Fundació.cat and FC Barcelona sign agreement to promote and defend the Catalan language in the digital realm

Today the president of Fundació .cat, Genís Roca, signed with the president of FC Barcelona, ​​Joan Laporta, and the institutional vice-president, Elena Fort, a collaboration agreement that unites the two entities in the coming year to work together with the aim of developing those projects that allow a strategic alliance between the two parties, in the promotion and defense of Catalan on the Internet. The event was also attended by Roger Serra, director Fundació .cat, and Albert Cuesta, coordinator of the Aliança per la presència digital del català.

This agreement begins with the collaboration around Aliança per la presència digital del català, an agreement between entities for the promotion and defense of Catalan on the Internet. Specifically, work will be done in various areas of the digital world where the presence of Catalan is not satisfactory or requires special attention. Now, however, the entities will focus on web content, where a loss of visibility of Catalan in web searches has been demonstrated in recent months.

Loss of visibility of web content in the Catalan language, a reality

For several months, web pages in Catalan have been losing the place in search engine results in favour of versions of the same content in other languages, even when users set their browsers to make a priority of Catalan.

Progress has been made in finding out the reason for this, thanks to the numerous informal inquiries made to search engine producers and interested parties. The main organisations for the promotion and defence of Catalan (Acció cultural del País Valencià, Amical Wikimedia, Fundació.cat, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Institut Ramon Llull, Obra Cultural Balear, Òmnium Cultural, Plataforma per la Llengua, Softcatalà and WICCAC) have joined forces to create the Aliança per la presència digital del català and are dedicating technical resources, knowledge and mobilisation capacity to diagnose the problem and help to reverse it.

Fundació .cat has undertaken, with the support of the other organisations and the Government of Catalonia, a draft report of the initial situation, based on objective traffic data from search engines for a large number of websites that offer content in Catalan and other languages. FC Barcelona is currently a patron of Fundació.cat and will contribute to the transfer of data to prepare this report.