hi, language nerd and aspiring sociolinguistics student here! i wanted to say thank you for what you do here- making minority language issues and language policy stuff accesible to an english-majority online audience (and sharing your culture with the tumblr world) is incredible and valuable work!
i also wanted to share a little of my experience. currently i'm self-studying occitan (languedocien specifically), in preparation of a research project on language attitudes in online occitanophone spaces. i've heard many times that it's really difficult to learn minority languages, that there's not enough resources, or that minority language communities won't even want you to learn the language, or that there's just no point. my experience has been the exact opposite: the occitan community has been super welcoming, and i've found plenty of easily accessible learning resources! i think this attitude, that there's no point in english speakers learning small languages, is just one more thing holding minority language communities back- separating them from the world of "proper" "legitimate" languages like french or spanish. would you agree with this assessment?
It took me some days to answer this because I couldn't answer anything else than... well, all this, being completely honest. And when I got to it, wrote the long ass text, then I clicked "post" and Tumblr said there was an error and it had not been posted nor saved 🙃 here we go again.
Thank you for your message. It was a strange timing to receive it because I used to post more about the discrimination we face, but in the last 2 years or so I have been posting little about it. I have even thought of stopping this blog for a reason related to it (which I'll get to in a moment).
In the last few years, the situation has been getting much worse. Recently, the United Nations issued a warning to Spain because of the increase in hatred against Catalan people and other minorities (I started making a post with the UN warning, but I deleted it because I thought "why bother"). It seems like we can't go a week without another heartbreaking case of Catalanophobia being posted on social media. Just in the last month we've seen people be fired from their job in supermarket retail for speaking Catalan, customers harassed to leave an ice cream shop for the same reason by the owner, lots of videos of people saying how they moved to Barcelona but avoid areas where Catalans are more prevalent because we're so annoying to be near, even with the terrible fires in north-west Spain on TV they interviewed a woman who was screaming blaming Catalans for the fire not being put out (in such a terrible, terrible moment of your hometown being burned, is that really what bothers you? that people live in a completely different part of the peninsula and didn't have anything to do with the fire and are also suffering fires ourselves?!). The situation is getting worse in so many aspects, every day we're less likely to be able to access health care in Catalan in the public healthcare system of the Catalan areas (I've had some unpleasant experiences with this lately, and my grandma —who struggles a bit with Spanish when she's nervous— has had it much worse), we have completely normalized having democratically-elected politicians in exile and singers in jail.
And as if the Spanish government (and French government, remember that among other things the French government is still sueing mayors and other representatives in town councils for using Catalan alongside the French translation for everything they said instead of only French, in their town and village councils in Northern Catalonia) wasn't doing enough harm, on top of it the Spanish nationalist parties won the elections in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands and they have excluded Catalan from healthcare programs, they're trying to exclude it from education and make schools teach in Spanish only, they've taken away the funding from associations that do and give access to our cultural holidays and activities to give it to bullfighters and the like instead, and now in the Valencian Country they're officially changing the names of cities to the Spanish version only, eliminating the original name of the place and with it its history that ties it to the people who created it and cherished it for centuries and who still live here, pretending this has always been and always will be Spanish only places. They've also changed what can be said on the public TV channel and added more hours in Spanish (there's already so many channels in Spanish! We only have this one! Also the reason why in the Valencian Country we only have A Punt is because Spain has a law that forbids us from having reciprocity with other places that speak the same language, our TVs receive the channels from all the Spanish regions but it is ILLEGAL to air the Catalonia channel and radio in València and the Valencian channel and radio in Catalonia, which goes against the Charter of Regional and Minority Languages of Europe that Spain signed ages ago and has never implemented because nobody makes them implement it!) and in Catalonia we haven't been forced to add more Spanish and the TV directors have decided to do so anyway. Which means we get less hours of our language in the only channel in our language.
And on top of it, politicians go out to make fun of (even in official institutional acts, looking at you Barcelona City Council!) to make fun of and insult the people who say Catalan speakers should have equal rights in Catalan areas such as being able to be attended by a doctor who speaks Catalan, and they say it's ridiculous and we're backwards and stupid and racist for saying it (racist! Racism is a real problem that exists but now Spanish nationalism has decided that racism means Catalan people speaking Catalan in Catalonia or Basque people speaking Basque in the Basque Country, because by speaking a language that's not one of the big imperial languages —basically Spanish, English and French— we are excluding others and this makes us supremacist. I don't care about others when I'm talking to my friends, I care about talking to my friends! How is a Spanish person speaking Spanish a normal thing but a Catalan person speaking Catalan can't be normal it must be evil and the origin of the world's problems!).
I could go on and on. This year for La Patum (a Catalan holiday like a festa major) one of my friend's young sister took a video (basically it's just a video of people being happy dancing on the streets to traditional dances of this holiday) and posted it on TikTok where she only has a few followers who are friends and family, but somehow the video got shared by Spanish nationalists and she started getting thousands of death threats and insults and people calling her all sorts of things, just for a video of people dancing and being happy on a holiday just because they are Catalan people on a Catalan holiday. For part of my job I work with the public and I've also had a few unpleasant experiences, and because our team works on Barcelona history we are under supervision of the Barcelona Culture Institute which depends on the Barcelona City Council and since PSC won the elections we've been censored and they've changed the signs in historical places to delete the mentions of persecution and repression of Catalan language and culture (seriously has anyone been to El Born CCM recently and seen how they have taken away the signs that explained why the people who lived there were forced to destroy their own homes and were expelled to build a massive fort for the Spanish army as part of the military terrorism and repression against Catalonia after 1714, together with scraping any mention of how that happened in the context of the Spanish monarchy applying the so-called "right of conquest" on Catalonia, forbidding the use of Catalan in all official settings, forbidding many of our holidays, commuting massacres and mass deportations, burning down our symbols publicly, etc etc etc?!).
Changing the city names, hiding history... They want to make it look like both Catalan and Spanish are spoken here for equally "natural" reasons, that they have both always been here (as if we didn't speak Spanish because it was imposed on us through violence and psychological humiliation!) with the difference between both languages being that Spanish is what good, polite and educated people speak and is the one that has a future and makes us part of humanity, while Catalan is backwards, ugly, uncool, racist (again, wtf!), not "of the world" (if I had a cent every time I've heard that we must speak Spanish in order to be "citizens of the world"! Do they think they speak Spanish in the whole world? And where does Catalan come from if not "the world", from Mars?!) and thus is dying because it's not fit for the modern and educated world. It's exhausting! I feel like I can't go more than like 3 days without another blatant case of this or being reminded of how many people wish we were dead. Sometimes it seems like it would be the easy solution. If we all die, then so many people would be happy that the world would be better. Sometimes it's difficult to resist those thoughts and remember that we have as much of a right to exist as everyone else and when we say that human diversity is a strength for all the world, that that also includes us.
And that's why I thought of stopping this blog. Because with all of that going on, every day on the news seeing how we have officially entered another attempt at linguicide, how silly is it to be here talking about dances and legends? I feel just silly. It feels ridiculous to be talking about why we dance on the street on certain day with bells on our ankles while all of that is going on and we are in such a desperate moment. But I really appreciate your message because it reminds me why I started this blog 10 years ago: I enjoy learning these things about other countries, and I still truly believe that fascination for and finding beauty in the different cultures of the world is what will get people out of hatred.
I also agree with what you say, almost all minority and minoritized languages communities will be thrilled when someone from outside chooses to learn the language. There's very few exceptions, which have to do with those communities having gone through very specific experiences (such as the Romani), but it is in no way representative of how most language communities think. For most, it's a honour when someone wants to learn it. People on the internet should think twice before repeating the idea that minority language speakers don't want new speakers and spreading it as if it was generally true. Not only it couldn't be farther from the truth for the absolute majority of us, but it is also harmful.
About minority languages or languages with a small amount of speakers having too little resources to learn, it depends. Yes, some will have less resources, but nowadays there's at least a few resources for pretty much everything. Plus, it has been precisely these minoritized communities who have often put in the most effort to create free resources. So sometimes it might be all the opposite.
But yes, it's exactly what you say. Some people seem to always be looking for a reason to separate between "important languages" which are "legitimate languages to learn" and the "useless, minority dying languages" (which are, in fact, very often not dying at all and spoken every day by tens of thousands).
Catalan is a good example because it has more than 11 million speakers who live in 4 different states (Andorra, Spain, France, and Italy) without counting the diaspora. Catalan has more speakers than, for example, Swedish. But nobody would say that it's useless and stupid to learn a tiny language like Swedish, while we hear this about Catalan all the time. In the end, the difference lies on which communities have power, and this means which communities are occupied and which ones have their own state. For many people, if you aren't an independent country, you're nothing. That's why some people always tell us we don't exist because our ID document says Spain, as if that meant anything when it comes to culture.
But regardless of how many speakers a language still has, it can never be useless. Occitan, for example, has way less speakers than it ever did before as a result of France's linguicide. But still, Occitania cannot be understood without Occitan. Actually, Europe cannot be understood without Occitan and its literature (the oldest European literature in a vernacular language, before English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or any other). Occitan will always be at the heart of its nation, it will always be the door to access a culture, a history, a literature, and a way of understanding the world, it will always be the access to the world of the troubadours, of the Catharist castles, of the Croquants, of Frederic Mistral, of the carbonièrs de La Sala, and of everyone who continues to speak it to this day. It will always be what explains the heritage of Occitania and it will always be a World Heritage for its role in literature.
I wish you the best in your journey learning Occitan and in your research! I'm sure you'll find it rewarding.
And, well, thank you to anyone who has read my definitely-too-long stream of consciousness 😅
