POV: you try speaking your language in your country.
This is the video (I have added English subtitles) posted by a Mallorcan man on Twitter, showing an experience that many of us have had. The man went to a gas station and when he went up to pay, he politely asked in the language of the land (Mallorcan Catalan). The cashier answered telling him to speak Spanish. The Mallorcan man said "I will say it slowly in both, this way you can learn it". He proceeded to say the numbers first in Catalan and then in Spanish. A second gas station worker came to him and started threatening him for speaking Catalan: "I'm going to kick your face", "I'm going to hit you so hard I'll leave you on the floor", "[you must speak Spanish because] this is Spain and that's it".
This is a common experience for Catalan speakers. Even in our own country, we can face violent threats, humiliation, and laughter for speaking the local language instead of Spanish. Even doctors routinely refuse to treat Catalan-speaking patients because they're Catalan speakers, and people have been kicked out of almost every kind of business you can imagine for speaking Catalan. When this happens in Spain outside our country, it's humiliating enough (for example: my grandmother and her friend, who are both daughters of people who moved from Southern Spain, went to visit their parent's hometown some years ago and got kicked out of a café because the other clients heard them and started shouting, they thought they were going to hit them, and the café owner came out to shout at them to get out because they don't want Catalans there) but you can more or less avoid it by not going there, but when it happens in our own country, where else are we supposed to go? If we can't speak our language in our hometown, are we just supposed to disappear?
In Barcelona (Catalonia's capital city), the 4th most reported cause of discrimination and hate crime is speaking Catalan. And that's considering that Catalan speakers rarely report these kind of events (I myself have never reported it before) while other collectives have been working a lot to report their discrimination cases and have specific places that help them do so and give them protection, like the LGBTQI+ community and migrant communities. Even then, statistics for hate crimes show the 4th reason for being hate crimed in Catalonia's capital city is speaking Catalan. And we can all be sure those numbers are nowhere near the truth of the problem.
In the Balearic Islands, discrimination is on the rise, and it's officially supported by the far-right regional government. But even though it has more legal support now, it's not new. (For example: I went to visit my friends from Mallorca years before the far-right was elected and they already got huge letters spray painted at the entrance of the town saying "Catalan pigs we'll hang you all" and they often got shouted at for similar reasons).
It's so tiring. We only want to be normal and have the same rights, to not have to face hate for our language and culture; but when we explain what happens to us and try to get Spanish people to understand that it's not good, most of them only make fun of it because they believe it's right and that it was our fault for "imposing" our public presence in the first place. Why is it so difficult to understand that we should also have the right to exist in public? Why are we always made to feel we are so annoying and disgusting? It is the people getting this angry over someone speaking the language of the place they live in who have a disproportionate amount of hatred and anger, it should be them to apologize.










