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.

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.

The Correllengua Agermanat organization has opened registration for the relay race legs, which will cover more than 1,500 kilometers across all Catalan-speaking territories from April 19 to May 5, 2026. Anyone wishing to join this cultural and sporting initiative can now easily register through the official website.https://www.correllenguaagermanat.cat/reservaParticipation is free and open to everyone.

How many times have you heard, thought, or even said, "Yes, Catalan is all well and good, but what's it really good for?" How many times has the conversation ended with a count of speakers, a comparison with English, or a list of supposed career paths? The question seems innocent, but it isn't. It implies a very specific way of understanding the world: only what has an immediate, quantifiable, exportable, and tangible return is valuable. Everything that doesn't fit into that logic is viewed with suspicion. Meanwhile, more than 2,600 kilometers from Palma, at Masaryk University in Brno, there is a full degree program in Catalan Language and Literature that is celebrating its tenth anniversary this academic year, 2025-2026. Ten years. It marked the occasion with a commemorative academic ceremony held on Wednesday, March 4th, with established faculty and graduating classes who have already entered the professional world.

Have you ever dealt with someone from Felanitx? We speak strangely, don't we? The Felanitxer subdialect is one of those Joan Veny calls 'bell tower' dialects, those that stand out for having particular characteristics compared to their surrounding areas. However, most of the features of Felanitxer are shared with other varieties. Today we'll talk about vowels. First, we pronounce the final 'a' in proparoxytone words ending in '-ia' (like Artà and Capdepera), such as farmacia, historia, or paciencia; second, before the group 'lt', [a] becomes either open ([ò]), deim [ò]other, d[either]lt and evil[either]ltAnd thirdly, it seems we lack the open 'e', ​​as is also the case with speakers from San Juan and María de la Salud. It is precisely this last feature that we will address in this article. Impression does not allow for phonetic symbols, so we will resort to using [é] for the open 'e' (cielo) and [é] for the closed 'e' (viento), just as we have already used [ó] for the open 'u'.

In the midst of the tiresome debate about the name and the unity of our language (will it never end?) It's common that, when someone says "Menorcan yes, Catalan no," someone else asks why the same isn't said of Castilian Spanish. In Extremadura, in the Pampas, or on the streets of Mexico City, it's often said that everyone understands they speak the same language, regardless of the variations in vocabulary, phonetics, intonation, and syntax. So why isn't the same criterion applied to Catalan? And it turns out that, indeed, among Castilian speakers there have also been attempts at linguistic secession, which are quite entertaining.

Obviously, the worst part hasn't been the music, but the reactions it's provoked. Bad Bunny sings in Spanish at the Super Bowl, and Spanish nationalism is choking on its own drool, all because this happened right in front of Trump.

The Menorcan councilor Gonella has managed to unite everyone in opposition to his new language regulations. Only the organization he headed before entering politics, Sa Fundació, has expressed support. Conversely, the regulations, which introduce Spanish and prioritize Menorcan over Catalan in Menorca's highest institution, have prompted a flood of objections from organizations, political parties, and citizens alike, all responding to the public call to get involved in defending the unity of the language.

Does God speak Catalan? Undoubtedly, for believers, since He is omnipotent. However, for centuries, the Catholic Church expressed itself in its ceremonies in Latin—the language of the Roman Empire, which threw the first Christians to the beasts of the circus: such are the paradoxes of life. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Second Vatican Council established that Masses would be celebrated in the vernacular: six decades ago, the Church in the Balearic Islands was embroiled in a heated debate about which language that should be. That the vernacular was Catalan had been perfectly clear to the Catholic Church in the Balearic Islands practically since the medieval conquest. Not even the growing centralism of the State made them change their position. The very liberal Bishop of Mallorca, Bernat Nadal, had the catechism published in Catalan in 1801. Bishop Pere Joan Campins created a chair of Mallorcan Language and Literature at the seminary. Bishop Josep Miralles, despite his support for the 1936 coup, had already stood firm against Primo de Rivera's Castilianizing ambitions and, during the early Franco regime, defended preaching in Catalan and published a final edition of the catechism in that language in 1937. Twenty-five years of Franco's dictatorship—a period of peace, as the regime proclaimed; yes, the peace of the cemeteries—and a segment of the Church in the Balearic Islands, as well as a segment of society, understood Castilian as the language of prestige and culture. Not all, of course: in Lluc, as if it were Asterix's village, the priest Pere Riutort promoted textbooks in standard Catalan and distributed copies of the magazine Strong Horse From Barcelona, ​​and upon moving to the Valencian Country, he would continue his work in favor of the presence of Catalan in the ecclesiastical sphere.

How is language organized in the human brain? What makes it possible for a child to acquire a language in just a few years, for this ability to be maintained throughout life, or for the system to find ways to reorganize itself after an injury? These questions, which linguists, psychologists, physicians, and neuroscientists have been trying to answer for many years, are not just for academics: they are relevant to anyone interested in understanding how one of the most basic and, at the same time, most complex abilities of the human species works.

Cinemas in the Balearic Islands screened only 16 of the 114 films and documentaries shot, dubbed, or subtitled in Catalan that premiered in the commercial circuit during 2025. This figure represents 14% of the total and places the Balearic Islands as the Catalan-speaking territory with the least presence of Catalan-language films, according to a report by Plataforma per la Lle. The study, based on data from the Department of Linguistic Policy of the Generalitat of Catalonia and information provided by distributors and exhibitors, confirms that 85% of Catalan-language releases in 2025 could not be seen in the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands, or Andorra. All of the Catalan-language films reached cinemas in Catalonia, but only 20 were screened in the Valencian Community (17.5%). 17 in Andorra (14.9%), and 16 in the Balearic Islands. Only two titles, Wolfgang and Sea and skyThe films could be seen in all four territories, though not always simultaneously. The report reveals a "very uneven" distribution of Catalan-language cinema and an "extremely limited" offering outside of Catalonia. In the Balearic Islands, almost all premieres were concentrated in Palma, mainly at CineCiutat, with a negligible presence on the other islands. Regarding the version, ten of the 16 films screened in the Balearic Islands were shown in their original Catalan. Dubbing is very uncommon, which, according to Plataforma per la Llengua (Platform for the Language), limits the accessibility of Catalan-language cinema to a wider audience. The organization points out that even when films are dubbed or subtitled, theaters tend to schedule few screenings, at off-peak times, for only a few days, and without significant promotion. This makes it difficult for audiences to become aware of the available films and establish a habit of going to Catalan-language cinemas.

Do you remember that song by La Trinca whose chorus went, "What a mess, I'm telling you! It's just how language works"? Released in 1979, the piece perfectly reflected the discursive structure characteristic of the group's compositions. La Trinca used satire as a stylistic device to question, denounce, and expose the attitudes, behaviors, and ideologies of late Francoist society.

Schools that don't comply with the minimum standards decree, teachers who switch languages ​​or don't master it. Students with negative attitudes towards Catalan fueled by social media content. An inspection department incapable of verifying with evidence whether a school complies with current language regulations: what happens inside the classrooms is only known by those present, a situation that benefits the offenders. And yet, students' Catalan proficiency plummets year after year. Schools remain the last bastion of the Catalan language. Teachers and the Ministry of Education know this, even though they make deals with Vox on measures that diminish its influence, such as the Linguistic Segregation Plan. We spoke with professionals about what should be done for schools to once again speak Catalan.