Barcelona football club boycotting Air Berlin for its refusal to make in-flight announcements in the Catalan language.

[Harold Schiffman]

Barcelona FC boycott airline for not speaking Catalan

Barcelona football club has boycotted a budget airline because it
refused to make in-flight announcements in the Catalan language.

By Fiona Govan, Madrid Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:33PM BST 01 Aug 2008

The team had booked the first leg of a tour to the United States with
Air Berlin, but pulled out in an escalating row over the promotion and
use of the language of Spain's northeastern region. The club have made
no official comments on their decision to use an alternative airline
and forfeit the price of the booking. But Alvaro Middelmann, director
general of Air Berlin for Spain and Portugal, expressed "bewilderment"
at the cancellation. "We do not reject the Catalan language but as a
German company that already uses Spanish it would involve a huge
effort," he told the newspaper El Mundo.

The club's president, Joan Laporta, has been promoting the Catalan
language in conjunction with the regional government.  The refusal to
use the airline comes after Air Berlin declined a request by regional
authorities to guarantee that Catalan would be spoken to flights to
Catalonia and neighbouring Balearic islands, where the language is
also used. The same authorities yesterday applauded the stand. "Barca
is a club whose official language is Catalan and is fully entitled to
refuse to use a company that is not sensitive to the introduction of
this language in their communications," said Margalida Tous, director
general of Linguistic Policy of the Balearic government.

Catalan was banned under dictator General Franco but following his
death in 1975 was made the official language of the northeastern
autonomous region, which has a population of seven million. It is now
spoken in all state schools across Catalonia, with Spanish only taught
for up to three hours a week, a fact which has angered many who claim
it constitutes an attack on the nation's official language and will
leave a generation without the ability to converse fluently outside
the region.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/2485175/Barcelona-FC-boycott-airline-for-not-speaking-Catalan.html
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