Phew! Here are the results of the annual Traumatic Event :

Vehicle Inspection (ITV): the car passed (and so it should, given the money I spent on the exhaust)
Spanish Language Competence Test (SLCT) : reasonable pass
Catalan Language Competence Test (CLCT) : dismal failure

Let me explain ...

Maybe there's been a change of management – there was no Loud Music, and the lads had gone. In their place, I was dealt with by a quiet, balding thirty-something who spoke courteous Spanish, and a tall, austere twenty-something with a long pony-tail who only spoke Catalan (hence my disastrous mark in the CLCT). And in the latter case I came up against the politics of language.

I would bet a lot of money that Pony-tail speaks Spanish (or Castellano, to be politically correct in Catalan terms) perfectly well, but that he doesn't see why he should not speak Catalan, his native language, just to accomodate foreigners who have been too lazy to bother learning it. I said that I didn't understand, in Castellano, and he continued explaining in Catalan … so it was evident that he was making a point. He did make the concession of backing up the Catalan with pretty clear sign language – and, tellingly, when I had to speed the engine to a precise number of revolutions he made sure I understood by using Castellano. Otherwise, it was solid high-speed Catalan, and I worked out what I had to do next by deduction from contextual clues – if he had just put a light meter in front of the car, he probably wanted the lights on!

Behind this little incident in the ITV garage, there is a huge weight of history. There are many Catalans, and particularly young Catalans like Pony-tail, who feel that their culture and their society have been oppressed and sidelined for centuries, and so insist on their language as a means of re-asserting their identity. There was a point in the 13th Century when Barcelona was competing for Mediterranean dominance with Genoa and Venice, but then a long slow decline set in. The centralised Spanish state based in Madrid progressively removed the Catalans' power to control their own lives, culminating in the gray misery of the Franco decades. The overall shape of this history of oppression is at the back of many Catalans' minds, and expresses itself in a generalised sense that still today the rest of Spain fails to treat Catalonia with proper respect – especially because Catalans feel that they work harder than anyone else and are required to contribute too much in the way of taxes.

There is much, much more to the history than that – but you can see why Pony-tail might insist on using Catalan. But … but … I can understand the point of view of catalan nationalists, but I can't share it. It is, surely, impressive that the vast majority of Catalans are bilingual – so why not be proud of that? Why not be generous with the poor sad limited souls who can only speak Castellano?

Why insist, in effect, that “if you haven't made the effort to learn Catalan, I don't care if we completely fail to communicate” ?

This, surely, is the point at which the admirable and justifiable desire to assert your language and culture starts to become poisonous – when you insist on your language against all others, and refuse any compromise. At this point, language is being used to state who you are, to impose yourself … but isn't the fundamental purpose of language to communicate? Isn't the perfect conclusion of all monolingual and nationalist projects to achieve some kind of perfect isolation ?