Internet can be an important resource for minority languages since users can easily create content for a wide audience and make it available beyond the region where these languages are spoken. In order to guarantee their use and relevance, languages need to adapt to online environments, which include specific ways of communication such as memes. In the case of Catalan, one of the official, albeit minoritized, languages of Spain, its online presence is guaranteed in official settings, but it struggles in social networks, where users tend to use majority languages. It has also been detected that its use among younger generations, the main internet users, has decreased in the last decades.

Bearing this in mind, our paper aims at investigating memetic production and consumption in Catalan. Our analysis focuses on the memes created for a contest organised by Optimot, a search engine of linguistic information funded by the Catalan regional government, between 23rd of February and 2nd of March 2022. Internet users were asked to tweet a meme in Catalan related to the Catalan language — i.e. metalinguistic memes — using the hashtag #ConcursOptimot14. They were collected in a corpus of 80 items, which was thematically and formally analysed. Thus, the analysis of this co​​rpus allowed us to discern the characteristics of metalinguistic memes in Catalan, classify them and identify speakers’ language ideologies towards Catalan. The results indicate that Catalan speakers use local references to create their contents, but are also influenced by international memes. Moreover, some of the recurrent topics of the memes are geographical variation, as well as perceived threats to the minorised language such as deviations from standard language, lack of grammatical competence and influences from other languages, such as borrowed vocabulary from Spanish.