Maria del Mar Bonet, Marta Pessarrodona and Eliseu Climent awarded government Gold Medal

Singer Maria del Mar Bonet, writer and poet Marta Pessarrodona, and the cultural activist and publisher Eliseu Climent will receive the Gold Medal of the Catalan government this year.

Catalan president Pere Aragonès announced the winners of this year's Gold Medal on Wednesday, which is one of the highest distinctions awarded by the executive.

Aragonès made the announcement before visiting the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia (ICGC), accompanied by the territory minister Ester Capella.

The ceremony to honor the three cultural figures will be held on September 7 in Plaça Margarida Xirgu, in front of the Teatre Lliure.

Marta Pessarrodona Artigas has been recognized for her long career, Maria del Mar Bonet for having transmitted the feelings of the Catalan corner of the Mediterranean to the world, and Eliseu Climent for his commitment to the Catalan language, president Aragonès explained.

Aragonès said the Gold Medal honors are the "best way" to foster appreciation for the Catalan language and explain "how we see the world from the Mediterranean."

The politician also insisted that it is time to defend the language and culture and thanked the awardees for having contributed from different arts to the language having the status it currently has.

Catalan language 

The use of Catalan has slowly been decreasing over the past decades, and fighting to ensure its survival and use is one of the main priorities parties such as Junts per Catalunya, Esquerra Republicana, and CUP. 

The school immersion system has been one of the main methods of protecting the language ever since the return to democracy, but this school system, where main subjects are taught through Catalan, has come under threat in recent years.

There are over 1.6 million students in Catalonia and since 1983, the vast majority of schools use Catalan as the working language with pupils. The territory has two main official languages, Spanish and Catalan, but there is a Catalan immersion system in place to strengthen the use of the language. 

The goal of this education policy in public and semi-public schools is for students to be proficient in both languages. Most of Catalonia’s students go to these kinds of schools; private ones, on the other hand, are exempt from implementing the immersion system. 

"The immersion system places a community, students, in this case, in a language setting to achieve full bilingualism. And in Catalonia, there are two coexisting languages, Catalan and Spanish, but there is one that is clearly stronger in society," Anna Rosès, a Catalan language teacher at Barcelona’s Escola Pia Sarrià, told Catalan News. 

Some of the reasons why Spanish has a bigger presence are because of pop culture, cinema, television channels, court rulings, or other day-to-day activities, in which people tend to favor the language in certain settings.

Catalan speakers often switch to Spanish without hesitation when speaking with people who talk to them in Spanish, and some Catalan speakers even talk to other Catalan speakers in Spanish sometimes. 

Listen to our Filling the Sink podcast to learn more about the immersion system.