Coming from a country in which the majority of the people is monolingual, it is interesting to be in a city where everybody is at least bilingual and most people can get by in English and maybe another language too. Bilingual Barcelona - the capital of Catalunya and yet still part of Spain - boasts two official languages: Spanish (Castellà) and Catalan (Català). It comes as no surprise therefore that the 'UB' (The University of Barcelona) is also bilingual.When choosing my modules at University, it was therefore unsurprising to see that each module specified which language it was to be taught in (normally Spanish or Catalan).
The Courtyard of my Faculty
One of the modules I have chosen is an introduction to Basque; a module taught in Spanish I chose last minute so I was doing enough credits. I arrived promptly to the first lesson at 8.30am and the teacher started blabbering on in Catalan and then half way through the class stopped and asked us if we spoke Catalan. There were two Chinese girls in the class who didn't, so the teacher asked us which language we preferred. Despite the fact the other students said they didn't mind which language the module was taught in, the teacher ended our little linguistic discussion by saying that she'd always taught the class in Catalan and that it must have been a mistake on the website. She said if they really wanted to do the module that Spanish and Catalan weren't actually that different and that she could just keep giving them summaries in Spanish after each section if they didn't understand. Needless to say they didn't come to the next lesson.
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