This week Plataforma per la Llengua took part in the fifth HIGA event, an international meeting of young speakers of minoritised languages, organised by an association of the same name with the support of Vitoria City Council and the University of the Basque Country. The event, running from Monday 14 July to today (Friday 18 July), analysed topics like the intersection between art and language activism, and the relationship between technology, the environment and language revitalisation. Plataforma per la Llengua was involved in a round table on minoritised languages on Mediterranean islands that compared the situations in the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily taking into account the impact of tourism, gentrification and resistance and revitalisation strategies.
Maria de Lluc Muñoz, international officer for Plataforma per la Llengua, represented the organisation at the conference and spoke about Catalan on the Balearic Islands. She explained that the population of this region has grown by 85.2% since 1983 (while population growth in Spain as a whole has been just 26.2%) because of the tourism boom, which has attracted thousands of workers and their families, although in many cases they have ended up with insecure, poorly paid temporary jobs. Currently, just 52.94% of the residents of the Balearic Islands were born there, making it is one of the European regions with the biggest share of its population born elsewhere. This has had a linguistic impact because of the difficulties of integrating all the newcomers in Catalan. In addition, this tourism-based economic model has led to an increase in housing prices which makes it difficult for young local people to move into their own homes while, at the same time, allows outsiders with greater purchasing power to buy property (32.6% of the flats sold in 2024 were bought by outsiders with greater purchasing power) in areas where until recently there had been no language substitution.
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The meeting was attended by 85 representatives of 68 minoritised languages around the world. Over the five days of the conference there were talks on the situation of minoritised languages in Abya Yala (the American continent), the effect of mining on indigenous communities in Europe, the digital gap and intersectionality in activism, workshops in Basque, improvised oral creativity in minoritised languages, community narratives and language space mapping, and project funding. Round tables also dealt with the survival of communities and languages in contexts of displaced population, technology for the common good in indigenous communities in danger of extinction, and languages, culture and the power of young people.
The tourism-based economic model is putting Catalan at risk
Plataforma per la Llengua has already warned on various occasions of the language impact of tourism. Last November, at a seminar in Palma, the organisation revealed that the Balearic Islands' tourism model was putting their own language at risk. The debate, which included Guillem Colom, a lecturer from the University of Glasgow and researcher on contemporary Catalan culture; Joan Miralles, holder of a PhD in the sociology of tourism; and Pere Joan Femenia, a representative of Joventut pel Clima - Fridays for Future Mallorca, made it clear that, with the residentialisation of tourism, tourists consider that they have rights over the region and demand sociolinguistic changes.
In addition, this June, the first seminar of Més Semicercles in 2025 also once again highlighted the fact that the tourism-based model does not help new arrivals adopt the language. This time, the philologist and activist Gerard Furest and the political analyst Saoka Kingolo, head of the "Xerrem" project of the Coordinator of Associations for the Catalan Language (CAL), took part in the debate, organised in Terrassa. Furest explained that the model constantly imports cheap labour with no guarantees of social progress, which does not encourage these people to put down roots in society. To continue to deal with the relationship between language and tourism, Plataforma per la Llengua is organising a new symposium on the subject on Eivissa at the beginning of August.
