Overview
- The Supreme Court, which issued a unanimous ruling on July 1, 2026, annulled a 2022 Generalitat instruction that reserved school rotulación to Catalan (and aranés/LSC) and barred exclusive use of Spanish.
- The court said the physical school environment—signs, posters and walls—forms part of the educational setting and therefore falls under legal protections for co‑official languages and the right to education.
- Justices cited the Spanish Constitution's language and equality provisions when finding that excluding Spanish from public‑school communications can harm its role as a vehicular language.
- The ruling upends a prior TSJC finding that signage was outside education but does not force universal bilingual labels; schools must no longer claim the Generalitat requires exclusion of Spanish and can decide how to display languages.
- The case was brought by the Asamblea por una Escuela Bilingüe de Catalunya with support from the Fiscalía and marks the first time the Tribunal Supremo has directly ruled on rotulación in schools, a decision that will shape future regional language rules and how families experience school communications.