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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2025

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  • Thank you, I do indeed live in !barcelona@piefed.social !

    Regarding the Catalan vs Castilian discussion, I prefer to focus on Catalan at the moment. I can speak Castilian okay, but Catalan is the language of Catalunya, so it makes sense to me to learn it as a mark of respect to the local people, and to integrate in society.

    People sometimes say that Castilian is more useful as it is more widely used worldwide, but that’s shortsighted in my opinion:

    • at the European level, English is much more widely spoken than Castilian (35% vs 13%, and that’s without the UK: https://languageknowledge.eu/countries/european-union), so by that logic, every people in Spain should learn and speak English (and indeed, there are some areas of Barcelona where you can now only live in English, so that phenomenon is already happening)
    • the local language is always going to be more useful than whatever powerful language is also present locally. If you move to Zurich, learn Swiss German. If you move to Denmark, learn Danish. If you move to the Netherlands, learn Dutch. If you move to Québec, learn Québecois French even if English or European French are more widely spoken.

    Your 70-year old neighbors don’t really care what language is spoken in Europe or worldwide, but they’ll care if you don’t learn their language.