On 25 May the Catalan Students' Union (SEPC) summoned five professionals from the field of linguistics and Catalan activism to discuss the UPF’s linguistic model at the Poblenou Campus. Although this model ensures that Catalan, Spanish and English cohabit harmoniously in teaching, it has been broadly criticized by the Catalan nationalist sectors for its low rate of teaching in Catalan in favour of Spanish and English.

Mercè Lorente, Doctor of Catalan Philology; Francesc Marco, representative of the Plataforma per la Llengua; Esteve Clua, Doctor in Catalan Philology; Mireia Calm, UPF’s Multilingualism Coordinator and Vanessa Bretxa, Doctor in Sociology, discussed the trilingual model of the University.

The round table focused on the UPF's teaching index in Catalan, comparatively lower than in other Catalan public universities. Indeed, at UPF in 2009 almost 60% of classes were taught in Catalan, while in 2016 the percentage was 47%. This decline meets the projection strategy of our university, as set out in the Strategic Plan 2016-2025, which aims to «become a pre-eminent university in Europe with a global projection» and wishes to target «excellent students, both Catalan and international.» Therefore the index of teaching in English (5% in 2009) has grown by 16 percentage points until 2016 (22%). Thus, in the 2015-2016 academic year, UPF taught 47% of classes in Catalan, 31% in Spanish and 22% in English.

Francesc Marco disagreed with the distribution of teaching languages ​​at the UPF and talked about how to raise students' awareness of their linguistic rights in the administration as well as teaching, research and exchange programs, through the platform http://estudiarencatala.cat/ .

Mireia Calm, UPF’s Multilingualism Coordinator, explained the UPF’s language policy referring to the Plan of Action for Multilingualism (PAM), which collects the language rights and duties of students. According to the PAM, «The goal of Pompeu Fabra University as regards languages is to contribute to shaping up a multilingual framework which, with the preservation and promotion of the Catalan language and identity as a basic premise, makes it possible to create favourable conditions for linguistic and cultural exchange and for the personal betterment of everyone in the university community at UPF, based on the use and interaction of various languages for unfolding administrative, academic and institutional activities.» Calm presented data on the evolution of teaching in Catalan, Spanish and English at UPF and underlined the main actions carried out in recent years. During the open session she answered students’ questions regarding the Catalan indexes, among others.

Vanessa Bretxa, professor at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at UPF, showed data on the language uses of the Catalan public universities, and made a comparison between the undergraduate and master’s studies. In addition, she praised the UPF’s language transparency, because it is one of the few universities that annually publishes accurate data on languages ​​and teaching, and keeps historical data that goes back 25 years.

Mercè Lorente, Doctor in Catalan Philology, was critical of the poor use of Catalan in masters and in research, and criticized the fact that extremely few grants are called by the Generalitat to publish doctoral theses in Catalan. Lastly, Professor Esteve Clua elucidated on the concepts of plurilingualism vs. multilingualism, and referred to the strategies of intercomprehension between languages that a student can use in order to understand more than one Romance language by being a speaker of another.

Pompeu Fabra University is one of the Catalan universities most committed to «language learning, mobility and a dialogue between cultures based on a clearly Catalan basis», as set out in the preamble of the Plan of Action for Multilingualism.

Mireia Calm's presentation (in Catalan)

Francesc Marco's presentation (in Catalan)

Vanessa Bretxa's presentation (in Catalan)