“Can you teach us (Catalan) in Spanish?”

Abstract This paper explores the complex sociolinguistic landscape of Catalonia, examining how international students and Catalan language instructors adopt distinct stances regarding pedagogical translanguaging. While international students acknowledge Spanish as a beneficial scaffold to learn Catalan, instructors often favor a monolingual Catalan approach as a form to resist the language’s historical subordination. The study argues that embracing pedagogical translanguaging holds significant social justice implications, fostering minority language revitalization and promoting linguistic complementarity over exclusionary monolingual ideologies. This approach could also help mitigate tensions in bilingual educational contexts, as supported by recent translanguaging research.