Teenagers and young people, like the musicians they idolize, in their twenties, love to make salsa to share the latest cotis with their bros; On a Friday night they can start with the jangueo and move on to fooling around with some shori. And if there is something they criticize, it is acting like an NPC (see the attached dictionary).
Surely you have noticed the Catalan sung by The Tyets (or the Tiets), the Figa Flawas, the Mushkaa or Triquell, some of the groups with the most listens and success on stage. If you’re over 40, you might be among those asking young people about the meaning of some of the words and expressions in their catchy lyrics.
Catalan, with its social use in alarming decline, especially among young people and adolescents, is experiencing success with few precedents in music due to what and how. “At the outset I can only welcome the use of Catalan in a segment in which the alarm lights have gone on,” says Miquel Àngel Pradilla, member of the philological section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) and professor of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV).
It is a Catalan used by groups that sing as they speak with their colleagues, most of them successfully in styles classified as urban music. Shared expressions and words, some invented and used as their own code almost unintelligible to other generations. They weave their own slang.
“Let’s ask the singers, why do you use this language model? They explain that it is the Catalan they speak. Young people and singers are criminalized, and we cannot ask them to do the work of Linguistic Policy, we cannot burden them with the burden of saving Catalan, they are making music,” highlights Xavier Mas Craviotto, professor of Catalan language and culture at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom).
They are lyrics full of anglicisms, as is also the case with groups that sing reggaeton, hip-hop or trap in Spanish. “There was a void in Catalan in these musical styles and they have filled it,” celebrates Craviotto. “The only way to create new users is for young people to see that Catalan is not a showcase language,” he maintains.
Songs also full of barbarisms and Castilianisms used almost always consciously. Not because they don’t know how to sing in the normative Catalan that they have learned in the classrooms. They sing like this because it is part of their identity and partly arises from the desire to go against.
“It is a reflection of the dynamic of multilingualism, it is not a whim. And they are voluntarily outside the norm, it is empowerment from below,” adds Pradilla (IEC). A reality, a boom, that has caught the attention of those who study the language, its forms and uses. The debate has been opened. Some see a danger, an impoverishment of the Catalan language and the growing loss of genuine expressions. Others a gift and a golden opportunity.
“We have always been taught the language from the dichotomy of what is right and wrong, but there are more nuances. There is a colloquial Catalan that can be genuine and is not always speaking badly or using barbarisms. Pedagogy has been lacking, we have not been taught to invent words that can be well formed outside of dictionaries. We can do it. And we have to take care of and feed the colloquial register,” says Míriam Martín Lloret, linguist (Optimot).
More and more people see benefits in this transgressive, dynamic Catalan, which triumphs among young people, also among Spanish speakers.
“You should not act condescendingly towards singers or youthful slang,” warns Martín Lloret. “We must make a virtue of necessity. It is evident that we would like a more genuine language, but we are in a multilingual society, in a communicative ecosystem where this more genuine use is more of a horizon than a reality,” reflects Pradilla (IEC).
“We need to create a platform to create a dictionary of colloquialisms, to normalize them. Otherwise, when we look for a more informal register, we always go to barbarism and Castilianism,” warns Martín Lloret. Mas Craviotto, philologist and writer, is one of the promoters of the Com ho diria portal, specialized precisely in colloquial Catalan and youth slang. “They have attacked us for collecting these words and accused us of being corrupters of the language,” he explains. They have a live list open, with dozens of new words thanks to collaborative work on the network.
For experts in philology and sociolinguistics, one of the keys is to do pedagogy, insisting to young people on the importance of knowing how to adapt Catalan to each register. “There is a lack of sociolinguistic pedagogy, to make people aware that language has many registers. Catalan must have all these registers and in an informal register it will have many interferences; What happens is that it is a minority language and the speakers are on the defensive because we know that Catalan is in danger,” admits Mas Craviotto.
“We must take care of the colloquial register, feed it and normalize it. There is a colloquial Catalan that can be genuine,” insists Martín Lloret. A debate that also opened spontaneously among URV students in the field of communication. “Do you feel like Catalan influencers that you have linguistic authority over young people?” one of the students asked the Figa Flawas in an interview on Ràdio Reus.
“It is not our role to be educators, this is done at home and at school, in the end we reflect on how the language is on the street; and if it weren’t like that, we wouldn’t connect as much with people. Of course as a public figure we have some influence, there is debate,” reflected Xavier Cartanyà, soul along with Pep Velasco of Figa Flawas, both raised in Valls (Alt Camp).
Asked about the same question, Irma Farelo (Mushkaa) said that if she and the singers of her generation have to save Catalan, we are in trouble. “Although some think that perhaps we ruin Catalan with Castilianisms, I think we contribute to strengthening the language. Despite this, I do not believe that my responsibility as a 19-year-old girl is to save Catalan. “If we are like this, it is because the previous generation should not have done things well.”
“There is a point of language adequacy, we do not use legal language, we are part of pop culture,” recalls Velasco (Figa Flawas). “In urban music, when you listen to something from Puerto Rico, there are a thousand anglicisms and nothing happens,” adds Cartanyà.
As a minority language, Catalan sings alongside giants with millions of speakers such as Spanish, king of reggaeton, or English, universal musical language. “We have the great workhorse in interference, in Castilianisms and Anglicisms. We cannot turn on the tap because it would be the beginning of a process of linguistic substitution,” says Pradilla (IEC). Balance, complicated, is key.
They are very young, they sing in Catalan because they want and how they want and they are succeeding in a small market (twelve million consumers). Now they are fashionable, they fill concerts, they also attract the interest of audiences who did not listen to music in Catalan and they rock it on Spotify. Nobody knows if it will be just a temporary phenomenon.
“Foreign students come to me wanting to learn Catalan after listening to Milionària,” says Craviotto from Bristol. Rosalía, with only one song in Catalan (81 million listens) in her discography, repeats the thing about the fucking money man and a wish: “… celebrate my birthday every day.” Castellanismo, by the way, very popular among many generations of Catalan speakers, including boomers.
