5 October 2026 · Sara Marugan
I support Treu la llengua and the Repte per la llengua
This article was machine-translated from Sara's Catalan original. The writing is hers; the translation has not been reviewed by a person. Read the Catalan original →
Every day, the Catalan teachers' groups I belong to send me lots of messages with ideas for defending the language in primary and secondary schools. There are two I want to explain here, because I believe in them and because the more schools that know about them, the better.
The Repte per la llengua
The Repte per la llengua ("the language challenge"), also known as the Repte Casteller, is a proposal to encourage the everyday use of Catalan in schools. It was created by Ester Vilà i Bibiloni, a teacher at the Escola Pompeu Fabra in Lloret de Mar, a school where very few pupils have Catalan as their first language. The idea is to pull together like a human tower: each pupil is one of the figures in the castell, and the whole group commits to speaking Catalan with each other throughout the school year.
It is already used in public, state-funded and municipal schools across Catalonia, and Ester offers advice to schools that want to get it started. Famílies pel català explains it in this video:
And InfoK made a report about it:
Treu la llengua
Treu la llengua comes from the Languages Committee of the Assemblea Educativa de Catalunya, prompted by the concern of many school assemblies about the decline of Catalan and Aranese in schools. It proposes a manifesto, "Per les nostres llengües" ("For our languages"), which schools and parents' associations sign up to: the teaching staff meet, read the manifesto and vote on joining. You'll find everything at treulallenguaaec.cat
One of its proposals is the C1 challenge. Today, pupils who pass Catalan in the fourth year of ESO (compulsory secondary education) automatically get the C1 level, and many teachers feel that this certificate does not match the real level of a large share of pupils. That is why the AEC offers teachers C1 exam papers adapted to the fourth year of ESO, and proposes certifying B2 at the end of ESO and C1 at the end of the Batxillerat (upper secondary): treulallenguaaec.cat/repte-c1/
Why I support them
I'm a Catalan philologist and I have spent more than eighteen years teaching Catalan in secondary school, upper secondary and to adults. These two proposals point the way I believe schools need to go, and I want to be seen standing alongside the people driving them.
If you're a teacher, take the manifesto to your staff meeting and have a look at the C1 challenge. If you're a parent, raise it with your school's parents' association. All the links, and the guide to bringing the Repte into the classroom, are together on the Resources page, in the "For teachers and schools" section: cursosdecatala.cat/en/recursos
Photograph: the base (pinya) of the Monument to the Castellers in El Vendrell, by Josep Cañas. Author: Enric. Licence CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
