"To be tighter than skin...": could you finish these traditional Mallorcan sayings?

PalmThe Mallorcan idioms and popular sayingsExpressions that for centuries have served to transmit wisdom, humor, and identity are losing ground among new generations. Expressions like "whoever goes with a pillow, after a year they both are" or "little by little and with good handwriting" sound increasingly distant in a context dominated by globalization and social media.

The increasing use of Spanish and English (primarily in the digital sphere) accelerates this loss, which also reflects a change in the way we communicate. The short, immediate words of the digital environment often replace the expressive and symbolic richness of traditional sayings.

However, several municipalities and educational centers are promoting initiatives to recover this linguistic heritageFrom workshops to cultural projects that champion popular speech as a hallmark of identity, their continuity will depend on the collective capacity to assert their own language, which, beyond words, preserves the Mallorcan people's perspective on the world.

In response to this, the communications agency Ximbomba took to the streets to conduct a quiz with 10 traditional Mallorcan sayings to see how many Mallorcans knew. "We should make one...", "go pee...", "it's freezing cold...", "whoever farts...", "go outside...", or "there's a tail behind it...", are some of the phrases they presented. Younger people got almost all the questions wrong, while those over forty knew the vast majority.

All in all, this quiz is yet another reflection of the loss of oral heritage being experienced by younger generations, who know and use more expressions in foreign languages than in Catalan.