The Menorca Council silences two internal reports against the use of the salty article on its social networks.

PalmPublic entities attached to the Ministry of Education, Youth, Culture and Sports of the Consell de Menorca will no longer be able to publish on social media using non-normative "salty" articles. The association Fem-ho en Català, formed last year by former language volunteers in Menorca from the Platform for the Language, is on the verge of legally forcing the Ministry headed by the former director of the Joan Pons Torres Foundation to stop using the "salty" article in its social media posts.

Menorca's Cultural Agenda, Menorca Island of Sport, and Menorca Illa Jove appear in all their posts on social media such as Instagram, although Joan Pons Torres's Ministry has been formally requested to stop using the "salty" article and non-normative vocabulary in its advertisements for over a year now. This is also being requested by two internal reports, one legal and the other by the Consell's linguistic advisor, following the appeal that Fem-ho en Català has filed against the minister's initial decision to reject its request. It is worth remembering that Sa Fundació, which Pons Torres directed before becoming a minister, promotes the defense of island forms with the aim of marginalizing normative Catalan in favor of "more indigenous forms."

The first request was made on July 9, 2024, with the support of an internal report from the Linguistic Advisory Service and the president of the Philological Section of the Institute of Catalan Studies, but the Consell evaded its legal obligation and responded with administrative silence.

Fem-ho en Català's reaction was to directly sue the Consell before the Palma Contentious Court under the special procedure for the protection of fundamental rights. The Prosecutor's Office supported him, but the Council responded by rejecting the entity's request.

Sentence

In his ruling, Minister Pons Torres relied on a 2017 High Court ruling on the dispute between the Formentera Council and the public entity Fogaiba (Fogaiba) over the latter's use of Mallorcan vocabulary in a list of subsidized products. The TSJIB (High Court of Justice) ruled in favor of the Agrarian Guarantee Fund (FAR), as it had no jurisdiction over language standardization, nor did the subsidy have anything to do with language policies.

However, Hagámoslo en Catalán (Let's Do It in Catalan) considered that the ruling was not applicable to the case of the article published on the Menorca Council's social media accounts and filed an appeal on May 4. In the appeal, he not only cited the Council's internal instructions regulating the language model on social media, but also the existence of a minor contract for the communication management of the Cultural Agenda, with a set of terms requiring linguistic correctness in publications.

Three months after the request, when the negative administrative silence was beginning to apply, the entity asked the Council to certify its lack of response and provide all the documentation in the file. There, it discovered two reports issued specifically for the appeal that had been silenced by the councilor, both of which were devastating.

The legal report clearly concludes that the 2017 ruling is not applicable to this case and that the language instructions must be taken into account. Regarding the report issued by the language advisor, it also reinforces the arguments and makes it clear that neither the language standards nor style manuals permit the use of the "salado" article in formal contexts.

In his opinion, "the salty or Balearic article is inappropriate, because it does not conform to the standardizing role of the councils and contradicts the institution's internal regulations regarding language and style criteria, as well as the linguistic uses that the Menorca Administration has consolidated in coherence with the other public administrations of the Community." Therefore, "the linguistic variety that should be used in communications of any kind, including social networks, is the standard, as corresponds to the formal registers derived from the administrative and institutional task that is its own."

The councilor remains silent

But the forcefulness of both reports has not changed the minister's position, which has yet to respond. Not even after "Hagámos lo en Catalan" (Let's Do It in Catalan) has also informed the Ombudsman of the situation.

The association emphasizes that it has no objection to the "salty article," since "it is part of our linguistic heritage and a hallmark of our spoken language," and denounces the minister's intention as "to corner any manifestation of Catalanness in our language."

In this sense, "Hagámos lo en Catalán" invokes the late Joan Francesc López Casasnovas, for whom the creation of a standard is a condition. sine qua non for the future of a language. Thus, "rejecting a standard for Catalan demonstrates the desire to reduce our language to something familiar at home, familiar behind closed doors, useless outside the country for economic, cultural, judicial, artistic activities, and for modern communication." In fact, the organization points out, the majority of articles written by island government advisors in the daily press are published in Spanish.