What does the future hold for the Catalan language?

Only a few days ago we learnt the re­sults of the sur­vey of lin­guis­tic uses re­gard­ing the Cata­lan lan­guage un­der­taken by the De­part­ment of Lin­guis­tic Pol­icy, and the data are nei­ther good nor en­cour­ag­ing. The wor­ry­ing sit­u­a­tion is the re­sult of many fac­tors, and there­fore the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties are shared. Every­one has some­thing to do with it, from the ad­min­is­tra­tion to the cit­i­zens, in­clud­ing com­pa­nies and civil so­ci­ety. The so­lu­tion will not come from find­ing a cul­prit but from as­sum­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and ap­ply­ing so­lu­tions. And we must start by chang­ing our at­ti­tude to­wards it, be­cause it is a liv­ing, use­ful and of­fi­cial lan­guage that we have the moral duty to use and the legal right to be able to use. There­fore, once we ac­cept that the sit­u­a­tion is del­i­cate, we must raise our spir­its and go on the of­fen­sive at least so that those of us who as speak­ers share a part of the re­spon­si­bil­ity con­tribute our part in the chain of so­lu­tions that must allow us to re­store our lan­guage to the level it should be. Fac­tors like im­mi­gra­tion have had an un­de­ni­able im­pact, but whether this is pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive de­pends on the at­ti­tude of the coun­try in gen­eral; if those of us who have come from abroad are spo­ken to in Span­ish by de­fault, or if those who have just ar­rived want to learn Cata­lan but have no place to do so, this will not work. If we start by re­vers­ing these basic things, Cata­lan has a great fu­ture. One im­por­tant as­pect is also the fact that Cata­lan is the 13th most spo­ken na­tive lan­guage in the EU, and has been on the Coun­cil of the Eu­ro­pean Union’s wait­ing list to be­come an of­fi­cial Eu­ro­pean lan­guage since Au­gust 2023, along with Basque and Gali­cian. How­ever, a year and a half later, lit­tle progress has been made. “Tech­ni­cally, gain­ing of­fi­cial sta­tus is sim­ple and easy, but po­lit­i­cal will is needed. And that is cur­rently lack­ing”, said Marga Pay­ola, in­ter­na­tional co­or­di­na­tor of Plataforma per la Llen­gua. For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of the Cata­lan lan­guage, see the fea­tures and in­ter­views on pages 10-17 of this issue.