When I arrived in Barcelona in 1988, I landed in what I thought was Barcelona, Spain. I had no idea that Catalonia had ever been a separate country or had aspirations of separating from Spain again in the future. I immediately fell in love with life in the city of Barcelona and my early trips up the coast and out into the Catalan countryside convinced me that I'd wound up in a pretty cool place.
Catalonia still felt like a region of Spain to me so given the choice of two languages, I opted to learn Spanish rather than Catalan. All the bilingual Catalans spoke Spanish anyway and it would also mean I'd get by on jaunts around the rest of Spain.
The Catalanisation process was a slow one. I suppose it began by choosing to support FC Barcelona rather than Real Madrid and continued as I started to watch more and more television in Catalan. In those days, Spanish television was as dreadful as it is now with game shows, South American soap operas and dumb gossip programmes.
I vividly remember the first time I switched the dial on my cheap portable TV over to Catalan TV3 and was greeted by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, the 'Space the final frontier..' introduction was the first thing I ever memorised in the Catalan language. What's more, I was probably feeling a bit homesick and lots of British series were shown on TV3. Dubbed versions of sitcoms, such as Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Yes, Minister, and soaps such as Eastenders, Coronation Street and Neighbours all made me feel much more at home even if it was a little surrealistic watching Michael Crawford say 'Oooh, Betty ...' and then continue in Catalan.
This must have been around 1989 or 1990 and I wasn't yet familiar with some of the differences between Catalan and Spanish culture. To be perfectly honest, it all seemed a foreign jumble to me. I do remember thinking, though, that if these people chose to show British TV series, they probably had more in common with me than the ones that chose to show South American soaps and bullfighting.
Obviously my grasp of the language improved very quickly and I began to notice the positive effect that a few words of Catalan had on people. I was mainly freelance English teaching at the time and every time I went to meet a new client things seemed to go better if I introduced myself in Catalan, apologised for my limitations and then switched to Spanish. So in many respects my first reason for getting to grips with the languages was in order to get better work.
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This excerpt is taken from the first chapter of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'
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