Francesc Xavier Vila: "There is a match with Catalan"

BarcelonaThe Minister for Language Policy, Francesc Xavier Vila, presented this Wednesday the results of the 2023 Language Use Survey (EULP) which show the slow but continued decline of Catalan in a context of strong migratory arrival, which conditions all the figures.

Would you say that the current situation of Catalan is comparable to that of the 1970s or 1980s in terms of the flood of migration and the need for large-scale learning?

— There are points of contact and there are points of difference. From the point of view of mass arrival, it seems. In fact, it is probably even better. From the point of view of the composition of the receiving society, it is different, because there are fewer Catalan speakers in percentage terms. From the political point of view, we now have more capacity for political action and to provide resources.

The first reading of the survey says that Catalan continues to decline as a common language to 32.6%, which is 4 points compared to 5 years ago, 14 compared to 20 years ago.

— We need to look at the data in a more complex way. Percentages are one thing, absolute figures are another. In absolute figures, we have a scenario of the maintenance of the main users of Catalan, who are those who have it as their habitual language, whether alone or shared. And, in addition, we have a growth in secondary speakers, something we had never looked at before. And this growth occurs within the framework of an overall growth of the population. What happens is that the growth of speakers is not enough to match the total growth of the population, but it is not impossible to achieve it.

In absolute numbers, however, the number of people who speak Catalan as their first language is also falling, with a decrease of 40,000. And as their habitual language, there are a decrease of 94,000.

— If we look at those who have Catalan as their habitual language [2.2 million] and add those who have Catalan and Castilian as their habitual language [636,453], the number of people who have Catalan as their habitual language, either Catalan alone or accompanied by Catalan, increases by 68,000, reaching 2.84 million speakers.

This year's survey has also evaluated secondary speakers, who in previous surveys were left out. hidden as habitual Spanish speakers.

— We have brought to light almost two million speakers who were not seen, but who are crucial for the language. We all have a neighbour who speaks Spanish at home, but who speaks Catalan with people in a normal way. These people exist and until now, in the analyses that had been done, they were left aside, they were forgotten. What we have done is to say: we cannot analyse the users of the language only in terms of habitual language because we hide the other speakers. If you only take habitual speakers, you have 2.8 million speakers. But if we look at the figures, they all tell us that there are between 9 and 12 million Catalan speakers in the world. How do we get there? With people who speak it at some point.

This is the group with the greatest potential for growth, that of speakers who do not have Catalan as their first language.

— The number of speakers who say they speak Catalan 50% or more of the time has always been around 3 million and is holding steady. Now it depends on whether we are able to make the secondary speakers grow with the people who arrive. How do you expect to have speakers who jump from Arabic to Catalan without a bridge in between? The analysis that had been done until now focused on looking only at the top of the pyramid; we did not see that the pyramid is supported by the other speakers.

Those who begin the path of speaking Catalan.

— They start and can go very far, eh? Look: a person born outside of Catalonia, who came as a young girl, who learned Catalan, who speaks Spanish with his partner because they are both outside of Catalonia, but who has a shop and who speaks Catalan with half of the clients or with most of the clients... My watchmaker is that. My watchmaker exists and he doesn't speak Spanish with me, he speaks Catalan to me.

But will these speakers end up becoming regular speakers of Catalan?

— The evolution that they make, as long as it is towards more Catalan, will be good for Catalan. We must work on the whole scale. Going from being a Catalan connoisseur to a Catalan user is basically like a dance. But a couple's dance, a waltz. You need someone who wants to dance with you so that you can start dancing, if you don't know how. So what we can't do is just look at those who already know how to dance and say "we always have the same ones who know how to dance!" and, on the other hand, not look at the others who have learned. And the data tells us that those who have learned to dance have grown. This is the most important data!

The 267,000 more people who know Catalan and the 117,000 people who frequently use it.

— What we need is to make it visible that there is a process of entry into the use of the Catalan language. There are many people who have started speaking Catalan, even though it is not their habitual language, but who speak Catalan and who are the ones who often speak Catalan to you in bars, shops, services and doctors even though it is not their first language. We do not have an overflowing birth rate that generates large masses of Catalan-speaking children...

Is there a risk that immigrants will be blamed for the poor health of Catalans?

— I would make an effort to stop talking about blaming, because this is a social phenomenon with multiple causes. There are those who want to blame immigrants, and others who want to blame Catalan speakers. We are not talking in terms of blame, we are talking about responsibilities and responsibility is shared. Administrations must provide more resources, but citizens and civil society and companies also have social and linguistic responsibility. The government alone will not be able to do it. Because, of course, if people continue to behave as they do now and think that if someone who is a certain colour or wears certain clothes by definition cannot know how to speak Catalan, it will be difficult for them to learn Catalan. You can put resources in between.

There is indeed a strong process of bilingualisation and greater identification with both languages, especially among young people. I don't know if it is a danger that Catalan always goes hand in hand with Castilian or if it is a positive factor, because those who become bilingual are more Castilian speakers, who become bilingual towards Catalan.

— Most of the process of incorporating the second language is carried out by people who do not have Catalan as their first language and who assume Catalan as a language of identification, for example. From this point of view, this is a gain for Catalan. In fact, you have made a contrast between less Catalan and more bilingualism, but we must look at it as a sum.

What if I ask you for a short headline?

— There is a match.