moving to you know where

Without probably knowing enough about these experiences, besides the first one which is clearly annoying, I sort of see that there is nothing wrong with the rest, including the last one :D.

You go to a bakery and they respond to you in catalan. How do you know they were annoyed at you? Just because they responded in catalan? Again, it's really common (way more than the other way around) to be responded in spanish when you speak in catalan. And that is not a problem, for anyone. Actually, hundreds of times I've been told "we don't speak catalan here". Have you ever been told "we don't speak spanish/english here?". And believe me, it happens a lot.

Our linguistic rights are getting crushed, really fast.

I used to be able to go anywhere in Barcelona when I was a kid, speak to anyone in Catalan, and people would understand me (it never bothered to me if they responded in Spanish). Now I know that 30% of the times I go to a shop, they will not understand me in catalan. And that's not even the problem. So many of them don't even ask you to speak slowly. It's just a "I don't speak catalan". Not a "I'm still learning", or "can you repeat". Nothing, no interest, it's not in their todo's list to learn it!

This is destroying our bilinguistic dynamic at a very fast rate. I want immigrants to come here (expats, foreigners, call it whatever you want). We need them, I love diversity and the world would be really boring without it. But please don't just come here and learn spanish "because it's more useful". And this is how it is really. How many people do you know that ended up learning catalan and speaking it daily, or ar least as much (or more) than spanish?

We don't care if your catalan isn't good, we are super relaxed when it comes to this, but it's important that a teacher -more than anyone else- learns it, even if you suck short term. We learn a language when we have the need to do it. If newcomer teachers could speak just spanish, most of them would never be bothered to learn catalan.

And finally, regarding your last paragraph: Yes, it's great that you recommend people to learn catalan. But you also said that they should learn it because we don't switch to Spanish for political reasons. And that makes us look picky, annoying, idealistic, etc. It's not fair that we are being told all this while the reality is that we just want to be able to speak Catalan in Catalonia, and to be respected and understood in our own region. It doesn't matter if it takes a few attempts, or obviously if we see a genuine interest from that person to eventually learn it if they just arrived.

/r/Barcelona Thread Parent