Aida Roca, philologist and creator of digital content, is responsible for “La Filòloga de Guàrdia”, a channel for disseminating content in Catalan and about the Catalan language. More than 30,000 people follow her entertaining and easily applicable tips for learning to speak genuine Catalan in any context and at any age.

She was barely out of her forties when Aida Roca took the plunge and created a YouTube channel she christened “La Filòloga de Guàrdia”. She explains that she began to create the kind of content that she missed on social media: entertaining content in Catalan and with the Catalan language as the main subject. Thus, “La Filòloga de Guàrdia” came to be, the YouTube channel, but also in other social networks such as Instagram, Twitter or TikTok, which already have more than 30,000 followers.

For decades, Catalan has suffered from the influence of the Spanish language, which is evident in almost all areas: in the media, in audiovisual production, in leisure, and even in the playground where children often use Spanish, rather than Catalan, to interact with each other. Aida, from her channel, and as she explains in this new episode of People, argues that Catalan is rich enough to be spoken in any context, we just need to use it.

On the (false) search for the correct Catalan

Roca stresses that we cannot speak of correct or incorrect Catalan, because this differentiation is rooted in the context in which we find ourselves. Thus, an expression such as “natros”, which is used in many regions of Catalonia, would be correct in a colloquial context, but would cease to be correct if we use it, for example, in institutional discourse. In this case, as in so many others, we should refer to these types of words or expressions as genuine, authentic Catalan, and depending on the context, it will be appropriate or not.

But, beyond the dialect we speak or the context in which we find ourselves, the young Aida Roca argues that the main concern is whether Catalan is really being used among the young as their main language, and she brings us closer to the key to changing this situation. Roca also shares her point of view on the controversial application of the 25% of hours in Spanish in the classroom and how endangered our language is. Listen to the whole conversation to get a little closer to genuine Catalan.

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