Despatches from Barcelona

I’m just back from Barcelona. If you haven’t been, I recommend it, it was great! Here’s a selection of linguistic observations. 

I spoke mostly (Castilian) Spanish to people I interacted with while I was there, though people who live there speak Catalan. I don’t have any great insight on Catalan other than it’s a cool language. It does have this interesting spelling thing: because <ll> is a letter, but sometimes two instances of <l> occur together, they put a dot between them to separate them. So there’s a metro station called Paral.lel, for instance. This seems very helpful, if not strictly required. 

In general, people did speak Spanish back to me as well, which is something that seems to vary in different places. I spoke French in Paris, but mostly people spoke back in English. Perhaps my French accent is bad enough that it just felt easier… and it definitely wasn’t that people didn’t speak English well in Barcelona. Pretty much everyone we talked to spoke it fluently. 

That’s partly a result of the massive levels of tourism there. Before I went I’d read that tourism is getting to be a problem there, and I wasn’t sure how that could be. In Margate we moan about the DFLs (Down From London) clogging up our local bars and making a mess on the beach in summer, but they bring in money and allow the town to thrive. But I could see what they meant when I was there. There were so many of us, and I could see how Airbnb must be causing a real housing crisis. I saw a sticker saying ‘You tourist kills my neighbourhood’. Just to bring it back round to linguistics, I wondered if this was a generic singular (like ‘the Humboldt penguin lives in South America’), or a vocative (addressing the audience) and it was directed at me. 

Lastly, a phonology one. On our last day we went to a nice ice cream place with old-fashioned decor, granizado, orxata, etc. They had a sign that said ‘More sits upstairs’. Much as I would love this to be an adorable use of the verb ‘sit’ as a noun, I suspect it’s a result of the words ‘sits’ and ‘seats’ being more or less homophonous if you have Spanish phonology. Spanish (and probably Catalan, I don’t know for sure) doesn’t have what linguists call a ‘phonemic distinction’ between the vowels in those words, which means that there isn’t an equivalent pair of words where the only difference is the vowel, like English ‘sits’ vs ‘seats’. And if your language doesn’t have a phonemic distinction, it’s really really hard to hear it and remember the difference in another language.