On Saturday, November 6, the annual meeting of Òmnium Cultural (OC) took place in Vic. One of the objectives of the eeting was to provide information to the 50 OC branches across Catalonia to prepare their annual action plans for 2022.

Since January 2021, the Idendi.cat research group, at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, is working with OC within the framework of a collaborative action-research. Maite Puigdevall is a member of the group and together with Joan Pujolar they are the principal researchers of the Equiling-cat project (New Speakers of Catalan as agents of linguistic transformation of Catalonia). The main objectives of this project are:

• To promote and create spaces of gathering, interrelation, bonding and complicity between Catalan speakers and new speakers who want to use the language, but do not find spaces to do so.

• Fostering a critical sociolinguistic awareness among the participants and participate in collaboration on new forms of sociolinguistic citizenship.

In the workshop "From bonding to use. Informal language learning spaces" presented the experience of Mataró where since 2020 a project was initiated by several organisations of the city, among which, 17 primary and secondary schools, to organize conversation groups between volunteers and parents of schools of diverse origins who wanted to practice Catalan.

The idea is to start extending the project to other territories in 2022 with the advice of the OC main headquarters.

During the debate, several directors of Òmnium branches took part, among which Núria Batallé, from OC Garrotxa. She explained that a commission for the Catalan language had recently been created for the Olot-Garrotxa area (CLOG), composed by nine public bodies and voluntary sector NGOs with the aim of coordinating actions to promote the use of Catalan in the region.