New alliance to 'guarantee survival' of Catalan language online

Ten groups promoting the use of Catalan have joined forces to create an alliance to "guarantee the survival" of the language online, as announced on Tuesday during a press conference at the headquarters of the Fundació.cat foundation.

"We want to coordinate our efforts to defend the Catalan langue online, as for the last years, the language has constantly been suffering in the digital world," Genís Roca, the president of the foundation, said.

The main objectives of this new Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan are to monitor, analyze, propose, and represent Catalan society's linguistic rights. And it will be tackled using a diagnosis of the situation based on collected data and not "subjective outcomings," the alliance coordinator, Albert Cuesta, said.

After making a diagnosis of the situation, the alliance will speak with "public and private companies that determine the use of Catalan online" and will set up a team to supervise the different actions taken to ensure that the actions made are successful.

We are "proposing a collaboration" between public and private companies that determine the presence of Catalan online, Albert Cuesta said.

And a way to get to these actors is by asking Catalan-speaking workers employed by some of these big companies to connect the Alliance with those who are in charge of the different projects.

"We want for them to be a little bit like diplomats," Cuesta added.

Eight sectors to tackle

The alliance has set eight different sectors that require "special attention," such as websites, mobile applications, social media, streaming platforms, car manufacturers, appliances like TVs or smart fridges, voice assistants, and artificial intelligence, which includes algorithms. 

In all these cases, the group will set all the required technical resources, with a capacity to promote the actions and even urge for demonstrations, if required.

"All of these reivindicative actions, to massively request the use of Catalan online, are backed by a website and social media accounts," Cuesta said.

The "alliance aims to promote the use of Catalan on all digital media, and joining is open to all Catalan-speaking territories," Genís Roca, president of Fundació.cat, said.

Fewer Catalan results in SERP

The alliance appears months after learning that Google and other search engines showed fewer results in Catalan on their search engine results pages, as Viquipèdia, the Catalan version of Wikipedia, first reported it.

It is "discrimination" against websites in Catalan, Albert Cuesta said before explaining that the alliance has already prepared a study to show the current situation of the issue.

The Fundació.cat foundation has been working on this report using website analytics data shared by several businesses after they made 50 requests to large and small companies.

The team was "very satisfied" with the positive feedback. They even explained that a company did not realize it had lost 90% of its website traffic in one month until the foundation asked for the analytics figures. 

The report will now allow the team to "objectively confirm" that there is an "issue with search engine pages."

Once ready, the Catalan government will assess future steps.