Context

Catalan is one of Spain's four co-official languages, spoken by millions, yet only a third of Catalonia uses it as their main language. It carries three centuries of political history — banned under the Nueva Planta decrees, erased under Franco, revived after democracy — and today faces a quieter threat: being seen as old-fashioned. I took this as the subject of my Magazine Journalism feature.

What I did

I reported and wrote a long-form feature tracing the language from its historical persecution to its present-day revival. I drew on data from IDESCAT and sociolinguists like Francesc Xavier Vila, interviewed language-learning platforms (Easy Catalan, Jo Aprenc Català) and expats who learned Catalan, and analysed how content creators and social media are turning a "millenary language" into something young and shareable.

The angle

The piece argues that a threatened language isn't saved by gatekeeping it, but by opening it up. The most interesting shift is generational: young Catalans and expats are reclaiming the language not through institutions but through TikTok, Discord voice chats and podcasts — turning identity into something contagious rather than defensive. It's a story about how communication itself becomes the tool of cultural survival, which sits exactly where my background in journalism and international relations meets.

Takeaways

This is the most complete piece of reporting I've done: historical context, hard data, multiple sourced voices, and a clear argument, held together across a long feature. Writing it in English, for an American readership, meant translating not just the language but the whole cultural stakes of why a small language matters — which is, in the end, what communication is for.