Welcome to multilingual Andorra – the country where speaking 3 languages is normal, says British writer Clare Allcard
When I first came here over 30 years ago, Andorra had three official languages: French — in honour of her 700 year connection to France, her powerful neighbour to the north. Spanish in honour of her 700 year connection to Spain, the powerful neighbour to the south and Catalan because it is the language of the Andorrans, dating back to medieval times and before when their country was a fiefdom of the Kings of Aragon and Catalonia.
As I already spoke French moderately well, I decided, on principle, to learn one of the other languages. At that point I didn’t realise the importance of Catalan to national identity, so I opted for Spanish — our boat was moored in Spain. It took me more than a year to discover that actually Catalan was what I should be learning, if for no other reason than as a polite sign of respect to my host country. For the next 15 years I was totally confused and communicated through ‘Spatalan’, plus enthusiastic hand signals.
I have a comic memory of those early days to understand what multilingualism is. I was religiously going to the Government’s free, weekly Catalan classes but I found, each time I went into a shop to practice by saying ‘Bon dia!’, the shop assistant replied ‘Buenos dias, Señora.’ Was this perhaps some ritual like that in Swahili where a formal greeting between two people has a set script of seven phrases starting with ‘Hujambo’ and ending in ‘Asante’? If someone said ‘Buenos dias’ to me, was I supposed to reply ‘Bon dia.’? But no, it turned out that it was probably a leftover from Franco’s dictatorship. Then Catalan in Catalonia was only spoken freely in the home. When outside the home, on the street and to foreigners, people spoke Spanish, indeed speaking in Spanish to foreigners was considered by many as a courtesy, and this courtesy had lingered on amongst the Spanish shop assistants in Andorra — and only served to increase my ‘Spatalan’ confusion.
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