16th session of the UN Forum on Minority Issues “Minorities and Cohesive Societies: Equality, Social Inclusion, and Socioeconomic Participation” Item 3: Legal and Structural Approaches to More Inclusive Societies Marina Massaguer Comes ─ Fundació Irla Thank you, Mister / Madam Chairperson. My name is Marina Massaguer Comes and I am here on behalf of the Fundació Irla to talk about the linguistic rights of Catalan speakers and, by extension, of the speakers of minoritized languages. Specifically, I will focus on linguistic rights in the digital sphere and in social media. For structural reasons, minoritized languages are often excluded from the digital sphere and, consequently, their speakers do not have the same opportunities to generate and access digital content in their own language. The causes of this discrimination are multiple: the market in these languages cannot compete with the market in the dominant languages, neither in terms of demographics nor in terms of political, economic and cultural power. However, digital minoritization is not just a matter of market size. Creators of content in Catalan and other minoritized languages often receive comments with attacks, mockery or hate speech. These creators fear that using their own language will generate conflict, or simply fear being ignored and belittled simply for not using a dominant language. That is why we make the following recommendations to protect the rights of linguistic minorities in the digital sphere: 1) Promote the creation of digital spaces so that speakers of minority languages can generate and consume content in their language. 2) Give visibility to minority languages in search engines. 3) Find ways to make the creation of digital content in minority languages profitable. 4) Pursue and penalize attacks on content creators due to language. If we want to maintain linguistic diversity, we need to implement positive action to promote minority languages in the digital sphere. It is a matter of linguistic justice.