The Catalan Thing

Well, it wasn't in truth the best of weeks for the Catalan thing. Francina and the Earth Mother Patricia, who is apparently still the health minister, decided that all this business with insisting on nurses imported from Andalusia being word perfect in Catalan might not just be wholly sensible. It wasn't good for Catalan, and it also wasn't good for Francina and the deconstructing pact. Més, as might have been expected, were hopping mad, though for appearance's sakes they weren't mounting the press conferences and firing off volleys of rebuke.

Francina, doubtless not wishing to appear to have taken over the education ministry despite having done so, despatched Pilar, the minister in charge of Francina's ministry, i.e. the presidency, to have a word with the press. We are working on getting the broadest social and political consensus, she waffled, noting that there wasn't enough of the C-word. The unions were not for consenting.

Not reticent like Més were the Obra Cultural Balear. Unaware that there was not consensus within society, as Pilar had attempted to explain, the OCB announced that "any measure" will be taken to ensure that the bedside manner is pursued with nary a syllable of Castellano being uttered. Any measure, they suggested, will include the mobilisation of civil society, that part of it which presumably does consent.

Meanwhile, Biel Company, the nominal leader of the PP, opined that Francina was more Catalanist than the Catalans because of her health service Catalan imposition. Which was rather odd, given that Francina had just withdrawn the imposition. Still, Biel observed that Francina had taken fright in having done so, as there would otherwise be demonstrations she couldn't afford, and he wasn't referring to the OCB.

Attempting to keep the Catalan thing afloat was the education minister. Marti March, for whom one newspaper headline suggested that education policy was being designed for his own personal glory, had come up with yet another new plan for education (these new plans surface every three to four years). Marti's plan, it would appear, will relegate English and foreign language teaching into virtual non-existence if schools choose to do so. Meanwhile, Catalan will be given pre-eminence. So basically, Marti was going back to the future circa 2008, and was thus paving the way for a new government to reverse his plan.

Educationalists, some of them, were as outraged about this as the OCB were with Catalan being given the health heave-ho. One teachers association, PLIS, which has the motto "educación, por favor", demanded that the government stops plissing all over education and does something sensible for once. Which of course it won't.

Striding confidently into all this Catalan carry-on came the leader of Ciudadanos, Xavier Pericay. Buoyed by the fact that his party could see its parliamentary representation leap to the princely sum of seven seats as opposed to the currently modest two, Xavier has been carrying a torch for what his political critics (i.e. Més) refer to as the "new Bauzaism". In other words, if Xavier and the C's end up in a coalition with the PP, there will be a revival of J.R.'s anti-Catalanism in schools. Therefore, there will be a new educational plan. And so it will go on and on and on.

Marti, meanwhile, had disappeared so far up a tortuous explanation littered with levels of language ability and pedagogical whatever, that he totally failed to remember to mention the C-word. Will there be the broadest social and political consensus for what may end up being almost exclusively Catalan teaching? He didn't let on. This despite the fact that he had been hauled up in front of the press alongside Pilar. Broadest consensus (or something of a charade to demonstrate it) for one thing, but not for another: it all rather depends on what the government is seeking consensus for.

Unhealthy Obsessions

Governing the Balearics isn't that complicated. A glance at the ministries will show that government by and large conforms to requirements that you would expect. Excluded from these ministries are, for instance, any need for defence or foreign affairs. These are not matters for a regional government, unless perhaps that government is Catalonia's.

Government is basically about internal issues, and the greatest of these - as determined by the size of the budgets - are health and education. Of the 5,000 million euros overall budget for 2018, these two areas account for slightly more than half the total. Health has 1,584 million; education 935 million. The president has let it be known that the latter of these will be up to the 1,000 million mark by the end of the current administration.

Health and education in terms of their delivery shouldn't be complicated. There's no denying that there are complexities with management, but the principles are straightforward. The government, any government, is charged with making people better, caring for them, teaching them, developing them. Straightforward.

Maybe it is this simplicity of principle which turns the straightforward into the complicated. There is something of an old belief from management thinking that problems are needed in order to justify management's existence. Problems are thus created. Out of smooth operations can chaos be manufactured. If there weren't problems, there would be no solutions or search for solutions. There would be no triumphalism among those deemed to have done the solving; probably the ones who generated the problems in the first place.

Business management, generally speaking, is not subject to ideologies. Different theories, different practices, different ways of doing things; yes, but these are not ideological. Likewise, managing important government departments can be open to these alternative approaches. They should be. Being open to something different for the better can only be positive. But ideologies intrude. Politics ensure that they do, and it is these politics which make matters complicated.

The Balearic health service is by and large an admirable institution. At a basic level, for example getting a doctor's appointment, it is a piece of cake; at least in my experience. Request one and the chances are you'll be seen the next day. There is agonising over waiting lists and waiting times for consultations with specialists and for operations, but these lists and times are mostly acceptable, and the government is working to reduce them. All in all, the health service is something that the Balearics can be proud of. So why try and complicate matters?

It is important when dealing with a person's health that there is proper communication, but is the insistence on Catalan for health workers solely a matter of communication? How many native Mallorcans can't speak two languages? It is of course valuable and useful for health staff to speak Catalan. This shouldn't be in doubt, but why is there such an obsession with it? There's just the one reason. Ideology. And it can threaten to undermine what is otherwise a very fine service.

President Armengol is insisting that there won't be a failure to cover all posts in the health service because of language. In other words, she is accepting that non-Catalan speakers have to be recruited. If they weren't, then the health service would be undermined. Yet there are those who make the insistence. What, therefore, is more important? Making people better, caring for them, or what language they use?

This unhealthy obsession with linguistic ideology is even more evident in education. We know this all too well, given the experiences of recent years and the crazy insistences that have been made and disguised as educational betterment, when they are nothing of the sort. Hand in hand with the language now come the allegations of political indoctrination related to independence and the influence of agitator groups, some members of which are themselves teachers.

Around 2,500 million euros and these most important of government areas become hugely expensive budget playthings. As a consequence, ministerial time, civil servant time, service management time, doctor time, teacher time is devoted to non-core issues. In education there is nothing more core than improving performance standards, and yet all that effort is expended on incessant ideological shifts and goalpost-moving: continuous complication rather than continuous improvement.

These obsessions manifest themselves in other ways. In Palma, where the administration mirrors that of the government, there are key issues facing the city, such as its services, its housing, its infrastructure. And yet time, effort and column inches are instead devoted to non-essential matters. The Feixina monument is an example. An overwhelming majority of public opinion is said to be against its demolition, but the town hall (and the Council of Mallorca) plough on regardless.

Administrations are thus diverted from what really matters, wrapped up in the self-importance and self-imposition of their obsessions, leaving those who require their attention (the public) bewildered by these manoeuvres of political justification.

The Politics Of "The"

The James the Third Foundation of the Balearic Islands in Castellano is La Fundación Jaime III de las Islas Baleares. But Castellano really won't do. Nor, to be frank, will English. How about, therefore, La Fundació Jaume III de les Illes Balears? Even worse; much worse in fact. It should be Sa Fundació Jaume III de ses Illes Balears. Which is what it is. Can you spot the difference?

Of the two latter usages, one is Catalan and the other isn't. It is Mallorquí. On such small detail are great arguments based. Whole societies and cultures revolve around the smallest of detail and words. In English we have a small word that generates no debate or discussion. The is the. The definite article is definitely the. Across the Catalan-Mallorquí divide there is no such definitiveness. The definite article is different.

Ultimately it is all to do with Latin. Without getting technical, separate or divergent linguistic development resulted in the "salat" article in Mallorquí - "sa" for the feminine form of the singular the and "ses" for the feminine plural. The use of the definite article is one of the more strikingly obvious differences between Mallorquí and Catalan, but it is far from being the only difference. There are at least 2,700 others. The foundation has an automatic translator system for Castellano into Mallorquí. This substitutes some 2,700 "continental Catalan" words for the genuine articles (sic) that are used in Mallorca. There are also hundreds of phrases.

The foundation takes its name from the last independent King of Mallorca, who died in combat in seeking to preserve his sovereignty. This happened an awfully long time ago - 1349 to be precise. Nowadays, Jaume III is the symbol for the foundation's mission, which is to dignify Mallorquí (and the languages of the other Balearic Islands as well).

Ah but, are they languages? The foundation pinpoints a time when Mallorquí was effectively relegated to dialect status: the establishment of regional autonomous government in 1983 and the adoption of Catalan as a co-official language. This is a somewhat contentious proposition. There are many of course who will argue that Mallorquí was always a dialect and still is. But the act of making Catalan official, the foundation argues, has led to Mallorquí being considered in a pejorative sense, as a form of patois.

Language or dialect is not an argument I have any wish to enter. Many are the philologists who have compiled worthy tomes on the distinction: it's for them to chew the fat. Let's just say that there are the obvious differences between Catalan and Mallorquí. But let's also say that there are great chunks of politics in the argument.

If one could just strip away the philological and political arguments for one moment, it seems - to me at any rate - perfectly reasonable and justifiable to defend Mallorquí (salat article and all). Be it language or dialect, this corresponds with culture and vice versa. In combination, language (dialect) and culture equate to identity, the roots of a society.

The problem is that politics, as much if not more than linguistics, intrude into the debate and totally dominate it. An article by Manel Soler Cases in "El Temps" last week took great issue with the foundation. Its title was "the ambiguous game of identity". Soler, in a nutshell, accused the foundation of being nothing but a politically motivated entity that it is anti-Catalanist. He explored the linguistic issue in depth, but then one has to ask how much he is influenced by politics - that of a pro-Catalanist nature.

The foundation has just drawn attention to a survey of linguistic uses in the Balearics that was conducted by the government in 2014. This discovered that only 31% of the population consider Catalan to be descriptive of their language. A further finding was that only 20% of young people (aged 15-29) predominantly speak Catalan. The foundation concluded that this was evidence of the "absolute failure of Catalan as a language of integration".

It is perhaps too simple to reduce the political argument to one of right versus left, but in general terms, there is a right-wing stance that favours the local languages, such as Mallorquí. On the left, a favouring of Catalan, at its most ambitious, involves the concept of pan-Catalanism and the Catalan Lands. When José Ramón Bauzá was president (a right-wing PP government), the IB3 broadcaster was made to use the salat article. There was a fair old stink; the policy has since been reversed.

When Bauzá stood again as leader of the PP, both he and the winning candidate, Biel Company, told the foundation that they were committed to teaching that uses Mallorquí. Company is not Bauzá though. But the very fact that he was asked thoroughly reveals the political nature of the argument.

I wonder if Jaume III used "sa".

The Language Of Tourism

Formentera is a small island. With a surface mass of some 83 square kilometres it is a little over two per cent the size of Mallorca. Because it is tiny, when there are noises about it being inundated with tourists and cars, one is intuitively inclined to accept that it is: more so than with the constant laments that Mallorca is overrun. In addition to its size, it has a disadvantage in not having an airport. Tourists mainly arrive with their cars on the ferries.

The largest tourist groups, it is said, are mainland Spanish and Italian. These tourists, of whatever nationality, are being confronted with publicity urging them to become aware of Formentera's environmental delicacy. The key aims of the campaign are the promotion of water-saving, of keeping beaches clean and of "sustainable mobility": traffic and transport.

Understandable though this is, less understandable is the fact that the campaign is being conducted in Catalan with some English. While Catalan, or at least the Formenterenc dialect, is of course common, the people who visit the island are not typically Catalan speakers (or even English speakers). Why, therefore, is there a campaign directed at tourists that's in Catalan?

Among those asking this question are Catalan speakers. They recognise that visitors will not necessarily be au fait. Use Catalan in the campaign but also use other languages, and not just English. And use one language in particular: Castellano.

The Council of Formentera is bossed by the Gent per Formentera party. This is a grouping described variously as being socialist, eco-socialist, Catalan nationalist and simply left. As such, therefore, it is inclined to butt heads with the right, i.e. the Partido Popular. The president of the PP in Formentera has described the campaign as being "one of those absurd things that our Council does".

The PP, one feels, does have a point. There again, it is, or was under Bauzá certainly, the great defender of Castellano. So, it would seem duty bound to offer an assault on the non-use of the other co-official language, just as it can now rely on the support of Ciudadanos (C's) in doing likewise.

However, there is a perceptible shift in language emphasis among the upper echelons of the PP at present. This may in part be as a means of distinguishing itself from the C's, with whom it does share some generally similar policies. Language is one; Catalan nationalism is another.

But more important is the leadership's wish to distance itself from the Bauzá era. In this regard the PP in the Balearics is basically returning to what it used to be: more sympathetic towards regionalism and so a regional identity and so also more sympathetic towards Catalan.

This is a style that helped to make the PP (and what was the forerunner of the PP from the time of regional government in 1983 until 1989 when the PP was formally founded) the dominant political power in the Balearics, a position it has never lost in the sense that it has always polled better than other parties. While the party is still led by an interim president - Miquel Vidal - when it is finally allowed to have a regional congress to elect a permanent leader, it is anticipated that the regionalist faction will win. (There was meant to have been this congress after the general election in December last year, but the indeterminate nature of the election result put that off.)

Vidal is not a contender as permanent leader. The most likely one comes from the regionalist camp - Biel Company, who was environment minister under Bauzá and who also led the revolt against Bauzá following the disastrous performance at the 2015 regional election (though the PP did still gain more seats than others). Two more of those rebels were the mayors of Campos and Santanyi, Sebastià Sagreras and Llorenç Galmés. They are now, respectively, the general-secretary and spokesperson for the PP, indicating the direction that the party has been going and is likely to continue to go.

Coming back to the Formentera affair, both have been asked why, if the PP has been critical of the Council of Formentera, their town halls have issued tourist publicity material without Castellano. This isn't wholly the case, says Galmés, pointing to dual-language use for Cala d'Or's fiestas. In Campos, there isn't much tourism from the mainland, unlike in Formentera. Both can perhaps refute any accusations of hypocrisy, but underlining situations in their respective municipalities is surely the renewed alignment with Catalan as part of a general policy reversal. In Campos, with its comparatively little tourism and greater agricultural tradition, it might be said that here is a municipality that is typical of that former PP regionalist style.

Language can so often be a determining factor in Mallorcan political success or failure. The PP leadership is not about to repeat the mistakes that Bauzá made.

The One Eye Of Catalan

Last week I considered the latest ride in the Mallorcan language merry-go-round. Up and down go Catalan or Castellano, round and round goes the carousel, accompanied by whichever political tune is being played. The latest has a strong Catalan beat, so strong that it will drown out any alternative sounds - those of Castellano - in companies' offices, at sports fields as well as in all the seemingly millions of departments, divisions and directorates of the Balearic public sector.

Or will it drown them all out? President Armengol has been given some earache by members of her own PSOE party on the matter. These members may not be opposed to wider use of Catalan but they are concerned about legalities. Making Catalan a requisite for granting a business licence, insisting that employees in private companies join the ranks of Catalan-speaking linguistic armies marching through the squares of every town and village unleashing Catalan on non-speakers does not sound very legal to some parts of PSOE. Not only not legal but deeply troubling. What sort of authoritarianism is this? Imposition by language.

The problem as always is the past. To speak of authoritarianism and language in the same breath is to speak of Franco and of Felipe V and the impositions, deprivations and destructions of the Nueva Planta. I am fully aware of them. It's not as though I don't have great sympathy for Catalan development. But to do so via a new form of authoritarianism, one nuanced in the new-age name of the citizen?

There is also of course the immediate past. Bauzá. His idiotic trilingual scheme for teaching was not only educationally subnormal it was a naked attempt at giving Catalan a booting. TIL would not have obliterated Catalan or anything like it (despite what the "Green Tide" of the t-shirt-wearing teachers might have had some believe), but its political goal was clear. Or should have been clear to those capable of understanding that an imposition of teaching in English was a convenient and impractical smokescreen.

The use of English or another foreign language as a medium for teaching is now voluntary. If the circumstances of schools are such, then there are potential benefits from foreign-language instruction. This may seem incoherent in terms of total educational policy but it is a form of compromise by PSOE, who hold the education portfolio in the current administration. PSOE are not and have not been one-eyed in matters of language policy. It has been the dogmas of government partners that have driven it in the past to appear to be, as was the case with the Antich 2007-2011 administration.

And it is the partners who are now adopting dogmatic postures regarding language away from just the classroom. It is Més who have the citizen participation and culture portofolios, wherein lies the policy of linguistic "normalisation". This normalisation is better translated as standardisation. Catalan as standard. While Armengol and PSOE prefer a persuasive system for Catalan development, Més (and Podemos) wish for a coercive system, one driven by a reforming, fundamentalist zeal.

The culture element of this standardisation is a culture of the victim. The right has accused those on the left like Més of wallowing in a victim culture, strewn with the bodies of the past - those of Nationalism and the Bourbon impositions from the early eighteenth century. To an extent the right has a point, which is not, however, to excuse its role. Both camps are equally culpable in permitting this victim culture to survive and indeed flourish.

Into all of this, however, enters the chaos of the Partido Popular hierarchy in the Balearics. Bauzáism has mostly been consigned to the immediate past. The citing of José Maria Rodríguez as part of the Palma police corruption affair has led to the removal of so-called "Rodriguistas", more identifiable with the right-wing former Bauzá administration than with the regionalist tendency which now looks certain to resume its hold over the party. This tendency has always been more Catalanist, and now the PP at the Council of Mallorca has abstained in a vote on Catalan requirements for public-sector employees.

The chief opposition to the Més-driven government policy is at present Ciudadanos, a party that wants no truck with notions of Catalan nationalism and which is led in the Balearics by a language scholar - Xavier Pericay. He has spoken of the defence of "individual freedoms", and his scope for opposition will be great. In addition to linguistic standardisation, the Més portfolio under the minister Ruth Mateu also includes sport. Every type of sporting event is to be regulated in ensuring that Catalan is the dominant language, even ones for which English is the norm, such as international regattas. One can be sympathetic to Catalan development but one can also be troubled at myopic insistence.

The Wheel Of Linguistic Fortune

Life in Mallorca can seem to be in a constant state of wheel reinvention. No, not seem to be. Is. The wheel is given new spokes and tyre, the latter being pumped up in one particular way, only for someone to come along, take it apart and then reassemble it in an entirely different fashion. The wheel, as a result, never runs smoothly. The ride is uncomfortable. Control is scarcely possible. Off you head, therefore, in a direction totally opposite to the one you were previously on.

Some twenty-four hours prior to writing this article I had been honouring Hotelbeds. I wonder what they think about the wheel in its latest reinvented incarnation. They probably give it scarcely a thought. International company, acclaimed by the Balearic government, the last thing on the corporate mind will be this particular wheel. But how would it fit with this international business, if the regional government were true to the absolute letter of the rules for wheel reinvention?

In days of not so yore, I was engaged in regular consideration of how the wheel was being moulded. This was 2008. The circumstances involved the last "pact" of government. Ostensibly led by PSOE, it had as its mutually exclusive other partners the former (now dead) Unió Mallorquina (UM) and the PSM Mallorcan socialists, the major part of what is now Més. Clash though they did because of varying positions on the left-right spectrum and also because of competing claims to be the main advocates of Mallorcan nationalism, there was some common ground. It was the wheel: the wheel of linguistic fortune. Turn it one way and you head to Castile and the birthplace of the Spanish nation and language. Turn it another and you are bound (possibly) for Barcelona and the heartland of Catalan.

I place possibly in parentheses due to the fact that most Mallorcans I ever encounter want nothing to do with Catalonia or with Catalan. They are Mallorcans and they speak Mallorquín. But let's not confuse things too much, especially when there's a good wheel to be reinvented. Yes, the wheel of linguistic fortune is pointing straight towards the Catalan heartland. Again.

The current "pact" has basically substituted the UM with Podemos, a description of replacement that would most definitely not sit well with Alberto Jarabo and his chums. That would be because of the C-word, one that ran right through the UM as though it were a stick of rock. Yet Podemos is every bit as much an advocate of Catalan as the UM were. More so it can appear. Like a reformed smoker who rails against the merest whiff of a cigarette, Jarabo, not a native Catalan speaker but a reformed Castellano speaker, rails as loud if not louder than others against the language of the Bourbons.

Under the previous pact, everything - more or less everything - was to be Catalan. Then along came Bauzá and the PP. The wheel was reinvented. It pointed once more to Castile and was shaped in the image of Carlos Delgado and Jorge Campos of the Círculo Balear. Bauzá no more, the PP no more, and we're heading back to square one: wheels aren't much use if they're square, but never mind.

Amidst all the Catalanisation of the previous pact, there was the amusing spat involving Air Berlin. The German airline had been "invited" by the regional government to use Catalan as its first business language. The former president, Antich, was to later suggest that this "invitation" had been "misinterpreted". Perhaps they were speaking different languages. One had the impression that Air Berlin had quietly told the government where they could stick their invitation. A stick of rock would have come in handy.

I mention this particular episode because of what the reinvention that is now upon us intends to bring about. It won't stop at the public sector, it will delve into the private sector too. There won't be an invitation more a requirement for businesses. For instance, there would be "linguistic vetoes" of licences to open a business. Catalan speakers would have to be recruited. On the streets, in the bars, in businesses, everywhere it seems, Catalan speakers will be encouraged (?) to speak only Catalan to non-speakers. Businesses, everyday life, leisure activities, sporting events. Catalan and only Catalan. The fervour would put some religious fundamentalists to shame.

So, what has all this got to do with Hotelbeds? Quite a lot in fact. There is this acclaimed business, bringing in foreign talent, likewise acclaimed by the government, conducting its affairs multi-lingually. It would seemingly be told that Catalan speakers have to speak only Catalan. Working on a tricky bit of software code? That's ok, I'll explain things in Catalan, even if you don't understand it.

Oh well, they'll probably ignore the command and wait for the PP to come along and reinvent the wheel of linguistic fortune.

The Great Vowel Controversy Of Calvia

Where, you will doubtless be wondering, is a toponymy commission when it is most needed. Only a week ago I was highlighting the government's revival of this twenty-person gathering of place names' experts. It is needed for Mallorca in particular: of the four islands there is less official toponymy in Mallorca than in the other three. And there is ample evidence of this. Paguera or Peguera? Palma or Palma de Mallorca? Just two daft examples currently doing the rounds to add to those of, for example, Porto Cristo versus Portocristo (and others) or Cala Ratjada plays Cala Rajada.

The Partido Popular in Calvia is minded to ignore the aspirations of said commission and indeed of the town hall responding to the apparently desperate requirement to harmonise the municipality's place names. (By the way, can we add Magaluf or Magalluf to the list?) The PP is suggesting that the citizens should decide. Have a referendum. Make the decision the people's Paguera or Peguera. It was always Pag, says the PP, until a unilateral decision taken by the town hall converted it into Peg in the 1980s. Not that it did wholly convert it. Had it done, there wouldn't be the argument there now is. Pag and Peg have resided side by side in comparative toponymic harmony since the '80s. But now the town hall appears determined to divide society in this part of Calvia over the choice between two vowels.

As might be detected, given the left-wing leaning of the administration and the opposition of the PP (and Ciudadanos), there is a bit of a Catalan thing going on here. The left, with the Open Left (Equerra Oberta) coming to the aid of the PSOE-Si Se Puede Calvia administration alliance, insists that there is no "linguistic conflict", only that there should be compliance with the law and with the department of toponymy at the university. Apart from begging a question, given there is such a department, as to why a toponymy commission is needed as well, this makes clear that toponymic correctness lies in the Catalanist camp. For what it's worth, the name is derived from "forn de brea" aka "pega", referring to pine sap. In Castellano, the colloquial "pega" means something like a snag or a catch. And yes, there is a snag. Is it Pag or is it Peg?

For reasons best known, so it would seem, to the good folk of Pag/Peguera, they opted for Pag at some time in the past, only for Peg to hit the revivalist trail some thirty odd years ago, courtesy of the town hall. And so we now arrive at the current controversy. Should the people decide? Perhaps they should. Holding a referendum is in current vogue. They're having one in the UK it would appear, though the subject is of somewhat greater consequence than a vowel. Of greater relevance is the citizen participation via referendum of Palma.

In that city the people (a very small minority) used their voice in choosing between Born terraces or not Born terraces. The vote went strongly against the town hall preference, which is probably why Palma hasn't opted for another referendum over the planned demolition of the Sa Feixina monument (the people would say no, and the town hall knows they would). It may also be why there is no referendum proposal regarding the choice between Palma or Palma de Mallorca.

There will undoubtedly be some Palma fanatics (in addition to those at the town hall) who will argue the case for with or without "de Mallorca", but the vast majority, one suspects, really couldn't care less. It was the nasty PP who were of course responsible for appending "de Mallorca", a move of some common sense if only to distinguish the city from others. But even if "de Mallorca" were to be retained, it's not as though anyone here ever refers to it thus. Tell me the last time you said, if you live outside Palma (de Mallorca), that you were having a night out in Palma de Mallorca.

The apparent pointlessness of this argument is reinforced twice over. Firstly by the fact that the Balearic parliament has to have a debate to decide whether it should hold a further debate to decide between the rival claims. Secondly by the weird assertion by a PSOE parliamentary deputy that the PP's adding of "de Mallorca" had been part of the Bauzá regime's desire to weaken Catalan culture and language. At least Mayor Hila had the sense to say that Palma was a Roman thing, because if Catalan gets dragged in, the name should really be the one that the bestower of all things Catalan, the conquering Jaume I of Aragon, gave the city: Ciutat de Mallorca.

Anyway, Pag or Peg, let the people decide. And perhaps give them some other choices. Piguera, anyone?

Tit For Tat: Education and language

And so we come full circle. More or less. Tit for tat. Education and language, two sides of a coin that has only one face. We are back to 2008. Year zero for much of the legacy of the Antich government: education, language, land plans, decrees for wetlands. Schools, teachers, the civil service and public sector workers, property and infrastructure developments with their implications of investment and employment or not. All of them in a constant state of turmoil and of the violently shifting sands of Balearic politics. Here comes a big wave to wash everything away. Now comes another wave to wash it back into place.

The Partido Popular is not wholly wrong when it suggests that the current government seems hell bent on repealing anything and everything that the Bauzá regime introduced. But it ignores the fact that it had acted similarly in dismantling the Antich legacy. There is an additional tone to this latest revisionism, however: the sheer hostility directed at Bauzá personally and all that he represented. It's not pleasant. Nel Martí, a Més-ite, has compared Bauzá to Felipe V and so to the vindictiveness and repression of the first Bourbon king, with Catalan and Greater Catalonia (not that it was referred to as such in 1715) on the end of a cannon ball and of prohibition. They simply cannot let the past be. History always intrudes. Here is a land constantly re-fighting wars.

PLIS is an association of teachers. The acronym stands for, in English, teachers free of social engineering. It has taken the government to task over its educational reforms. There is a whole list of criticisms. They range from renewed bureaucratisation of school management, to the role of unions in selecting school directors to the totally free training of teachers to be done in the workplace and paid for out of everyone's taxes. Then there is the most recognisable cog in this social engineering wheel. The language.

Bauzá's trilingual teaching (TIL) project was an unmitigated disaster, one that could have been foreseen. Had it been a project predicated on education, it might not have been. But it was not. It was a naked, undisguised means of subverting Catalan, the first attempt at doing so - the free selection of teaching language by parents - having proved to be as much of a disaster as to what was to follow.

No less an institution than the Council of Europe has been having its say. In its report on the charter for regional and minority languages, it has issued its own broadside. It condemns TIL because there weren't teachers qualified to implement it. It insists that Catalan should be respected in teaching at all levels - from infant to secondary. It concludes, however, that during the school year 2011-2012, the first full year over which Bauzá presided, the balance (slightly in favour of Catalan against Castellano) was about right. It was to be the engineered and deeply flawed introduction of English that was to disrupt this. Or would have done, had it ever been implemented in something even approximating a coherent fashion.

The Bauzá critics refer to the "obsession" that the last government had with Catalan. Yet it is an accusation that could equally apply now; only in reverse. To what extent there will be a reversion to the edicts of 2008 which effectively made Castellano a minority language remain to be seen. But in different spheres - schools and the public sector - there is little equivocation. The clock has been turned back eight years. Tit for tat. Catalan becomes once more a pre-requisite for public-sector employment. It's as you were.

Xavier Pericay, the leader of Ciudadanos in the Balearics, must feel lonely. He can snuggle up to the PP, but he fights an all but lone battle. Anti-nationalist, as the C's are, he brings his own scholarly interest in languages to the parliament chamber. Languages do not have rights, only those who speak languages. It's not an argument destined to find favour with the government (or with the regionalist-nationalist El Pi). Languages are all. One in particular. The rights lie with vocabulary, grammar, dialect, the ancient divergence within the Romance languages and so with cultural heritage aka baggage. The social engineering decrees that this must be so.

Nothing, or very little, remains of TIL. It was unceremoniously (and correctly) hurled with great force into the deepest of seas surrounding the Balearics, a faint echo vaguely detectable amidst the fading sonar tests for oil. This echo is in the form of free choice by schools. If they wish to use a third language for teaching, then they can. The PP says this will produce first and second division schools. It probably won't. There'll be one division. First or second depends entirely upon your perspective.

Meanwhile, someone, somewhere is genuinely concerning him or herself with education. He or she is not a politician.

Mallorca's Identity Conundrum

It is, when you think about it, a bit odd. There you are, stuck on an island some 250 kilometres off the Spanish mainland to which your owners (the Spanish) paid scant regard for several centuries. And yet there you are, nevertheless, a part of Spain. It is the lot of islands that they tend to belong to someone, albeit that the Maltese have eventually made a pretty decent fist of not being.

A distinction needs to be made between Spain the state and Spain the mainland. Not that Spain, as such, existed when the Catalans and Aragonese arrived in the thirteenth century. It was the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabel of Castile - more than two hundred years after the conquest - that sowed the seeds of a unified Spain. But even this union didn't dispense with Ferdinand's Crown, that of Aragon. It was to be roughly 250 more years before the Crown was dismantled together with Mallorca's part within it. Three hundred years ago marked the moment when Mallorca became definitively a part of the Spanish nation and a centralised one at that.

But prior to the enactment of the Nueva Planta decree and subsequently, Mallorca was largely ignored. Yes, it had some trading significance as well as some strategic military importance, but to all intents and purposes it was a colony, one remote from the Spanish state and mainland. It had its Viceroy, its Governor and then its Captain-General. But here, fundamentally, was an island which owed nothing to the more ancient history of Spain or indeed Catalonia. In the cultural mix of Spain, one forged from invasion and migration, Mallorca and the Balearics were the missing link (as were the Canaries). The islands and the islanders were never of the Visigoth stock which determined the course of the development of the Iberian peninsula. Not that is, until a branch line of Visigoth inter-mingled descendants came and took it over in 1229.

Colonialism, both Catalan and Spanish, implanted culture, but even now the arguments rage as to what this culture actually is or should be, and so extend to the seemingly endless quest to understand the identity (linguistic and otherwise) of the island and of the islanders. Within this debate, there is the vital factor of what happened some sixty years ago. For so long a sort of afterthought appendage to the rest of Spain, Mallorca suddenly assumed a position of critical importance. It wasn't to be the nation's bread basket so much as the nation's principal foreign-exchange agency. Tourism, ultimately, was all about money, and only some of it was for Mallorca.

The new colonisation wasn't solely that by tourists or by foreigners buying up what were then cheap-as-chips properties. It was one of enormous labour migration. In the 1950s, before the boom started, migration contributed roughly 7% of population growth. By 1970 this had risen to almost 30%, a great deal of it coming from parts of Spain without the old Aragonese connection: Andalusia, most notably.

The population of Mallorca in 1960 was just over 360,000. It has since grown by over 500,000, and within this increase is the detectable influence of the mainland. Which are the most popular surnames in Mallorca? Well, they're not ones of specifically Catalan origin. They are García, Martínez.

While many migrants will, so to speak, have gone native, is it the change in demographics of the past sixty years which helps to explain the results of the latest study of Mallorcan and Balearic identity? The annual Gadeso research is a significant sociological survey and it consistently shows that Mallorcans consider themselves as much Spanish as they do citizens of the Balearics. What it also shows is that a majority (63%) identify more with Mallorca than with the Balearics. This isn't particularly surprising, but what might be considered to be surprising is the almost total absence of sentiment towards Catalonia. A mere two per cent of Mallorcans identify with the "Catalan Lands".

The Council of Mallorca president, Miquel Ensenyat, has some justification in referring to the "colonial" nature of the financing arrangement between Mallorca and the Balearics and the state. The islands are disadvantaged, and one can argue that the colonisation from the 1960s has consistently been more to the advantage of the state than to the islands. Yet despite this, and despite what the likes of Ensenyat ultimately avow - a form of Mallorcan independence within a Catalan Lands nationalism - the popular sentiment for this, as shown by Gadeso, simply doesn't exist.

This is political sentiment, so a similar survey of cultural sentiment might well show a very different result in terms of Catalan identity, but it is nonetheless rather odd that those centuries of Spanish neglect should now appear to show a firm connection with Spain and almost none with the lands that introduced that original cultural identity.

Mallorca Days

9 September. That's the one I'd go for. Tourism Day 1965. It won't win of course. The first Tourism Day had been the year before but I can't find the exact date. It may have been the same, but it wouldn't make any difference. Either year and it was a day of the times of El Moustachio, so that rules it out straightaway. And celebrating tourism? You must be joking. Mallorca Day, in honour of tourists?

Another problem with my day is that it's too near the current one. Only three days shy in fact. 12 September is currently Mallorca Day, but the problem with this current day is that no one takes any notice of it and they never have done. One could now, via a reinterpretation of historic memory law, make a case for its abandonment on account of it having been a Maria invention: the Maria who is at present at His Majesty's Pleasure. 12 September was Munar Day, one conjured up by the government-in-parallel, Maria's Council of Mallorca. When you have your own mini-me government, you need your own "day" as well. Jaume II was crowned on that day, 739 years ago (721 ago years when the first Day occurred in 1997). The Kingdom of Mallorca was firmly established, certain rights were bestowed, so 12 September it was to be then. 

As the new Council of Mallorca seeks to become its own government-in-parallel, Banbury's finest, Miquel Ensenyat, believes that the citizens should decide which day it should be. Given that the citizens appear to have been indifferent in the past, the chances are that participation in the planned referendum might just turn out to be a slight embarrassment. But you never know. Get a day for rejoicing by all Mallorcans, and they'll turn up at the polling stations and celebrate it like crazy for years to come.

The bookies' favourite would be 31 December. It is a date so obvious that it is worth being reminded why it isn't Mallorca Day. Firstly, it would seem that no one had really thought that such a day was necessary before Munar Day was announced. Secondly, it would clash with Palma's Festival of the Standard and thus become all a bit too Mallorcan, as in all of Mallorca and not just one chunk of it. Thirdly, most public institutions and thus politicians are on festive break, and they would have to be corralled into engaging in all the ceremonial palaver when they would prefer to already be half-cut before getting totally cut come midnight and choking on their twelve grapes.

And then fourthly, and most importantly, there's the nationalism thing.

As 31 December (1229) is the day when Jaume I finally took old Madina Mayurqa (aka Palma), put the Muslims to flight and started carving up the island's land for his mates, for Catalan nationalists, such as Miquel Ensenyat, and for many who are neither Catalan nor nationalists, 31 December appears a no-brainer. It was when Mallorca started: in a Catalan sense. There are probably, if one delves deeply enough, days from 123BC, the fifth century and 902AD when, respectively, the Romans began a-roaming, the Vandals came a-vandalising and the Muslims came an offshoot caliphating, that could also be suggested for a "Day", as in conquest and occupation, but then none of those spoke Catalan and all three were the bad guys.

Blindingly obvious though 31 December is, the Catalan nationalism thing is, for some (i.e. those to the right), just too Catalan. Jaume II and his coronation is far more acceptable to those of a purer Mallorcan nationalist tendency: typically, those more to the right.

If anyone can be bothered voting in this proposed referendum, the No to 1276 and Yes to 1229 Campaign should, you would think, win. There are, however, already other contenders. Some parts of PSOE seem to believe that 29 October, 1977 would get the locals excited. True, there was a demo on that day when some 20,000 called for autonomy (for both Mallorca and the Balearics). But given that there is a day for when Balearic autonomy was officially granted, i.e. 1 March, Balearics Day, then why would you need another one? And to be perfectly frank, Balearics Day is a holiday that doesn't inspire a great deal of passion either.

As they'd almost certainly reject my Tourism Day suggestion, let me make another one. When should Mallorca Day be? 12 September. Forget all about Jaume II (or Jaume I for that matter), 12 September is also the day of the Virgin of Lluc, when Mallorca's patron saint is honoured. For once, religion could have a compromise role.

Whatever dates make the shortlist though, I've a question. Do you reckon non-Spanish residents will get a chance to vote in the referendum? Miquel might just remember where he was from.

Fiesta Time: Uapidubi!

What, you might well ask, is a uapidubi? Well, it is not an "a" but a "they", and how indeed could you not know Uapidubi? Or how could you not know Cucorba? Wherever a fiesta takes place, one or other of them is there. And if not one of them, then another. No fiesta is complete without one - or more. Gainful employment is assured the length and breadth of fiesta-time Mallorca. Uapidubi is a children's entertainment group, and any fiesta worth its salt has to have a kiddies' entertainment group.

It is comforting to know that there are these troupes. Fiestas haven't always been as diverse as they now are in providing entertainment, attractions and activities for all members of the family. Nowadays though, you can't go near a fiesta without being confronted by a clown, an enormous array of inflatable bouncing things and entire squares given over to an "aquatic festival", the climax to which is the now almost obligatory foam party. Kids, in fiesta terms, have never had it as good, and they aren't presented solely with opportunities of a totally unserious nature. There are kiddies' workshops for making them good recycling citizens, workshops for absolutely everything. And then there is tradition, as in, for example, demons. Yes, there are even kiddies' gangs of demons, learning the art of creeping around menacingly and then terrifying the life out of you. Which all sounds like a recipe for later-life disaster but which, exposed to the island's culture from an early age, is probably the exact opposite.

Uapidubi, it's probably fair to say, don't conform to any known tradition, though as an act this foursome, typically kitted out in different coloured, silken boiler suits with accompanying hats, specialise in bringing popular songs from the Balearics to its mini audience. Dances, games and songs, the Uapis (as they are known for short) keep the little ones amused and entertained for an hour or so while parents can indulge in more adult fiesta pastimes: those involving a bar, for example.

Cucorba is probably the better known if not the best known of the kiddies' groups. And they have also been around for a fair old while: since 1977 in fact, when the troupe was formed in Muro. There are now Cucorba DVDs, a Cucorba book, Cucorba songs and a bunch of awards in recognition of their cultural contribution. In 1988, for instance, they received one from the regional government "in recognition of their extraordinary work in the promotion and development of the Catalan language and culture of the Balearic Islands". Then, in 2002, came perhaps the grandest honour - the Ramon Llull prize "for 25 years of dedication to children's theatre ... always in Catalan". So, even with kiddies' entertainment groups, or perhaps most importantly because of them, the politics of language seem never to be too far from the surface.

The omnipotence at fiesta time of the "animación infantíl" does probably owe quite a deal to Cucorba. Such a galaxy of entertainment didn't used to be on show, but now fiestas can almost seem as if one of their principal reasons for existence is so that children can sing songs in Catalan and smear each other with foam.

If one is, however, looking for the origins of children's involvement in fiestas, then one can go back to the Crown of Aragon where a tradition of children's participation came to rival that of the heartland of Spanish religiosity, Santiago de Compostela. As a consequence, when Jaume I conquered Majorca in 1229, this tradition was to become established. In Jaume's "llibre dels fets" (book of deeds), there is mention of how children were part of ceremonies that were part political, part religious but in which children symbolised the purity of the word of God; and Jaume was under the impression, as kings tended to be back then, that he was from divine origins. There was later, by the end of the fourteenth century, a system by which municipalities in Mallorca had to have elections for seven-year-olds to participate in certain fiesta activities. (This was in fact a law for Mallorca of 1384.) This notion of election might be said to still exist with, for instance, the election of La Beata in Santa Margalida, which takes place this evening, albeit the "girls" are now older.

Anyway, so much for the past and back to the present. Uapidubi won't be worrying too much about what happened six or seven hundred years ago. They'll be entertaining in Puerto Pollensa's church square. Fiesta time: Uapidubi!

* Photo: Uapidubi from www.uapidubi.blogspot.com.es

The Never-Ending Argument Of Language

There was this interview. It was with the philologist who is responsible for linguistic use at the IB3 broadcaster. At the conclusion of the interview she says of the Balearic language that it doesn't exist. To speak of a Balearic language is provocative, just as it is when one refers to the Catalan of Mallorca. It is the philological way, but she doesn't like it because, for centuries, we have called it Mallorquín.

In Mallorca, it can appear, there are more philologists than you can shake a dictionary at. These "students" of languages, be they actual students, professors or hobbyists, proliferate to an extent that is hard to comprehend for those of us brought up without an obsession with arguing over languages and their historical significance. Philologist was a word, a profession if you like, that I was well aware of before coming to Mallorca, but never had it occurred to me that there would be a place where the philologist seems as common as the town hall official, and as equally bloody-minded in all likelihood.

And the town halls have their own quasi-philologists, the councillors who are charged with the responsibility for what, through literal translation, is linguistic normalisation but which is better translated as standardisation. Either noun will do, as the whole term is a euphemism for Catalan. Or is it?

The philologist of the interview, Mariantònia Lladó, has a contentious responsibility at IB3. Anything to do with language has the potential to be contentious - which is one reason why there are so many philologists knocking around - and at IB3 it has been just this. It has all had to do with an issue that will, for the great majority of you, seem impenetrable and arcane, but that is because you will not be obsessed with the detail of language, one that is so micro-scrutinised that there are arguments which haggle over the use of the word "the". At IB3, "the" became a politico-philological battle. The Partido Popular, which ruled the broadcaster through its government vice-president Antonio Gomez and then José Manuel Ruiz, who failed so spectacularly in becoming mayor of Calvia, insisted that the Mallorquín "the" should be used and not the Catalan "the". Mariantònia, elsewhere in the interview, reveals her "the" preference, lamenting the fact that, except out in the villages of Mallorca, the "new generations" use the literary "the", i.e. the Catalan one.

For the Bauzá PP, so desirous of distancing itself from anything marked with the stamp of Catalonia, the intervention over "the" at IB3 went to the heart of its linguistic politics, and the very notion of there being a linguistic politics can strike many as being somewhat absurd. But that's because they are not bound up in the ceaseless polemic that can appear to define all politics of Mallorca.

The PP line, and that of Mariantònia (and I hope I'm not misrepresenting her), is to promote the languages of the islands at the expense of Catalan. Yet this can appear to be - in political terms - contradictory. The PP disassociates itself from notions of nationalism - those which are not Spanish nationalist - but it advocates a distinct language, Mallorquín. And what, as far as nationalism is concerned, is more nationalist than a language? But then, it isn't contradictory if it is accepted that there are minority languages/dialects within the framework of the grand nationalism of Spain and it also isn't contradictory if this acceptance is one to cock a snook at the pretensions of Catalan nationalism which involve a geographically broader area than just Catalonia - the mythical Catalan Lands.

Inherent to this line is an argument that the languages of the islands, and each island lays claim to having one, are the products of some form of separate development. Well, quite clearly there has been. When there are 250 plus kilometres of sea that divorce Mallorca from the Catalan heartland as well as a history of Arabic language and Vulgar Latin (and it is this which is the root of the "the" argument), there was bound to have been linguistic modification. But the mother tongue is Catalan (and/or variants that themselves influenced and created Catalan). To refer to the "Catalan of Mallorca" is, however, says Mariantònia, provocative. And in this, for many Mallorcans in my experience, she is right. Mallorcans speak Mallorquín and not Catalan, albeit there are obvious, very strong similarities.

So, one comes back to this business of linguistic normalisation, sometimes determined at town halls by councillors who proudly speak their Mallorquín (and nothing else) but within an ideological framework of Catalan nationalism and with responsibility for the normalisation of Catalan. And ditto the schools, where the argument is over the promotion of Catalan, not of Mallorquín.

Still, this all helps to allow philology to flourish and for there to be never-ending arguments, and the fact is that they will never end.

Marching For Education?

A hundred and twenty million steps sounds a good deal more impressive than ten thousand people, but ten thousand there were (organisers' figures) marching on the capital: more a green, slow-moving road block than a green tide - a "marea verde" (or better, "verda"). 

The march of the ten grand started at ten on Saturday morning in Inca. It would appear that it takes eight and a half hours to walk from Inca to Palma's Plaça Major, though it might have been quicker had it gone straight down the motorway. Symbolically, however, this would have been a poor idea. The ten thousand heard that in 2011 they, and indeed the whole of the Balearics, were to have expected "motorways of education". Needless to say, the motorways had not been built. All that had been delivered were cart tracks.

It was a strange metaphor to have offered, but then it had been strange for the Bauzá administration to have apparently been promising motorways of education in the first place. What is a motorway of education exactly? There again, once Bauzá had realised that his government had made a balls-up of so-called free selection of teaching languages (between Catalan and Castellano) and had conjured up the non-manifesto item of trilingual teaching, perhaps the motorway had been being built after all: English on the outside fast lane, Castellano in the middle lane, and Catalan reduced to a crawl on the inside lane.

This motorway madness, though, was ended by the Trafico of schools which had rather bent the figures of numbers of parents who had plumped for the politically incorrect Castellano option in order to scupper free selection and subsequently of the combined forces of unions, teachers' assembly (Assemblea de Docents), parents' associations, school directors and opposition parties. The boys in green were substituted by the green t-shirts of the green tide. Halt! Stop! The fast and middle lanes were exceeding the teaching-hour limits. The inside lane had to be given its priority again.

A month away from the regional parliamentary election, the Assemblea and its fellow slow-moving travellers had given ample warning of their intention to once more voice their discontent with the government's language policies: primarily the one to do with teaching languages. Here was to be a reminder to the electorate of the dictatorship of Bauzá, the authoritarianism of Bauzá and of the cart tracks travelled by those who were instead aspiring to maintain freedom.

Language rights, said Jaume Mateu, the president of all-things-Catalan promoters, the Obra Cultural Balear, had been subjected to "ruthless attacks" from the dictator. After eight and a half hours on the march, the blistered-feet ten thousand needed such a rallying cry. The comedian Miquel Àngel Llonovoy quipped that, as Bauzá loved English so much, they would be saying "goodbye" to him in May (goodbye said in English, you understand). It would have brought the house down had there been a house to have been brought down.

The day before the march, the Mallorcan federation of parents' associations and the Balearics' co-federation of parents' associations had complained to the board which oversees fair play at elections about Bauzá's "totalitarian attitude". The Partido Popular had complained to the same board about a campaign by these associations which it considered was designed to "influence voters". Somehow, one doubts that there will be any influence: minds have long been made up, positions have long been taken in the teaching languages' battle. (By the way, has the Mallorcan federation ever taken any English lessons? Its acronym, FAPA, is, when spoken in English slang terms, somewhat unfortunate.)

When it finally draws to a close, the obituaries for the current Bauzá administration will speak of one issue above all that has dominated. It hasn't been financing of the Balearics by central government, it hasn't been the occasional "collapses" in the health service, it hasn't been oil prospecting, it hasn't been the tourism law designed to meet the desires of the hoteliers, it hasn't even been corruption (and this really is an accusation that Bauzá doesn't deserve), and it most definitely hasn't been the stupidity of Magalluf's "mamading" and the even greater stupidity of the reaction. It has been TIL: trilingual teaching.

Throwing around descriptions such as totalitarian is also pretty stupid, but then, playing fast and loose with legal procedure, being revisionist in terms of manifesto claims, dumping TIL "wets" like ex-education minister Bosch have all played a part in a policy that, at best, has been insensitive. The arguments - for and against - have been chewed over often enough, so there is little point in their being regurgitated. But whatever merits TIL might have had (or indeed might still have) have been obscured by the deliberateness of political posturing by the government and its opponents. Who is marching for a sensible and consensual education system?

Alcúdia's Language Of Tourism

Well, you know how it is. You wait an eternity for a fair and then three of them turn up at once. Let's be grateful there are only three, though. The Pollensa Wine Fair (next weekend, 18-19 April) has often coincided with one of this weekend's threesome - the Puerto Alcúdia cuttlefish and boats jolly - in the past.

Before everyone has the chance to troop off to Pollensa and get drunk next weekend, the town has its April Fair, one that is loosely based on the Seville Fair and is organised by the local Andalusian Cultural Association.

Something rather curious has happened with this fair this year. They have actually got round to publicising it rather more effectively than in the past. Accordingly, I was sent the programme by the tourist office and asked if I could supply a translation. Not, to be honest, that there was much to translate, but I'm always happy to oblige, as I am when Alcúdia tourist office makes a similar request. Could we have the boats and cuttlefish in English, pretty please?

The poster and programme that has been put out for the April Fair is a revealing document. It notes the "special collaboration" of both the regional government and Pollensa Town Hall, yet here is a piece of promotion that is not in Catalan. Andalusians don't speak Catalan, except perhaps for some who live in Pollensa, so Castellano it is.

Appropriate though the use of Castellano is, its use highlights, and not for the first time, the curious relationship between languages and promotion of events: curious primarily because there isn't a relationship, save one - Catalan. This subject is an old chestnut, I do recognise, but it is one that doesn't go away and indeed becomes ever more relevant. April is an odd month in tourism terms. Despite Easter falling in April this year, it isn't a month which is considered to officially form part of the tourism season. It is an off-season month, one which local authorities would love to develop in order to lengthen the season and so reduce the harmful impact of tourism seasonality.

The trouble is, as I think many of us are aware, there is a sizable gap between what is hoped for and said and what is actually done, and the promotion of events that occur this weekend pretty much sums this up. Pollensa's April Fair is, in the scheme of things, a minor event, but those in Muro and Puerto Alcúdia are not. Yet, if one takes the boat show and cuttlefish gastronomy extravaganza as an example, what does Alcúdia do? It asks some sucker to supply an English version. Free. This, to me, does not suggest a town hall fully committed to effective promotion. Rather, it suggests one that is content to put up with an ad-hoc arrangement so that English-speaking visitors might be aware that "sipia" is in fact cuttlefish.

Alcúdia has something called the consortium for overseas promotion. It is one rarely referred to and usually only when it has gone off to Miami to try and entice the odd cruise ship to put in an appearance. What does this consortium actually do? Who is on it? Does it not believe in a touch more professionalism, such as establishing a formal arrangement for having its promotional literature in foreign languages? (And I'm sorry, you Germans, I'm not about to put myself out and translate into German as well - there's probably some other mug doing that.)

The apparent indifference towards effective foreign promotion and so evidence of the lack of genuine commitment to lengthening the season can be found in the programme for this weekend's fair. It isn't simply that it is all in Catalan, it is what is to be found in one of the greetings. It comes from the councillor with responsibility for fairs, Carme Garcia. It starts: "Benvolguts Alcudiencs i Visitants". Dear people of Alcúdia and visitors. It is the "visitants" which gives the game away. If you are greeting dear visitors, do you not seek to do so in a fashion that they might understand? Or are the "visitants" considered only to be people from, say, Inca or Santa Margalida? I suspect that they may be.

Carme is a councillor from whom Castellano has to be wrenched out. Passion for the language is fine, and I have no objection, but not when it positively discriminates against precisely some of the people who should be being greeted. With such an attitude, and Carme also has responsibility for "linguistic normalisation" (i.e. the promotion of Catalan), what is she doing in charge of the fair?

I fail to understand, and Alcúdia is not unique in this regard, why fairs, fiestas and tourism are the responsibilities of three different councillors. Yes, there is administration required for fairs and fiestas and yes, of course, they are events for the people of Alcúdia, but they are regularly held up as being for tourists. And this weekend's fair is a prime example. But the town hall's own structure has an in-built mechanism which undermines what should be a principal objective: tourism development.

The Felanitx Theory: Columbus

At the end of 2011, I offered an annual award for the "historian of the year". To this day, I would imagine that Gabriel Verd remains blissfully unaware of this accolade but four years later he may be placing himself on the shortlist to pick up a far more celebrated prize. The citation in 2011 went along the lines of perseverance in the face of almost overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Verd is the Mallorcan historian who insists that Christopher Columbus was from Felanitx. His life's work has pretty much been devoted to proving this. In 2011 he was convinced. Now, he is on the point of producing evidence which will demonstrate definitively that Columbus was from Felanitx and not from Genoa or any other place which has laid a claim on him.

At the weekend at a restaurant (Son Colom) in Felanitx which doubles as an exhibition centre for Columbus, Verd was able to explain his theories to visitors who included the president of the Council of Mallorca, Maria Salom. He asserted that the "Felanitx theory is the most coherent that there is". The competing theories include Ibiza, Galicia and, of course, Genoa, which is the city that history scholars over the centuries have accepted that Columbus came from.

Having Maria Salom along for the day was understandable, as the Council is one of the keepers of Mallorcan culture and heritage and as it was the Council, in 2004, which forwarded a grant of over 50,000 euros for research into Columbus's origins and genetics; one of the biggest supporters of this research was Gabriel Verd. There have, subsequently, been DNA tests carried out which have sought to establish links between local populations and Columbus (certainly with his younger brother, Bartholomew). These don't, however, seem to have proved anything - definitively.

The research has been and is valid. Though it is the accepted version of history that Columbus came from Genoa, there have always been certain questions, e.g. why he himself made little reference to Genoa and, more importantly, why he spoke in the strange way he did. Linguistic research has held much of the key to resolving the arguments regarding Columbus's origins. It is this linguistic element, along with Mallorca's culture and heritage, which was what interested a former president of the Council, Maria Antonia Munar, who held this office when the 2004 grant was made. She admitted at the time that she had "a patent interest in Columbus being from Mallorca", and one suspects that this interest would have been partly kindled by nationalism. Munar's party, the Unió Mallorquina, was Mallorcan nationalist. Columbus a Mallorcan? The discoverer of America was Mallorcan all along and not an Italian and definitely not a Spaniard? It's the stuff of nationalist dreams and one, moreover, that features some version of Catalan as the mother tongue.

A further linguistic element is the name Porto Colom in Felanitx. Colom means pigeon in Catalan. In Italian the word is "colombo". In the Genoa region of the fifteenth century it was "corombo". There were people called Pigeon all over the western Med. Porto Colom, as in "colunbi", was noted on an Italian map of Mallorca from the thirteenth century, so it is perfectly logical that people might have adopted Colom as a surname because of the place name. Or alternatively, they were just named after a pigeon. Either way, as far as Columbus was concerned, Verd has maintained that his name came from his mother, Margarita Colom, who gave birth to the illegitimate son of Carlos, an Aragonese nobleman who was the brother of Ferdinand, later the husband of Isabel and so one half of the Catholic Kings. And the precise location of the birth was the Felanitx finca of s'Alqueria Roja.

Gabriel Verd believes that this year he will add to the celebrations of notable Mallorcans (Ramon Llull, 700th anniversary of his death, and Fray Junipero, his canonisation) by proclaiming that Columbus was definitively a Mallorcan. There is a part of me which really wants him to be right, for him to turn historical orthodoxy on its head and for history to therefore have to be rewritten. But despite his confidence that he will prove Columbus's Mallorcan birth definitively, unless it is in such a powerful way with new, previously unseen, original source documents that can substantiate the Felanitx theory and be scrutinised by peers who might be convinced of the arguments, the overwhelming evidence in favour of Genoa will remain.

Even if he were to provide definitive proof, would all Mallorcans be happy? History is less kind to Columbus than it once was. He is now accused of genocide and so of the extinguishing of Taino Indian culture in Hispaniola. The fact that smallpox and other diseases were largely responsible for the Tainos being all but wiped out doesn't stop contemporary views which portray a barbarous Columbus. Would Mallorca really want that legacy?

The Struggle For Balearics Education

Two years of struggle. The very word struggle conjures up images and sentiments of great struggles of the past - workers' rights, women's rights, civil rights - all of them battles with established orders in demanding what was just and fair. But two years struggle in the Balearics? Two years for the rights of what precisely?

At Can Alcover in Palma, an exhibition is being held that celebrates the struggle of Balearics teachers, and in particular the Assemblea de Docents teachers' organisation, against the ramifications of trilingual teaching (TIL). The exhibition was in fact launched in Barcelona to commemorate the first anniversary of the massive anti-TIL demonstration in Palma at the end of September 2013. It has been brought over to Mallorca and it will be on display until 14 February. It shows, among other things, photos of the demo and charts the chronology of the struggle from the time that TIL was approved, through the sackings of two education ministers and the three-week strike, to the various "denuncias", the latest of them being against Isabel Cerdà, the director-general for planning, innovation and professional training at the education ministry, for a supposed abuse of office in respect of the "massive approval of TIL projects".

This has not been a struggle against TIL per se. It has been a struggle against the perceived unfairness and unjustness of a teaching regime that has sought to diminish the influence of Catalan. One neglects the past at one's peril, but notwithstanding the discriminations of the past and the potential for them to repeat themselves, styling this all as a struggle of some form of social injustice neglects what has been and remains a political confrontation. Both sides, teachers and government, have denied that they have had political motives, but they most definitely have: the struggle has been a clash between entrenched ideologies with language at their core. The unjustness and unfairness have been those that have plunged the education system into chaos; the victims are those on the receiving end of this system, the schoolchildren and many parents who have not been persuaded by the narrative of the teachers' struggle.   

Who pulled the first political trigger in all this mess is now pretty much irrelevant. The chronology of the struggle is thus also now irrelevant. What should be relevant and what should be the struggle is to come to an accord to create a rich, varied, contemporary public education system for a region of Spain which, linguistic arguments aside, has obstinately underperformed for way too long. Instead, and despite the protestations of government and teachers which insist that they have made paramount the needs of schoolchildren, the education system has been hung out to dry by a conflict which could have been predicted and one in which both sides have been eager participants. A plague on both their houses.

It suits the Assemblea to remind everyone of the struggle because of the next stage in its process. If, as they have threatened, the teachers go ahead with strikes in the lead-up to the regional election, these might easily backfire because of the weariness of parents. The teachers will believe otherwise: that strikes will be an additional force in bringing down the Partido Popular in May.

Strikes or no strikes, this may well happen in any event, and already there are clear indications as to what will transpire if there is a change of government. Francina Armengol of PSOE went on record months ago in saying that she would scrap TIL. On Saturday, at a conference in Palma, she spoke of taking "ambitious measures" in creating a quality public education system through a "social and political pact" that will restore peace to the classrooms. What such a pact might be and what such measures might also be, we are yet to find out, but it was perhaps no coincidence that Armengol should be speaking about such a pact when one has already been formed. Various bodies, such as the Assemblea and the Balearics parents association, have come together in drawing up what they would see forming a new education law, one to be introduced by an alternative government to the PP. While vague about but not dismissive of third language teaching, there would be a return to giving Catalan priority; a minimum 50% of teaching hours in Catalan without specifying what might be the maximum. 

Were this to come to pass, then the struggle would be over, but for how long? The four years it would take for the electorate to decide that it wants to bring the PP back into government? And then where would be? Back no doubt to the same arguments, the same conflict and the same struggle. Or maybe not. If there's one thing that many in the PP have discovered, it is that they sense some unjustness and unfairness in the current government's policies.

Nights Of Culture: Annual awards

They're having a night of culture in Alcúdia tomorrow. Cut along to the town's auditorium for 9pm, hand over 18 euros, and a cultural extravaganza will be yours to enjoy. And if you are inclined to go along, do be sure to take your Catalan cultural hat with you. This is the Obra Cultural Balear's Night of Culture, one at which the "Premis 31 de desembre" are to be handed out.

It is the time of year for awards to be made, for the great and good to be honoured, for speeches to be made, for photos to be taken. Awards here, awards there, even if, in the case of the OCB's 31 December prizes, they would appear to be being given 19 days too early. There again, on the night of 31 December there are other things to occupy the citizenry of Mallorca; not only New Year's Eve and munching on a dozen grapes but also the memory of 1229. Jaume I the Conqueror upset the New Year's celebrations all those years ago by putting the Muslim occupants to flight or to the sword.

The OCB prizes do have the merit of being named after the last day of the year. Awards should, generally speaking, reflect a year, as in the year gone by. Not all of them do. The Council of Mallorca, for example, has its awards in September. They are the Jaume II prizes, named after Jaume I's lad, and as such they reflect the seemingly eternal difference of opinion as to Mallorcan culture in its historical origins sense. On 12 September 1276, Jaume II was crowned King of Mallorca, a coronation which was also the occasion for issuing what was in effect a bill of rights for the Mallorcan people. Defenders of the true Mallorcan cultural faith, e.g. the OCB, want nothing to do with 12 September. Culture started on 31 December 1229, not 47 years later.

This cultural difference is, it might be said, reflected in the choice of award-winners. The winner of Spain's "Masterchef" 2014, Mallorca's Vicky Pulgarín, received a Jaume II in September. So also did the what's on youth publication, "Youthing". Which is not to say that earnest Mallorcan culture was not also honoured, but the Jaume IIs are a tad frivolous by comparison with a formality of Catalan virtuousness that typifies the 31 December awards. The names of these awards explain much: the Gabriel Alomar prize after the politician and poet who was associated with the Catalan modernist movement; Emili Darder, from the Republican mayor of Palma who was executed by the Nationalists in 1937; Josep Maria Llompart, who was a Catalan poet and essayist and a one-time president of the OCB. Among those who will be receiving an award will be Xïtxeros amb Empenta, a youth association that was founded in Manacor in 2008 and which has as its principal objectives linguistic and cultural recuperation as well as environmental conservation.

The OCB has been dishing out its awards since 1987, and it is interesting to note one or two previous award winners, such as the broadcaster IB3 in 2009. Given all the fuss over linguistic interference by the current government at IB3, one would doubt that it would now be up for an award. Last year, the Gabriel Alomar prize went to the Assemblea de Docents, the teachers' association right to the fore of the anti-trilingual teaching furore, and now a union in its own right. Politics and culture are never too far apart; indeed you could argue that they are one and the same.

Though 27 years old, the OCB awards are not the island's oldest. These are said to be the prizes from the Cope Mallorca radio broadcaster. The 35th edition took place at the end of last month. The Bishop of Mallorca was among the glittering array of attendees. One winner was Pollensa's Olympic canoeist, Sete Benavides; another was Juan José Hidalgo, president of Air Europa and Globalia. The Onda Cero radio station has taken over 30 years to follow Cope's lead, but at its fourth annual awards ceremony, a couple of weeks before Cope's, Rafa Nadal was one of those who was honoured. President Bauzá and Palma's mayor Mateo Isern were both at the Onda event, no doubt giving each other a wide berth, but one would imagine that neither will be in attendance in Alcúdia for the OCB bash.

Bauzá will definitely be at Son Amar on 20 December, as the Partido Popular's own awards - the Larus - will be up for grabs. Will Isern receive one? Doubtful. Will he even go? Whoever does win an award, Bauzá will hope that he doesn't receive the same thinly veiled broadside he got from the PP's ex-president, Gabriel Cañellas, last year, something of which, given allusions to culture regained, even the OCB might have approved.

Communication Breakdown: Balearic Government

The government of José Ramón Bauzá has many failings, but its greatest is arguably its inability to communicate effectively. In this it only has itself to blame, while by its own design it has allowed communication in a more general sense - media, the man and woman in the street, social networks - to be dominated by the battles it has sought.

If only. If only Bauzá had not bulldozed headlong into the great wall of Catalan, he might now be looking at higher poll ratings and looking forward to receiving the mandate which would allow him to realise his ambition for a second term - to complete what he says he has started. Instead, he chose his battles and he will die by the sword he has waved. If only he had not revised history by insisting there was a mandate for trilingual teaching when there was not. His constant reference to a manifesto which set this out, but which did not, has merely added to the discontent that TIL has aroused; he has constantly taken people for fools, those who have bothered to read the manifesto, that is. If only he had approached TIL in a consensual evolutionary fashion. If only he had not torn down the symbols and marked himself out as the enemy of Catalan through a conversion to the philosophies of Carlos Delgado and the Circulo Balear's Jorge Campos.

But this confrontation was wholly expected. Members of the Partido Popular now claim that Bauzá became someone they hadn't selected as leader in 2010 (rather than Delgado). This may be so, but his conversion was indecently swift. In December 2010, five months ahead of the regional elections, I wrote about Bauzá's intention to revise language law and of the divisions this had already created within the PP. Immediately after the election, I said that the good week the PP had enjoyed because of the election results might not look so good "when the divisions that exist within the PP in Mallorca re-surface". Not if. When. If leading lights within the PP had their concerns about the language policy, as many will now intimate, they failed to get it toned down, assuming they even tried.

Several months ahead of the last election, Manacor's mayor, Antoni Pastor (then still in the PP), was already at loggerheads with Bauzá over language and attitudes towards regionalism. When he spoke recently of the "hate" that has been brought to Mallorcan society by the Bauzá government, he was overdoing it, but there is no questioning the division that has been created; division which could have been predicted and indeed was.

Has the inability to communicate effectively been intentional? It seems perverse to believe that it has, but the Bauzá regime appears to have been content to allow the controversies to take centre stage. Perhaps the political ego of wishing to appear tough, even at the expense of social and indeed party harmony, has barged common sense out of the way along with communication that is more positive.

Bauzá inherited a difficult economic situation, and he is now able to say that the Balearics will enjoy two per cent growth in 2015. If only. If only the communication had been more effective, more sympathetic, less confrontational, people might now listen and believe that he has done well. Instead, an announcement of predicted growth sounds more like triumphalism and propaganda neatly timed with the months ebbing away before the election. Yet, he and the government can take credit for the improvement. It has had its luck, such as with the Arab Spring that benefited tourism, but it has also sought to enable growth. The tourism law, while by no means perfect, the farming law, the fishing law, an emphasis on technologies; they have all been examples of policies with investment, greater productivity and growth in mind.

Bauzá now boasts that his has been a reforming government, the most reforming government among the regions of Spain. There has been welcome reform and, even allowing for the mess created by the language policy, this also needed some reform because the bias towards Catalan had gone way too far under Antich. Nevertheless, there will be those who will call it reactionary and not reforming, just as there will be those who will point out that economic growth can increase inequalities, and a report last week highlighted just this.

Boasts about reform will cut little ice with the electorate. Economic good news should do, and it was the economy above all else which was the reason for Bauzá being in government. He should have stuck to the economy knitting and communicated the changes needed to right the economy in a more understanding way. But he hasn't, and so he only has himself to blame for the divisions and ruptures that have been caused and for inadequate communication that has merely intensified them. 

What Is The Truth?: Francesc de Borja Moll

A publishing house closed last month. It was eighty years old and was one of Mallorca's most important and most famous publishing companies. Its name was, and remains for the time being, Editorial Moll. It had been battling against financial difficulties for some years, had been placed in administration and, despite fundraising efforts, finally lost the battle. As part of the process of liquidation, buyers are likely to be sought for the collection of hundreds of thousands of books at its headquarters. Included among this vast collection is the "Diccionari català-valencià-balear", a work of enormous significance in that it was the first dictionary to bring together different strands of Catalan. It was a work which had been started by Antoni Maria Alcover, who died in 1932, and which was finally completed in 1962 by the person after whom the company was named - Francesc de Borja Moll Casanovas.

The timing of the founding of Editorial Moll in 1934 was both good and bad; good because it was during the period of the Second Republic, bad because of what happened two years later. Under the Republic, Catalan could flourish, and Editorial Moll was a publishing house for Catalan. So, given the bad timing, what happened to the company and to its founder once the Franco regime and the Falange set about their prohibition and persecution of Catalan?

My own knowledge of Borja Moll goes back some years. I came to know about him because he, like Antoni Maria Alcover, is afforded high levels of reverence in Mallorca, especially Alcover. I confess, however, that until now and with an interest sparked off by the closure of Editorial Moll, I had never paid over much attention to his background. And so, it was with more than a little surprise that I found a lengthy article by an historian, Mariano Bendito Saura, that was posted on his blog in 2011 and which was entitled "The historical-linguistic misrepresentations of Francesc de Borja Moll" **.

The company, it would appear, didn't encounter any great difficulties and nor did Borja Moll. And that was because, and Bendito is not the only one to have asserted this, he was a member of the Falange. Bendito says that during the Civil War Borja Moll was in the propaganda department of the Falange and goes on to say that in 1940 he collaborated on a project which was sponsored, among others, by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the founder of the Falange and therefore daughter of the 1920s' dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. This project was a propaganda exercise to promote the notion of Catalan fascism and a unitary Catalan and language.

Bendito's article, apart from being lengthy, is complex and far from straightforward. It devotes attention to detail of linguistic development and cites innumerable references to this development and to political interference and orders. But at the start of the article, he makes his sentiments clear. "Borja Moll (director of Editorial Moll, ex-Falangist from Palma de Mallorca ...) is an unethical and dishonest person who sold Catalan imperialism and who betrayed and disowned all Balearic historical and linguistic truth." He implies, therefore, that "Catalanisation" of the islands' languages was an invention but was one which re-emerged from 1970 in a very different political and cultural form.

Bendito, who describes himself as being "passionate for historical truth", paints a picture of Borja Moll which is hard to reconcile with what he achieved, e.g. founding the Obra Cultural Balear in 1962 or the grand honour for Catalan "letters" in 1971, and with what Editorial Moll became, a publishing house of great significance which promoted Catalan and which over its eighty years published works by names of cultural and historical importance such as Alcover and the poet Miquel Costa i Llobera. Perhaps Borja Moll had been put under pressure by the Falange. He wouldn't have been the only one. Whatever his involvement, it didn't last, and nor did the strict anti-Catalan dogma that the Franco regime initially pursued with such rigour.

The article does, however, point to complex linguistic arguments which, while somewhat obscure and arcane, inform so much of current-day arguments in Mallorca, those to do with language, culture and education. Bendito is not unique in presenting a version of history which seeks to debunk a Mallorcan link to Catalan (and thus Catalonia) and to the notion of the Catalan Lands. The problem is, and with the greatest of respect to him and to his research, getting at the "truth" is made difficult because of how current-day politics create fertile ground for competing versions of history. His version is firmly in the anti-Catalanist camp.

Editorial Moll folded because of financial difficulties, and one source of these difficulties was the elimination of regional government support for books in Catalan. Borja Moll's son says that this stemmed from "the government's extreme belligerence towards Catalan". Politics, always politics.

** http://historiaregnemallorca.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/tergiversaciones-historico-linguistas.html

Mallorca's History ... In Catalan

On 19 November 1981 the culture department at the Council of Mallorca held the first of what has since become an annual conference. It was the first Jornades d'Estudis Històrics Locals. A prime objective of this conference was to allow young researchers to present their projects and discuss them with those of greater seniority and experience. Initially, project submission was open only to researchers who were resident in the Balearics. This soon changed. The door was thrown open to international researchers, and some of the results of these conferences were published.

Next week, on 28 and 29 October, the thirty-third conference will take place. It will be held at the university's Sa Riera building in the street named after one of the more important figures in recent Mallorcan history, Miquel dels Sants Oliver, the journalist and political thinker who, it might be argued, was the father of twentieth-century Mallorcan tourism. Its theme will be the era of the Taifa of Denia, the Muslim kingdom that was one of various other taifas that were formed after the disintegration of the Caliphate of Cordoba. The Denia taifa was all important in Mallorcan history, as it controlled Mallorca. One of the presentations is entitled "Power and culture in Mallorca (or rather Mayurqa) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries". Others include the use of coins in the taifa and the relationship between Islam and Christianity.

Overseeing all this is the Institute of Balearic Studies. a consortium for the diffusion and promotion of Balearic culture and the development of the Catalan language. Presentations, papers have, therefore, to be in Catalan, and you wouldn't really expect them not to be. But this does have one drawback. The audience is not as wide as it might be.

In December 2009 the institute published a whole collection of papers. It stretches to over five hundred pages. I have a copy, and much as I might attempt to read some of it, over five hundred pages would be taking an interest a bit far. Yet, what this particular publication contains (and it is the second volume) are papers devoted to the theme of studies of the local press by which is meant not so much newspapers or magazines but research devoted to towns across Mallorca. The conference on local history studies is not the only conference of its type. There are similar conferences in various towns as well. Alcúdia, as an example, will be holding its latest conference over three days at the end of next month; the ninth such conference to be held.

The collection of papers published in 2009 doesn't cover every town on the island - it was the second volume after all - but if I start to list the towns that it does cover, then you will get an impression of how comprehensive the collection is: local studies in Alcúdia, in Algaida, in Ariany, in Campanet, in Campos. In addition, there is a separate collection - "The Civil War in Mallorca: village by village" - while there are also papers to do with Menorca. Most of the papers are entitled "local studies of ...", but there is one which dispenses with this. It is simply called "The Local History of Pollensa". It is in fact more a history of historians who have contributed to the town's history, but its pages are naturally enough full of the stuff of the local history.

The papers in the collection, though academic, are not presented in the manner in which much academic research is, i.e. in the formulaic style highly valued by academia in which methodology and proof of research rigour can seem to assume greater purpose than the message and which is thus totally baffling to anyone unused to, for instance, the detail of statistical analysis or literature reviews.

This might all sound like dry stuff but it isn't, and fortunately some of the more extreme academic material which does get published in the proceedings of town's local studies conferences finds its way into more digestible forms, such as the histories which town halls have produced. I have, by way of example, a couple - one for Sa Pobla and one for Santa Margalida. They're in Catalan, but they are also goldmines of information.

The point is, though, that someone without any understanding of Catalan wouldn't even start to read them, and so vast resources go to waste in terms of taking local history to a wider audience. And these are vast resources. Mallorca does history extraordinarily well and in great detail: not just the broad brush stuff of conquest, kings and battles but the more focused stuff, as with the histories of each town.    

Mallorca desperately wants the foreign visitor to engage with its history and its culture. It has a wealth of history and of material which explains it. Development of the Catalan language by all means, but history is not or should not only be Catalan.