The Majorcan goalkeeper for Barça, Cata Coll, was awarded the Yashin trophy, which recognizes her as the best goalkeeper in the world. During her speech at the Ballon d'Or gala, the Majorcan chose to deliver part of her speech in Catalan, a gesture that was highly appreciated from the very first moment on social media: "Congratulations for making Catalan visible in your impeccable speech, using our beloved language".

Andratx, like all our towns, is well loaded with linguistic anecdotes. The one that occupies us today arises from a confusion between spellings that the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary (DCVB) unravels with documentary sources and philological criteria. At the entry 'Andratx', the dictionary documents the old spelling Andraig from the 13th century to the 19th and the modern Andratx from the beginning of the 19th century. In between, a parade of incorrect graphic variants, such as 'Andrayig’ and 'Andrag’, documented during the Middle Ages and the modern era. In the 18th and 19th centuries we find 'Andraix’ and 'Andrax’, while 'Andrache’, from the 18th century, and 'Andraxe’, documented in 1812, are identified as Castilian adaptations. But we still have another spelling, which appeared in the 19th century, that will take us to the very core of our history.

Mecagondéu is the third album by Sr. À, after Fil per randa (2019) and Ordint la trama (2016). Sr. À is the stage name of Adrià Rubio, born in Barcelona 31 years ago, an Ibizan by adoption since he was 14; he currently resides in Camarasa (La Noguera), because it “hurts him a lot what is being done to Ibiza”. Precisely, the first single of the album has been ‘E.I.V.I.S.S.A.’, an invective against the social and environmental degradation of the island. In Mecagondéu, Sr. À combines poignant lyrics and rap with a classic air, with production by Jove Cirurgià del Sample, who has introduced fragments of sardanes or redoblat singing. Sr. À is also the singer of the band Malaka, is a social integrator by profession, and a restorer of peasant chairs. If you are fed up with pop without ideological substance, Mecagondéu is just what you were expecting.

Has it ever happened to you that, when someone told you they had greeted ‘a la veïna’ [the neighbor] or that on the radio they had interviewed ‘a aquella escriptora tan famosa’ [that famous writer], you wondered if that ‘a’ should be there? The question is quite common and, if we only take the regulations into account, the answer is simple: no. We should say ‘he saludat la veïna’ or ‘han entrevistat aquella escriptora’. In Spanish, however, the preposition would indeed be necessary: it would be appropriate to say ‘he saludado a mi vecina’ or ‘han entrevistado a la escritora’, and that is why it is easy to think that, when we use it in Catalan, we have let ourselves be carried away by the neighboring language.

Surely everyone has said or heard at some point a sentence like this: “The construction of the building lasted two years”. If we look at it, this sentence has something curious: there is a noun, ‘construction’, that does something that, at first, we wouldn't expect from a noun: it has a duration. We can say how long the construction lasted, we can say it was fast or slow and even that it was constant. On the other hand, if we say that “the construction at the end of the street is new”, we are no longer talking about the process of building, but about the result: the building that has been built. The word is exactly the same, but what it designates is quite different.

‘Catalan’ is the scientific name of the language spoken in the Balearic Islands. This is established by the Statute of Autonomy, although, colloquially, the demonym of each island is used, and ‘pagès’ in Formentera. However, over the centuries, many denominations have been used to refer to it: ‘our language’, ‘vernacular’, ‘mother tongue’, ‘own’, ‘regional’, etc. Often, so as not to have to say ‘Catalan’, because it was understood –and is still understood– that whoever speaks Catalan might be Catalan, and some did not want –do not want– to fall into this identification. We remember the range of synonyms when the European Day of Languages (September 26) is celebrated.

A tongue twister is a sentence that is difficult to pronounce. Usually, tongue twisters are used as games, especially to entertain children with little more than words. We have all tried to say, as quickly as possible, tongue twisters like ‘Setze jutges d’un jutjat mengen fetge d’un penjat, si el penjat fos despenjat es menjaria els setze fetges dels setze jutges del jutjat’ (Sixteen judges of a court eat the liver of a hanged man, if the hanged man were unhanged he would eat the sixteen livers of the sixteen judges of the court), and ‘Un plat pla blanc ple de pebre negre està’ (A flat white plate full of black pepper is). If we look at the characteristics of these sentences, we will find a shared element: the repetition of a sound. The repetition of a sound is a stylistic device that we call alliteration and which also occurs in poetry, as in that verse by Josep Maria de Sagarra, “Vinyes verdes vora el mar” (Green vineyards by the sea). But unlike alliteration, a tongue twister consists of the repetition, usually at high speed, of alternating sound sequences. With this system, the difficulty arises when a different but similar sound appears. If we think about ‘Un plat pla blanc ple de pebre negre està’, the mistake we usually fall into is reaching ‘pebre negre’ and pronouncing ‘peble negle’ or, if we want to prevent it, pronouncing ‘pre’ and not ‘ple’. In these cases, the ‘l’ and the ‘r’ are consonants that are pronounced by placing the tongue at the same point in the mouth, before the upper teeth. In a tongue twister like ‘De genollons collia codonys, de genollons codonys collia’ (Kneeling he picked quinces, kneeling he picked quinces) the change in the order of the word ‘codonys’ and the similarity of the first syllable with the word ‘collia’ can cause us to say “de genollons codonys codia’” or, due to the similarity of the last syllable of ‘genollons’ and ‘codonys’, to say “de genollons collons collia”. The second one will surely be the one that will make the person who challenged us to pronounce the tongue twister laugh.

Literature in Catalan will once again take over the Misericòrdia gardens in Palma from September 24 to 27 with the 37th edition of the Catalan Book Week. The event will bring together around thirty participants and twenty activities, featuring names such as Dolors Miquel, Biel Mesquida, Empar Moliner, and Laura Gost.

After last week's newtons and greengage plums, we can continue searching for proper names hidden within everyday vocabulary. Once again, we just need to look around a little. We can put on some sneakers to go for a run or some hiking boots to go on an excursion. If during these activities we catch a bit of a cold and get a headache, we might have to take an aspirin. And, if the headache goes away and we decide to go out for dinner, we might use mascara to dress ourselves up a bit more.

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.

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.