B-b-b-broken record

Here I go again, talking about language issues in Spain, particularly dealing with Catalan --Basque is just not as big an issue--, but if you read my blog regularly this is kind of my "thing" and should surprise no one that I'm talking about this.  And I'm actually kind of late with this one, like two weeks, but I've been out of the loop for a while.  Don't mind me.  Anyway, here's the topic.


I just finished reading a blog entry on the Ara.cat webpage (one of my favorite news sources, won't even lie) in the Sports section about the Chinese journalist who asks FC Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola questions in Catalan despite only being in the country since last summer and being able to communicate perfectly well in Spanish, and the Italian journalist who also asks questions in Catalan (by the way, all the links lead to Catalan articles) and was pointed out by Guardiola himself as an example of "linguistic immersion" as he's also been in Catalunya less than a year.

One of the points the author of the blog post makes that I find incredibly relevant is how in Italy, no one even bothered to ask Francesco Canale, the Italian journalist who asks questions in Catalan, to ask Guardiola the same questions again in Italian, which Guardiola does speak.  And yet, in the rest of Spain, players who answer questions in Catalan are often asked to repeat their answers in Spanish.  It's the idea that because the Catalans speak Spanish, they shouldn't need to translate anything in the broadcast.  So besides the fact that there's a state of shock anytime a non-Catalan speaks Catalan, regardless of how much time they've been living in the region, there's also that element of "Why doesn't the rest of Spain get it?"

Honestly, I don't know.  Catalan's not that difficult a language (though the verbs and certain parts of the grammatical structure are kind of a bitch, I give it that) and it's not like anyone's trying to convert anyone to another language.  Speaking Catalan doesn't automatically make someone a Catalan nationalist/separatist (just ask Andrés Iniesta) who brings estelades to every meeting.  If foreigners, many of whom already speak Spanish, and many of whom don't, can get it and learn the language, why does Madrid still treat it like the spoken version of the Spanish flu?