"Catalan is in a completely recessive phase." "We are in a situation of linguistic emergency." "Levels are so low that it's very difficult for them to recover". These are some of the responses of experts when asked about the future of the Catalan language. The data is clear: there is a general decline in the use of Catalan and its use is falling both quantitatively and qualitatively in Catalonia. Having reached this point, the experts are not confident that the situation can be reversed even under a government with full powers.
The decline is especially notable among the younger generations - who, despite having learned it, do not use it - and, as a consequence, the usage statistics are also bad in future-oriented areas of communicative usage, such as the internet and the new technologies. In secondary schools in urban areas in Catalonia, only 14.6% of playground conversations are in Catalan - as a study by the Plataforma per la Llengua group shows - and this means that the youth base and education system are faltering and thus it is difficult for Catalan to get out of the accelerated dynamic of substitution in which it finds itself.
The reality of the Celaá law
Right now, the Spanish government is in the process of replacing the current law regulating education, the so-called Wert law, passed by the previous PP-led administration, with a package labelled as the Celaá law. In its passage through the Spanish Congress, the PSOE- United Podemos minority government accepted an amendment by Catalonia's ERC party, eliminating the bill's reference to "vehicular languages". But, contrary to ERC's claim, this does not mean that Catalan will prevail over Castilian (that is, Spanish) in schools. The truth is that the wording recognizes the rights of students to receive education in Castilian and in the other co-official languages - Catalan, Basque and Galician, in their respective territories - in equal parts.
Isabel Celaá, during a debate in the Congress of Deputies / Moncloa
According to Article 18 of the bill, Castilian and the three co-official languages will be used at the same level from the start of primary school at age six, until the end of secondary education at age 17, and, in addition, the school centres will have to make available to students "the necessary measures to compensate for the lack of competence in linguistic communication, in the Spanish language and, where applicable, in the co-official languages ".
Former education minister José Ignacio Wert put it bluntly: he wanted to españolizar Catalan students - that is, to "Spanishize" them - and after years of Spanish government policies favouring linguistic homogenization and substitution, the Catalan education community is increasingly concerned about the retreat of the language in classrooms and schoolyards in Catalonia, which are also the reflection of the widespread decline in the use of Catalan in society at large.
Beyond the new and controversial Celaá law, which has divided even pro-independence groups, what is the future of the language which makes the Catalan countries unique? If, indeed it has a future. And what role do governments and the public play?
The data speaks for itself
According to 2020 data from the Plataform per la Llengua, Catalan is in a situation of "linguistic emergency", and especially concerning is the low social usage of the language in the large cities in Catalan-speaking territories. In Barcelona and its metropolitan area only 35% of the population speaks Catalan regularly, a percentage similar to that of the metropolitan region of Valencia (34.8%). Yet if we take into account only the city of Valencia, the figures are much more dramatic: less than 15% of the population uses the language frequently. In Palma, capital of Mallorca, usual speakers of Catalan form 41.3% of the population.
This, for the president of the Plataforma, Òscar Escuder, highlights that "we need to be very concerned" and emphasizes that we need to look beyond Catalonia itself, because all Catalan-speaking areas, that is, the Balearic Islands, the Valencia country, the franja or Catalan-speaking strip in the east of Aragon, l'Alguer on the island of Sardinia and northern Catalonia (in the state of France) are also on high alert in linguistic terms.
Catalan class for adults / CPNL
A bleak future
For Josep Murgades, professor of Catalan Philology at the University of Barcelona, Catalan is in a "completely recessive" phase and he has no time for celebrating the "symbolic gestures" of the current Spanish government with the language. "The Celaá law is playing to the gallery to win ERC's vote for the government budget. They are gambling with language in order to conduct politics. But the reality is that, since the Franco regime, the state has done no more than decriminalize the use of Catalan, and our language is not even mentioned in the Constitution", he explains.
However, Murgades states that the decline of Catalan goes beyond government policies and dares to predict that not even the independence of Catalonia or a government with full powers over the territory could ensure the survival of Catalan: "Just look what is happening in Andorra, or in Ireland with Gaelic. The language is there in society and here you only have to listen closely to understand the hegemony of Castilian".
In the same vein, no more optimistic, is UB linguistics professor Carme Junyent, who says that any law in the field of education is late arriving and criticizes the "inaction and unwillingness of the Catalan government", which, in her opinion, has led to this situation. However, she stresses that if the speakers of the language do not raise their consciousness of the issue, "any language policy can be applied, which will disappear anyway" and she does not see independence as a salvation.
"They can make the laws they want, the levels are already so low that it will be hard to recover. At the beginning of [Spain's Democratic Transition, in the late 1970s], the percentage of Catalan speakers in society was around 50% and now we are at 36%. We can continue bashing into the same brick wall - carry on changing the same laws which we have already seen do not work - but after so many years we have to look for other alternatives," she warns.
There's not much time left
The signs are far from optimistic. Institutions and experts are having to row against the current to return Catalan to a a central position in the linguistic environment, a fact that, according to Junyent, will only be achieved by creating more reference points in Catalan, especially in the audiovisual and leisure fields. The aim, then, is to promote the Catalan language in spaces of spontaneous use and for society to feel it as a mechanism for coexistence and socialization.
Language policies change according to the government and the attempt to impose and homogenize the language on the part of the Spanish state cannot be expected to stop, but the key, for Junyent, is for Catalan speakers to stop behaving like speakers of a subordinate language and modify their attitude. The Catalan language is in danger and it is up to its users to decide whether the future speaks Catalan.
Main image: Catalan school books in a classroom / ACN