Making learning Catalan trendy with viral videos

Out with the indefinite articles, the conditionals, and the subjunctive tense; in with the viral clips, entertainment, and making ratafia. 

Learning Catalan as a foreign language can look completely different nowadays compared to any previous generation. The internet and the prevalence of social media have provided new opportunities to connect people both looking to learn and teach the language, and created a new context for the language to spread and grow. 

Júlia Riera, with her account @DailyCatalan, is one of the biggest profiles on Instagram and TikTok teaching the Catalan language through English. With over 105,000 followers on Instagram and millions of views on TikTok, she has brought learning the language into a new age. 

Riera is a Catalan teacher that started off her career by posting entertaining videos online. During the pandemic, she saw a gap in the market to teach Catalan to English speakers, and her account has grown from strength to strength since then. On the back of her social media success, she launched Catalan language courses that have gathered over 1,000 students from all over the world. 

The Daily Catalan courses are offered in form of masterclasses which are not live, meaning students have access to the resources whenever they want to.  

Going viral through Catalan

“I remember my first video that went viral was a video about ‘frases fetes,’ so like idioms in Catalan,” Riera tells Catalan News in a recent interview about her career and social media success teaching the language. She gives the example of ‘tocar el dos’ which means ‘to leave’,  as a phrase that resonated particularly among new followers. “They just found the phrase bizarre.”

Riera says that Instagram and TikTok are “oversaturated with short format videos,” meaning that she, therefore, not only has to impart knowledge to become successful online, but entertain as well. To “go beyond just teaching,” Riera says content creators have to find a story “that people relate to, and they find unique.” 

In this regard, one of her most recent videos that went viral is one in which she makes ratafia, the traditional Catalan liqueur. Riera believes that featuring her relatives aged in their 70s in the video added to its popularity, helping people resonate more with what they were seeing. “The way they speak Catalan is very genuine, and [audiences] really like that storyline of how to make ratafia, it's a very unique thing that you don't really see on Instagram that much.” 

“I think those are the videos that now perform the best, it's not just teaching something, when you teach something it is valuable to some people, but you have to entertain and on top of it find something that is unique,” she adds.

Modern tools like social media

The Catalan language is in a vulnerable state currently, fighting against a more dominant Spanish language, but also against English in an ever more globalized and inter-connected world. This poses serious challenges to maintaining the language healthy, but the advent of modern tools like social media also offers lifelines and opportunities, as people like Riera show. 

“Some people might think that social media is a curse, and in many ways it is, but I actually think that specifically for the Catalan language, social media has been a huge blessing,” the teacher says. “I think we have found a new avenue to expand our language, to find new ways of showing our language to the world and opening it to the world.

The creator of the Daily Catalan brand says that five years ago, there were not many content creators working online in the Catalan language, but she’s seen a “huge increase” in such accounts since the pandemic. “People nowadays see Catalan, or creating content in Catalan, as a way of making money, which is obviously very necessary, but also it means that we trust that there's going to be an audience that's going to watch it, we trust that brands are going to partner with us if we make Catalan content, which was definitely not the case 10 years ago when the whole influencer world and social media started.”

“Now this has changed tremendously, and it makes me super happy to see that so many people now want to create content in Catalan,” she adds. “Social media is a huge blessing for Catalan because it opens so many more avenues for people being able to see how Catalan sounds, and discovering the beautiful language that we have.”

Evolution of the language

The more interaction any language has with another, the quicker it will evolve into new iterations of itself. In the 2020s, all languages with an online presence are developing new forms of slang, particularly influenced by other tongues that are commonly seen online. 

“Young people, like Gen Z and Millennials, speak a very different Catalan than my 80-year-old grandma who had no access to the internet,” Riera explains. “Nowadays we use a lot of phrases that belong to Spanish but we Catalanize them in a way, like ‘tenir que’ instead of ‘haver de.’” 

“But what I see in younger generations is that we speak a mix of Spanish, English, and Catalan.” Riera even says that sometimes she thinks in English while speaking Catalan, such is the seamless blending of languages that she interacts with on a daily basis. 

Younger generations also see slang like ‘tea’ or ‘slay’, “words that are very popular on social media slang,” and adapt them to Catalan. “For example, when in English you say ‘facts’, in Catalan now like the social media term for that is ‘factors.’” 

Ultimately, Riera feels that this evolution is a natural step for languages, and that “as long as we keep the structure of the language genuine and to its grammar, we're going to be fine. A few words here and there are not going to harm it,” she says.