De manera excepcional, aquest article el publicaré en anglès. El motiu: aquests dies he vist gent de parla anglesa escrivint malament Barcelona en forma abreviada.

These days I’ve seen the word Barcelona incorrectly abreviated, and I want to write the different ways catalan and spanish people use abreviations of the name Barcelona. The first time I saw it was in an e-mail that one client sent to me, but the second (and more bleeding!) one was in the t-shirts of Skype crew at the Mobile World Congress 2011.

So, these are the common abbreviations for Barcelona:

• Barna: it refers to the city of Barcelona.
• BCN: it also refers to the city of Barcelona, commonly used in really short representations of the city, more as a code than as an abbreviation. For example, referring to the Barcelona – El Prat airport (BCN airport). See this baggage sticker as an example.
• Barça: it refers to one of the football (in the sense of soccer) teams of the city, Fútbol Club Barcelona. And is written using a c-cedilla (c trencada in catalan). In the “offending” cases that I saw, they had written Barca, using a common “c”, which is wrong. Barca, in both catalan and spanish means boat. Quite funny!

To be honest, the Skype guy I spoke with told me that they were aware of the “boat” thing, and that it was an error from the PR guys. :D Even Google gets it wrong!