Culture : Despite Ups and Downs, Catalan Language Is Alive, Well : Once banned by Franco, it is enjoying a resurgence in Spain and is used in a lively press and two television channels. And in 1992, it will be an official tongue at the Summer Olympics.

By STANLEY MEISLER

Jan. 1, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BARCELONA, Spain — In the 1970s, when Anna Balletbo was a television reporter, she and some of her colleagues devised a way to defy the dictator Francisco Franco by sneaking the Catalan language on the air.

They would interview people from the Barcelona area in Spanish but surreptitiously ask them to reply in Catalan. “Then we would go back to the studio,” she recalled recently, “and say, ‘I’m sorry. I asked my questions in Spanish, but they replied in Catalan. What could I do?’ In that way, we were able to put the Catalan language on television.”

Her ploy was looked on as a bold blow for freedom in those days--an era when a fascist regime trumpeted the glory of the unified Spanish state and tried to suppress all vestiges of regional culture and language.

Now that Franco is dead and Spain prospers with democratic government, Balletbo is a Socialist deputy from Barcelona in the Spanish Congress in Madrid. And Catalan is thriving as an official language alongside Spanish in the region of Catalonia. Almost all people in the region can understand Catalan, and most can speak it. More than half the elementary schools teach in it. There is a lively Catalan press, and two television channels broadcast exclusively in the Catalan language.

Balletbo, in fact, now finds herself more troubled by nationalists who continually demand more use of Catalan than by the handful of die-hard Francoists who would like to repress it once more.

“I have a feeling now that we need to breathe a little,” she said recently over coffee at her home in Barcelona. “We don’t need to keep pushing use of the language. Our schools are in Catalan. We have television in Catalan. That will do the job.”

She smiled as she thought about some of the Catalans who have embraced the language almost too fervently recently. “I say to them, thank you very much, welcome to our ranks,” she said, “but where were you in the days when it really mattered?”

There is little doubt that the extensive use of Catalan in eastern Spain represents one of the great triumphs of the persistence of language in history. The rest of the world will probably take notice of Catalan in 1992 when sports fans discover that it is an official language of the Olympics in Barcelona. Yet not every Catalan is as confident as Anna Balletbo about its future.

In a pair of scholarly articles published earlier this year, three Catalan linguists predicted that use of the language will die out within 50 years if the regional government known as the Generalitat does not pass more stringent legislation forcing its use.

Miquel Strubell i Trueta, the Generalitat’s director of language use, dismissed the articles as scare tactics. “They wanted to shake people out of their complacency,” he said in a recent interview at his offices in the Department of Culture.

But Strubell also disagreed with those Catalans who believe nothing more needs to be done.

“The power of the state, of the government in Madrid, is loaded in favor of Spanish speakers,” he said. “People still have a kind of inferiority complex about using Catalan. Many people won’t even think of speaking in Catalan with someone in uniform. When they go to a lawyer’s office, they expect to deal entirely in Spanish. This comes from the Franco era and hasn’t changed very much.”

It is not always easy for an American to understand the problem of regional languages in Europe because our main minority languages like Spanish are imported rather than home-grown. But Catalan, a Romance language related even more to French than Spanish, has deep roots in Spain.

It developed in the Middle Ages and was used widely in the 13th Century when King Jaume I of Catalonia and Aragon conquered the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca as well. A great Catalan novel, “Tirant lo Blanc,” was written by Joanot Martorell in the late 15th Century, and the 500th anniversary of its publication has just been celebrated in Valencia.

Catalan was the official language of the kingdoms of Catalonia and Aragon until early in the 18th Century when the kingdoms’ leaders supported the wrong side in a war between Spain and Austria and, as punishment, found their special privileges, including official use of their language, revoked by Madrid.

The Spanish republic restored the official status of the language in the 1930s, but this was torn away by Franco after he defeated the republic in the Spanish Civil War. In vehement fury against the language as a symbol of division and leftism, Franco tried to stamp Catalan out, urging Catalans to become “civilized” and speak Spanish--or what really is Castellano, the language of Castile in central Spain.

Although no book or magazine or newspaper could be published in Catalan during the Franco era, Balletbo said, “it was not illegal to speak Catalan.” But, she went on, “it was looked on as a private language. If you went to a government office and asked in Catalan for a document, they might not give it to you. They might say they could not understand you and demand that you ask for it in Castellano.

“Catalan became a language of resistance,” she said. “If you were a democrat and against the regime, you spoke to your friends in Catalan. Those people who were close to the regime used Castellano.”

After Franco died in 1975 and Spain approved a democratic constitution in 1978, Catalonia signed a statute of autonomy with the central government that allowed the region the use of Catalan as an official language alongside Spanish. A language law was passed by the regional government a few years later to enforce this.

Its most important provision makes Catalan the language of education. While children from families that do not speak Catalan have the right to study in Spanish for the first years in school, everyone is taught Catalan as a subject so they can start taking their regular classes in Catalan once they master the language.

Although there are some complaints by Spanish speakers that they are treated rudely by Catalan officials who do not reply to their questions (a mirror image of the complaint under Franco), most Spaniards agree that the Catalans are relatively easygoing about their language.

“I have lived here for 15 years,” said a taxi driver born in Granada in Andalusia. “I do not like to speak in Catalan because I make so many mistakes. So I always speak in Spanish. But it does not matter. All the Catalans understand me. And they do not seem to mind.”

Strubell believes that Catalans do this too easily. Since practically everyone in Catalonia, whether a Catalan speaker or not, speaks Spanish, it is easy for everyone to switch to Spanish when a lone Spanish speaker shows up in their group, no matter how large.

“The majority of Catalans are very flexible,” said Strubell, “and will change their language in conversation, from my point of view, too quickly.”

Yet problems do arise. Miquel de Moragas, a professor of journalism who now heads the center for Olympic studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, said over lunch recently, “It is a big problem. If you start to speak in Castellano because you know there are people at a conference who do not understand Catalan, there is always someone there who shouts out, ‘Why are you, a representative of our government, not speaking in Catalan?’ So you have to have interpreters. And they are expensive.

“In one of my classes,” Moragas went on, “I have a French student who asked me to speak in Castellano because he does not speak Catalan. What do I do? Do I speak in Castellano just for one student? I cannot.”

According to 1986 census figures, 90.3% of the Catalonia region’s 6 million people can understand Catalan, 64% can speak it, 60.5% can read it and 31.5% can write it. The statistics for Valencia and the Balearic Islands (which includes Majorca), the two other regions where Catalan has official status, show that similar percentages of their population can understand and speak Catalan but much lower percentages can read and write it.

In all, there are almost 6 million Spaniards in the three regions who can speak Catalan. If you add the number of Catalan speakers in the Spanish province of Aragon, southern France, the principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees and the Italian island of Sardinia, it is probable that well over 6.5 million people in the world now speak Catalan.

The Catalonia education system seems to be the strongest support for the perpetuation of the Catalan language. Just about every child in public school studies Catalan. A little more than 40% of the 1 million children in elementary schools in the 1986-87 school year studied all their subjects in Catalan as well.

About the same percentage of high school students took at least two of their main courses in Catalan. The province does not require more than that since a large number of veteran teachers come from other parts of Spain and do not speak Catalan.

Catalonia’s three universities conduct their administrative business in Catalan, but statistics are not available yet about how many courses are actually given in Catalan. Most textbooks, however, seem to be in Spanish or English. There is clearly no problem among the students about using Catalan. A recent survey of the University of Barcelona revealed that more than 90% can write in Catalan “well” or “fairly well.”

The statistics about the mass media are less encouraging. The three newspapers with the largest circulations in Catalonia publish only in Spanish. Spain’s most popular magazines, all in Spanish, sell from 15% to 30% of their copies in Catalonia.

In television, the government’s main national Spanish network has the largest audience in Catalonia, but a new Catalan channel, growing swiftly in popularity, now has an audience about 75% the size of the Spanish channel. The new private television networks, however, in their hunt for national markets, telecast only in Spanish.

Catalans like to compare their situation with that of the province of Quebec in Canada. But there are major differences. First of all, unlike the Catalans, a majority of Quebecers do not speak the majority language of their country well. They would be at a distinct disadvantage if forced to operate in English.

On top of this, Catalonia’s Catalan, unlike Quebec’s French, is not a major language spoken by scores of millions of people around the world. Catalan’s limits create a danger of isolation. A writer in Catalan simply has far less of an audience than a writer in French.

The limited audience may be one reason why the best journalists in Catalonia write in Spanish rather than in Catalan. A skillful stylist in Spanish has the chance to capture a worldwide audience eventually; a skillful stylist in Catalan does not.

That has led to some debate in Catalan cultural circles. Juan Marse, a Catalan novelist who writes in Spanish about Barcelona, is on the best seller lists these days with a comic novel about a lovesick street musician who wears a disguise and fakes a southern Spanish accent to seduce his ex-wife, who is a Catalonia official charged with defending the Catalan language.

At a recent award ceremony, Marse was testy about Catalan nationalists who refuse to accept Catalan novelists who write in Spanish. “They used to blame our use of Spanish on Franco,” said the 57-year-old Marse. “I’m getting tired of that, and I’m now starting to blame Napoleon (who conquered Spain in the early 19th Century). Look, I’ve always written in Spanish, and at this juncture I’m not going to change.”

In a recent speech to the Catalan Parliament, Jordi Pujol, the president of the Generalitat, pledged more financial support for Catalan television, more Catalan language training for teachers and a government campaign to encourage the use of Catalan in shops and public signs.

Despite this, few analysts expect the Catalan government to become more coercive about the use of Catalan than it is now. The emotional force behind Catalan is so strong that tough laws are not needed.

“This is a pretty important agency of government,” said Strubell, the Generalitat’s director of language use. “But I can’t pull open the door of someone’s house and say, ‘I heard you speaking Spanish instead of Catalan.’ Even Franco did his best, but couldn’t get that far. Our present language policy is quite moderate.”

An Old Language Thrives Again In the Spanish region of Catalonia, Catalan is booming once again as an official language alongside Spanish. The regional government has launched a campaign to urge people to learn the language and has published a self-teaching pamphlet.

USE OF CATALAN IN REGIONS OF SPAIN

REGION and Catalonia Valencia Balearic Islands* Three area total POPULATION 6 million 3.7 million .68 million 10.38 million UNDERSTAND 90% 84% 90% 88% SPEAK 64% 55% 71% 62% READ 61% 27% 46% 49% WRITE 32% 8% 17% 23%

* includes Majorca