The omnipresence of Catalan
My only experience of Catalonia thus far was Barcelona, where public signage is in both Catalan and Spanish and you hear more Spanish than Catalan spoken. But we've been staying 60 kms north of Barcelona in the village of Sant Pol de Mar for the past week and the Catalan language outside Barcelona is not only omnipresent but frequently unaccompanied by any Spanish translation.
We're in the region for the Finn Masters World Championships (for those of you who might be wondering: the Finn is an Olympic-class dinghy, so this is a sailing race!) and in the Welcome Pack were some tourist maps and brochures... all in Catalan. How many of the 359 sailors who've come from as far as New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Ukraine and Russia, not counting all the Europeans, speak Catalan I wonder? Probably none. Or come to that, how many of the visitors to the area generally, speak Catalan?
Whilst my husband was sailing I've been touring. I went to the biggest town in the area, Mataró, exactly half-way to Barcelona from Sant Pol. Entrance to museums was free so I went to the Nau Gaudí museum and the Can Serra Mataró city museum.
I gathered from the latter that Mataró dates back to the Roman times and also, at some point, specialised in making cement tiles. But more than that I could not discover because explanations were offered in Catalan only. Why? City officials may be trying to make a political point, but if they'd like visitors to be interested in what they have to show then they should at least present their blurb in both official languages and put their explanations up in Spanish too. I left after no more than about 20 minutes feeling annoyed and frustrated.
Signage in the Nau Gaudí was not an issue because there it was trilingual: Catalan, Spanish and English. So I stayed much longer and learned something: the building is the only remnant of the manufacturing plant of the Mataró Workers Cooperative and was part of an ambitious project conceived between 1878 and 1883. It is considered to beAntonio Gaudí's first work. In this cotton bleaching shed he experimented with parabolic arches which subsequently became a key element of his architecture. The building now houses the modern sculpture collection of Luis and Carmen Bassat, including a couple of very small and rather lovely Henry Moore works.
Later I went food shopping in the village of Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. Everyone in the butcher's shop and on both sides of the counter was speaking Catalan but when the butcher asked me a question, presumably asking me what I wanted, I had to say that I didn't understand and could he please speak Spanish. He shifted languages immediately. A similar experience was had in the small supermarket. And as I sat drinking a coffee on ice in front of the basilica I heard nothing but Catalan being spoken around me.
So, when I got home I looked up the Catalan Institute for Statistics, which indicates that only 36% of the population uses Catalan as their main language although over 80% of the population can speak it. And then I found a map which shows that only 27.8% of the population in Barcelona speak Catalan whereas in the regions of Comarques Gironines (the region where we are between the Barcelona metropolitan area and the French border), 51.5% speak it as their usual language. My experience is that 100% seem to speak it as their usual language!!
But these statistics make it all the more bizarre that so much of the public signage is in Catalan only. Does that mean that the 20% of people who live here and don't speak Catalan are just ignored and uncatered to?
