Now that we have objective data on the poor health of Catalan and its sustained decline over time, we can avoid denialism and raise the bar and, for the same price, become justifiably combative. The good thing about this misfortune is that it allows us to dismantle what until now had been the star argument of the Spanish-speaking community in Catalonia: self-regulation. As sociolinguists have always known, languages do not spontaneously balance themselves, but rather compete like starving animal species for the scarce resources of the same biotope. This is sometimes difficult to see, because linguistic plurality is presented to us as a luminous natural wealth, but, as always happens with the romanticization of nature, once we study it, we see that the reality of the pre-political world is brutal and ruthless competition. Without regulatory mechanisms and coercive power, the law of the jungle prevails, and the largest language inexorably overwhelms the smallest. Now that we have data to prove it, every time someone talks about linguistic self-regulation, we must discredit them quickly and ruthlessly.
That said, I'd like to review a couple of basic battlegrounds, because anti-Catalan people often use a confusion that we're not used to refuting. Above all, I think all Catalans should be well aware of the distinction between the principle of personality and the principle of territoriality. According to the first principle, linguistic rights accompany people wherever they choose to live within the territory of the state; according to the second, linguistic rights depend on the part of the territory in which individuals are located. Well, almost all the difficulties we have in refuting attacks against Catalan arise because someone makes a personalist argument against us, and we discuss it on their terms, instead of responding with a territorial argument. Every time an anti-Catalan person frames the linguistic conflict in terms of the right of individuals to choose the language their children study or the language they use to see a doctor, it is necessary to respond that nowhere in the world are individual linguistic rights separate from the territory where they practice. We are constantly told that the important thing is to have doctors who know how to cure and that whether they speak Catalan is secondary, while in Madrid or Paris, no citizen should submit to this false dichotomy.
Furthermore, choosing between the principle of personality and the principle of territoriality is not neutral. Thanks to sociolinguistics, we know that the principle of personality short-circuits the principle of territoriality, that if you have a personal right to be served in Spanish in any area of Spanish territory, even in Catalonia, what scientists call "one-way bilingualism" occurs, a situation in which speakers of one language mostly understand and use the dominant language and understand the minority language. Naturally, years of empirical studies have shown that the principle of territoriality is the only effective means of protecting a small language, that the languages that survive in our world are those that have a piece of land on which they have the power to impose exclusive obligations. That the principle of territoriality provides better protection than the principle of personality is not a matter of opinion, but a studied anthropological fact.
In Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands, everything stems from Article 3.1 of the Spanish Constitution, according to which everyone in Spain has the duty to know Spanish and the right to be served in Spanish everywhere. That this is an aberration that we should not normalize in any way was made clear to me during a conversation with Jean-Rémi Carbonneau, a Quebec academic and expert in language policies (whom Laura Serra also spoke about). has been interviewed in this newspaper), in one of those cases in which someone from outside keeps you awake at night, and you shudder at how you've come to resignedly accept what, in reality, is anything but normal. Quebec has the right to be served in French in Vancouver.
Today in Spain, there is no territorial reciprocity in languages, but rather a strengthened Spanish language against which Catalan cannot compete on equal terms. But it's important to explain that this shouldn't be the case in any linguistically just country, and any discourse on plurinationality and respect for languages that doesn't address this structural inequality has nothing plurinational or egalitarian about it and must be criticized as the domination that Catalans represent among Catalans. We are unabashedly assuming that, when we talk about languages, the only correct and fair analysis is the territorial one.
