Mallorca

"According to the last official census in 1860, Mallorca had 26,181 inhabitants capable of reading and writing in Spanish. This number has to necessarily be considerably higher today. If we take into account that the abovementioned census included some errors and that the education provided to the population has increased considerably in the last ten years, I would dare say that it would be not at all absurd to set the number of Spanish speakers at between 32,000 and 33,000.

Only a small fraction of people use Spanish in their daily lives and, at any rate, those that do are not originally from the island, that is, public civil servants and their families, soldiers and other peninsular Spaniards excepting, however, occasional Catalan residents, which, as a whole, represent some 1,000-2,000, or a maximum of 3,000, located predominantly in the city of Palma.

For the rest of the population, Spanish is more or less a foreign language, not used within their family circle, not even in Palma, where knowledge of Spanish is relatively frequent.

Contracts, wills and other private documents which were long ago written in Latin were also written at the same time in Mallorcan. Most people used the latter to write to their acquaintances and fellow countrymen, and some used it at times for sessions, official acts and to express themselves in community meetings, even in the city of Palma, though this occurred in a previous period than the one we are discussing here.

All this has changed extraordinarily in the last few years with the installation of many elementary schools which have come to familiarize children of both sexes, though males predominate, with the Castilian language.

In Palma’s churches and those in some of the island’s most important towns, the preachers almost always preach in Spanish, also the official language for administrative formalities and in Palma Town Hall assemblies. The same can be said for all the sessions held in the capital’s official corporations, in the general assemblies of the different casinos and other societies, such as the political clubs founded after 1868 in Palma and elsewhere. Even in towns where the language used is Mallorcan, the pertinent protocols for all verbal processes and other reports are prepared in Spanish. We should note that all documents, contracts, wills and other public texts have to be written in Spanish obligatorily for them to be legal, except in a few rare cases or when it has been previously agreed on otherwise."

Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria. Las Baleares por la palabra y el grabado. Majorca: General Part. Ed. Sa Nostra, Caja de Baleares. Palma de Mallorca. 1982.