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¹ My family name is Quintana Seguí, not Seguí. Since 2011, in all my publications I'm writing my name as "Pere Quintana-Seguí", to avoid this confusion. Read more about the Spanish naming convention here.

² I made a difference between mother tongue and native speaker, which are usually considered synonyms. Catalan is my mother tongue because this is the language my parents transmitted to me, and, in fact, it is also the language I mainly use with family, friends and coworkers. However, Spanish is widely used in the Catalan speaking regions of Spain. In fact, Spanish was the only official language of Spain until the late seventies and, historically, Spanish authorities tried to impose Spanish as the only language of Spain, without success, fortunately. Therefore, in Spain, every speaker of Catalan is also a speaker of Spanish (unfortunately, not every speaker of Spanish is a speaker of Catalan in these regions). We learn it in school and we use it everyday, switching languages very often. Therefore we speak Spanish as well as any other Spaniard, even though, technically, it is not our mother tongue.

³ I lived in French speaking countries for five years, working in this language. I even wrote my PhD thesis in French. Therefore, my knowledge of this language is higher than what can be assumed from my DELF diploma.

⁴ Yes, this constructed language is still alive.