English gains ground on Spanish in job offers in Catalonia

BarcelonaGlobalization and the rise of remote work have reformulated the linguistic component of the Catalan labor market. This is revealed by a study from Pimec and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) presented this very Tuesday, which points out that English now surpasses Catalan as the language in which job offers are published in the country. In fact, this has been happening since the pandemic: 2020 was the last year in which there were still more job proposals written in Catalan than in English, according to the same barometer.

Specifically, just under 16% of the job offers analyzed by Pimec and the UOC were published in Catalan in 2025, while about 26.3% were written in English. It is worth noting that Catalan has not lost momentum in recent years: in fact, the ratio in the country's language is slightly higher than that of 2020, when it hovered around 15%. English, the authors of the report describe, has gained ground on Spanish, which records a percentage of vacancies according to the language of drafting much lower than before the pandemic.

According to the study, 56.7% of the published offers are in Spanish, a substantial decline compared to the 74.6% reached in 2020. The lowest point for Spanish in this area was 2023, with less than 50% of the registered labor supply. This coincides with the highs detected for English, which climbed that same year to nearly 35.5% of the advertised vacancies.

In the opinion of Carme Pagés, director of the Unit for Labor Prospecting and Analysis at the UOC, the language in which the vacancy is written is especially relevant, given that it is a "key signal of the demand for languages and the level of proficiency expected of the candidate." In this sense, Pagés confirms that the growth of English, and to a lesser extent of Catalan, is a "space being won from Spanish" in the labor market.

More explicit demand for Catalan

Catalan has indeed registered a substantial increase in the job offers that explicitly request it among their requirements. According to the document, 17.9% of the analyzed vacancies recorded that the candidate had to speak Catalan, far from the 30.7% that directly claim Spanish and the nearly 49% that register English as a requirement. The presence of Catalan in this table is a novelty, as it was previously testimonial: in 2019, only 0.6% of the offers listed it as an obligation to apply for the job position.

The authors attribute this increase to the decline in the social use of Catalan, which means that the employer can no longer take knowledge of the language for granted. "Years ago, it was taken for granted that Catalan and Spanish were known. Currently, however, both languages are requested at an advanced level," described Sílvia Miró, director of the labor area of the Catalan association of small and medium-sized enterprises.