MADRID (AFP) - The increasing use of regional languages such as Catalan and Basque in parts of Spain instead of Spanish is making life difficult for tourists, the head of a Spanish tourism lobby group said Tuesday.

Juan Andres Melian, the director of the Tourism Panel which groups about 30 major Spanish tourism-related companies, said that in some regions local languages had totally replaced Spanish on signs at airports and on roads.

"Bilingualism is not respected in several regions and this creates problems for national tourists who only speak Castilian (Spanish) and for foreigners," he said in a statement.

Melian said a plan by local authorities in the Balearic island of Majorca to set up a "language police" whose role would be "to impose the Catalan language in restaurants" was "terrifying".

Spain has three main regional languages. Catalan is widely spoken in the Balearic islands as well as in Catalonia whose capital Barcelona is a top tourist draw. Basque is spoken in the northern Basque Country and in neighbouring Navarra, while Galician is spoken in northwestern Spain.

At the end of June a group of intellectuals, including Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa and Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, published a "Manifesto for a common language" in a bid to goad the government into defending people's right to use Spanish anywhere in Spain.

So far 133,000 people and institutions have backed the manifesto, according to the centre-right daily newspaper El Mundo which backs the initiative.

Melian's Tourism Panel announced Tuesday that it backed the manifesto.

Spain's socialist government has been reluctant to take steps to defend the use of Spanish.

The issue is sensitive as under the right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco the use of Catalan and Basque, and to a lesser extent Galician -- which is more similar to Spanish than the other two -- was repressed.

"The Spain which exists as we know it for hundreds and hundreds of years, is one which speaks in one language and in several," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Sunday at the party's annual congress.

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