Controversy over the Catalan content of one of the university entrance exams in the Balearic Islands. In the Catalan Language and Literature test held this week, a text comment was included, as usual. The text chosen for this year by the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), the public center that coordinates and hosts the tests, has been an opinion journalistic article published in the Ara newspaper on December 27 of last year, signed by the Mallorcan writer and columnist Melcior Comes.

In it, the author wrote about electronic voice assistants and, among other things, he reflected on the fact that they are not yet adapted to process and answer in Catalan.

In line with this argument, on which the exam asked the students for their opinion, the article object of the controversy, obviously written in Catalan, the co-official language in the Balearic Islands, literally said: "At the moment these devices are quite in tune if you speak to them in Spanish but we have to wait for the day when they will be available in Catalan ". And he added: "If this day does not come, we are lost" since "if we spend so many hours talking with these devices in Spanish it will be one more defeat for our language, more significant than the one we suffer every day in the administration of Justice or on the cinema billboard. " After explaining that more and more users are offering to help the developers of these household appliances to introduce the use of Catalan and thus contribute to helping "users in Catalan countries", the author added the phrase that has generated the most controversy: " We are talking about an assistant who helps or distracts us, not a civil guard, but at the moment it does not work if you do not speak the language of an empire. "

The group of teachers from the Balearic Islands called 'Plis Educación' and the political party Vox have denounced these events, considering it an example of indoctrination in the Catalan cause promoted by public education by the Balearic Government led by the PSOE.

For Plis and other related organizations it is a clear imposition of the "independence dialectic" aimed at "subliminally manipulating young people", in this case boys between 17 and 18 years old about to enter university.

For Vox Baleares, "radical Catalanism has slipped in" and the Civil Guard is "mocked". Jorge Campos, president of the party of Abascal in the Islands, has stated that "once again we see how the left in the hands of the separatists even uses something as important as the Selectivity tests for its gross indoctrination." Students are branded as "blackmail": "What do you expect a student to answer when they ask for their opinion? How are they going to score the one who dares to disagree with their pan-Catalan fanaticism?" Said Campos, for whom it is a question. of "a very serious violation of liberties".

The UIB has not spoken about this controversy, especially agitated through social networks, where it has spoken, for example, the former leader of Cs in the Balearic Islands and former head of the Education commission of the party in Spain, Xavier Pericay, a Catalan philologist and writer, who considers it "outrageous" and asks himself: "How long will this identity and xenophobic slop have to be endured in the Balearic Selectivity?"

UIB sources have taken iron out of the controversy, assuring that it is only a text commentary on the opinion of a writer in the Catalan language, not the opinion of the university, also pointing out that, in fact, students are asked to give their opinions over the text. The questionnaire asks the student for their opinion, but it does so on the fact that the columnist refers to the dependence on these electronic devices, not on the linguistic issue.

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