Celebrating 19 years of commitment to Catalan culture and language: Anniversary of the .cat Foundation

Today is a special day for the .cat Foundation as we celebrate our 19th anniversary!

On December 28, 2004, Associació puntCAT was dissolved to make way for Fundació cat. The Foundation was established with the aim of managing the .cat domain, a key tool for the visibility of Catalan identity on the internet. Over the years, .cat domains have grown to over 112,000 and have become a clear reference both locally and internationally.

This is a success story of Catalan civil society, the success of a bold initiative that, 19 years later, has been consolidated and is now considered established by all. The .cat domain was the first cultural domain on the internet, paving the way for the hundreds of cultural domains that exist today.

Beyond continuing to work to expand the .cat domain, Fundació .cat has also taken on the challenge of helping to consolidate the Catalan digital community. Throughout its history, it has promoted and developed many projects in this regard: creating content, offering free training programs, or supporting third-party initiatives.

We are proud to have contributed, along with many other civil society and institutional initiatives, to the defense of the use of Catalan on the internet over these 19 years. A study by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international consortium, ranks Catalan as the 35th most used language in the digital world. It is the highest-ranking non-state language on the list, surpassing languages such as Bosnian, Icelandic, Georgian, as well as Galician and Basque.

But the challenge of being able to use Catalan normally on the networks and in the digital world is still very much alive. There is still much work to be done, and we want to continue working on it. More than ever. Collaboratively, with other entities, and maintaining our commitment to Catalan-speaking civil society.

That is why, in 2023, we launched the Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan (Aliança per la presència digital del català) together with other civil society entities from Catalan-speaking territories. An alliance that has been key to reversing the serious crisis in the positioning of Catalan in Google searches.

We face 2024 with the goal of growing and promoting new projects, such as the Catalan Digital Monitoring Network (Xarxa de monitoratge del català digital), to strengthen the community and the presence of Catalan in the digital world.

Now that we are 19 years old, we want to express our gratitude to all the individuals (patrons, collaborators, and team), organizations, companies, and institutions that have accompanied us over the years.

Finally, we want to thank, especially, the holders of the more than 112,000 .cat domains for your firm commitment. Without you, none of this would have been possible.