Xanguito has just released Batecs, a new EP of five songs with which the group opens a riskier, more intimate and mature stage in its trajectory. After almost a decade on stage, the Mallorcan band reaffirms its identity with a work that focuses on intensity and attention to every detail.

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?

“Everyone who comes to Mallorca and wants to take a typical souvenir: let them take a cyclist, there are many... To a whore's house, the bicycle!”. This is how Lluc Aparicio (@parisioproductions) ironically states in an Instagram video that has over 26,700 likes and nearly 10,000 shares. The publication accumulates hundreds of comments, some very harsh. “There are always people who get angry, but I don't want to pay attention to them. They criticize me if I talk about tourist saturation and also if I speak Catalan, but they are people who don't understand that I'm doing humor,” he explains.

Llucia Serra Ferre (Eivissa, 1992) has just won the Ciutat de Manacor poetry prize with Et dibuix un portal in media something (i tu t’hi ajoques). Living in Mallorca since her adolescence, she is a philologist, a high school teacher in Son Servera, and runs a board game publishing company in Catalan, Dino Ludens. So that the reader can get an idea of her writing, in Et dibuix un portal..., she quotes and paraphrases a poem by Antonina Canyelles that says: “You can say my boat, but the sails are always the wind’s”. Llucia Serra’s version is as follows: “You can say my house / but the lands / are always the bank’s”. The poem is titled ‘Idealista’.

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.

Sidonie is one of the benchmark bands of Spanish alternative pop with its own discourse that, over more than two decades of career, has evolved without losing its identity. Recently, however, the Barcelona-based group made an unexpected and significant turn: their latest album, Catalan graffiti (2025), is the first entirely in Catalan. On the eve of their concert at TribuFest in Felanitx, on Friday, May 29, their singer, Marc Ros, also talks about the life stage they are going through, their doubts, their successes, and the need to reconnect with music from a freer and more essential perspective.

Mata de Jonc, a school promoted by idealistic and brave families and teachers, was the first to conduct all teaching in Catalan in the Balearic Islands. It began to be formed in April and May 1976, 50 years ago. It was born with the will to become a new school, breaking with the traditional model, with active teaching, rooted in its environment and, above all, in Catalan. It took its name from the "Crònica" by Ramon Muntaner (1325-1328) from a paragraph that exemplifies how unity makes strength: "If the whole bunch of reeds tied together with a strong rope and you all want to pull it up together, I tell you that ten men, no matter how much they pull, will not pull it up, nor even if more were to join. And if you remove the rope, a young man of eight years will break it from reed to reed, so that not a single reed will remain".

The Correllengua Agermanat was an undeniable success, a new demonstration of the appreciation of the people of the Balearic Islands for their language and culture, and of the defense –energetic, festive, unrenounceable– that Mallorcan society, especially (and this is more than important, it is decisive) young people, carries out. The Plaza de España in Palma was packed to the brim, just as the Plaza Mayor was two years ago, with thousands of people who shouted a civic, inclusive, hopeful, and, above all, massive ‘Yes to the language’.So massive that the very next day the Government spokesperson, Sebastià Sagreras, with his particular oratory, was struggling to avoid being completely left behind. After congratulating the organizers of the Correllengua Agermanat (there were reasons to do so, even more so after the institutions governed by them had turned their backs on them), he said: “The PP of the Balearic Islands is the father and protector of the Linguistic Normalization Law”, Sagreras stated improperly, because the Linguistic Normalization Law was approved with a PP government, yes (they wouldn't do it today), but in no way can it claim a paternity that was much broader, nor a protection that, over these forty years, civil society has too often had to provide. And he added, in Peixet, referring to this same law: “Throughout the entire legislature we have defended it, supported it, and marked it as a red line in all negotiations, despite the left's intentions to use our language to confront us with the citizenry”.This is what Sagreras said on Monday. The following day, Tuesday, in the Parliament, the PP supported a series of amendments by Vox to the law on strategic projects, the sieve law. The approved amendments eliminate the Catalan requirement for teachers and professors from outside who occupy “difficult to fill” positions, without any obligation or subsequent deadline to prove knowledge of the language. They also exempted “temporary” students, who reside for a limited time in the Balearic Islands, from the Catalan subject. In other words: for the umpteenth time, an attack against the own language of the Balearic Islands (and also of the PP leaders, such as Sagreras himself, or Prohens, or Vera) perpetrated by the Government. An attack, incidentally, which constitutes a serious violation of the Linguistic Normalization Law, and also of the Statute. The PP does this to please the obsessions and hatreds of its Vox partners. Among the measures, it was also approved that local police officers can carry taser guns, and pigeon shooting was legalized: weapons, and killing animals, are things that the right also tends to like very much.Proclaiming oneself one day as the father and protector of the Linguistic Normalization Law, and the next day getting rid of it without any qualms in the company of fascism and Spanish ultranationalism, is no longer just cynicism: it is a strange dysfunction that indicates an extremely weak government, without leaders capable of negotiating anything, without principles and without dignity, completely surrendered to the far-right and with no other course than to exhaust the legislature with the strategic project of giving the green light to all the speculators who happen to come by. There is something curious about Sagreras's little speech about the PP's paternity and protection of the Linguistic Normalization Law, and that is that he says they have defended it “during the entire legislature”, and they have barely (not yet) been in office for two years. It is known that it feels long to him: imagine the rest of us.

It is a joy to see deputies, councilors and members of the Socialist Party of the Balearic Islands with the Correllengua t-shirt, filling social networks with their enthusiasm to protect the Catalan language.

The Correllengua Agermanat 2026 reached its end with a resounding success, that of becoming a historic mobilization in defense of the Catalan language. During the two weeks of its duration, more than 180,000 people have participated in this first edition, covering 1,500 kilometers, passing through 500 municipalities, and 30,000 people have been torchbearers. The spokesperson for Correllengua Agermanat, Pau Emili Muñoz, assures that the event's success is "a demonstration of strength" and emphasizes it as follows: "As a society, Catalan-speaking territories have regained the enthusiasm to fight for the Catalan language and demand its real normalization".

What do you want, to sell a lot or to write well?Speaking of the difficulty of living off what I write, a colleague posed this painful question to me.Let's be clear: publishing houses are not charity organizations, but businesses like any other, they have to pay salaries and survive in a complex cultural context: surrounded by two very powerful cultures, the authors of this small country insist on writing in Catalan, without any powerful state to support us, with Portuguese institutions that don't quite believe in it, with booksellers who have limited space and receive new releases every week with the support of large groups with a powerful promotional machinery that usually prioritizes non-literary criteria.I suppose the goal would be to make culture in Catalan profitable. And this is where consumers have a lot to say. What books do you buy? Are you aware that we hold in our hands the most effective way to make Catalan culture profitable? Well, buy a lot of books, and buy books written in Catalan.To make an impact, I'll give you four and a half recommendations for books written by Balearic authors that, if we had a normal country, would be among the bestsellers.– Winter Sun. Dora Muñoz. Edicions Xandri. July 1939: a group of Majorcans heading to the popular Olympics in Barcelona found themselves caught between two worlds, quite literally: Republican Catalonia and Francoist Mallorca. They left for three days, which ended up being three years.Muñoz shows us her great versatility (have you read Errada de comptes, her latest crime novel? It's also fantastic!). Here she changes register and hooks us with a great command of narrative tension, which is not easy at all. Sol d’hivern is a story based on a real event, and life very often doesn't fit literary tempos, but Muñoz knows how to keep us hooked on the story.– How do you want, brothers, for me to sing? Joan Pons Bover is doing fantastic promotion for this novel, with a piercing lyricism, a tribute to lost loves, to the grief of what never was. Published by Illa Edicions, with two temporal arcs, from the desolate routine of a nursing home to the despair of losing one's first love in post-war Formentera. A breathtaking book, written with a careful and precious language that you won't be able to stop reading.

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.

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.

I read that the far-right party Vox says it will condition its support for the approval of the 88 amendments to the strategic projects law –a true shake-up of the current system that will modify almost thirty laws– on a change in the toponymy of the Balearic Islands: “That they return to bilingual toponymy, Palma-Palma de Mallorca, Maó-Mahón and others like Santanyí-Santañí”. The Government has already replied that it does not agree with this, as it contravenes the Law of Linguistic Normalization.

The Mallorcan Carles Rebassa, winner of the Sant Jordi award for the novel Prometheus of a Thousand Ways, has criticized on social media the lack of institutional recognition after obtaining this award, one of the most prestigious in Catalan literature, convened annually by Òmnium Cultural, an entity dedicated to the defense of the Catalan language and culture.