The Vic City Council has launched the initiative '21 challenges in 21 days' to strengthen the use of Catalan in public service offices. The action targets staff from the OAC, OMA, Benestar i Família, and the SLO.
The Vic City Council has initiated a campaign to make Catalan the usual language in citizen services. Under the name '21 challenges in 21 days', the initiative proposes a daily challenge to municipal workers for three weeks to consolidate the linguistic habit.
Prior diagnosis with 387 real situations
The action is based on a diagnosis of linguistic uses conducted between February 9 and 13, 2026. During that week, 387 real interactions with citizens were recorded, revealing that municipal staff predominantly start conversations in Catalan, but the profile of users often leads to a language switch to ensure communication.
The results highlighted the need to reinforce professionals' confidence and provide strategies to maintain Catalan without compromising service quality. This led to the action plan, the first step of which is this 21-day challenge.
“The action serves both to guarantee the linguistic rights of citizens and to facilitate the use of Catalan in daily life for those learning the language,” explained the Councillor for Culture and Language, Bet Piella.
Challenges adapted to the daily lives of workers
Each day, participating employees choose a challenge tailored to the situations they encounter in their workday. Work areas include active use of Catalan, quality service, communication with citizens, self-training, and collaboration among colleagues or raising awareness among users and workers.
Some of the proposed challenges include maintaining Catalan while ensuring fluid communication even if the interlocutor switches languages, using simple and slow Catalan, reinforcing messages with non-verbal language, sharing a good linguistic practice with a colleague, informing about Catalan courses, or reminding that learning the language is a tool that facilitates autonomy and expands opportunities.
Workers who have already begun applying the challenges have noted that “some of the proposed challenges are already part of our daily practice in citizen services; others, certainly, present greater implementation difficulties. Precisely for this reason, this action is relevant, as it allows us to progress and improve.”
A boost to collective commitment to Catalan
With this initiative, the council aims to consolidate linguistic habits among public service staff, improve service quality, raise awareness and support both workers and citizens, and reinforce the collective commitment to Catalan as the usual language of citizen services.
The action is part of the Action Plan for Language of the Vic City Council, which anticipates further measures based on the diagnosis results. For now, the 21 challenges have been implemented in the offices of the OAC, OMA, Benestar i Família, and the Local Employment Service (SLO), and it is hoped that the experience can be extended to other municipal services.
For the residents of Vic, this initiative means that when visiting these offices, it is most likely they will be spoken to in Catalan from the very start, although it is guaranteed that no one will be left without understanding if they need to switch languages. The measure aims to normalise Catalan without excluding anyone, a balance that the council considers key for social cohesion.
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