I have lived in Mallorca for the best part of 30 years. My first port of call was Puerto Pollensa before moving to Palma, and over the past five or so years I have noticed a growing anti-British attitude. And unlike certain colleagues of mine in the UK, who have been writing pages and pages of articles about the Brits no longer being wanted in the Canaries or the Balearics recently, I have witnessed it first hand. It’s something I find rather strange considering that Mallorca’s tourist industry has been built on British tourism, many of the island’s multi millionaires have a lot to thank the British for.
So while Brit-bashing has become a popular pastime, I got another shock this week when I was in a meeting of supposedly intelligent people when someone suddenly asked why everyone was talking English, using English phrases. What sparked this was the news that Toni Nadal, Rafa Nadal’s former coach and uncle, has joined a Partido Popular ‘think tank’. The heated debate around the table was all about why the Spanish press was using the English term ‘think tank’? Then they moved on to why co-working or co-living is also being used in the Spanish media; Nomad visas was another. I tried to explain that in this globalised world of social media, these are terms used across the world in almost all languages and the vast majority of intelligent people know what they mean. After all, the French having been going on ‘le weekend’ for as long as I can remember while more and more Britons like to enjoy a ‘siesta’ when time permits. Far from belittling languages, as the enlightened ones around the table tried to convince me, I think it enriches the world we live in. It’s certainly nothing personal. Chill out, as the whole world says.