1. Was it a lack of coordination, a coincidence of the agenda or a well thought-out strategy? The same day that Salvador Illa went to Brussels to negotiate that Catalan be an official language in the European institutions, the minister Francesc Xavier Vila presented the results of the Survey of Linguistic Uses of the Population in Catalonia. The headline was as expected as it was disappointing: less than a third of the population has Catalan as their habitual language. And falling. Any MEP might ask himself why the hell Catalan should be official in Europe if in his community there is a smaller and smaller percentage of habitual speakers. Well, precisely for that reason. Because our language is not a patois. Because to reverse this figure we must give prestige to a language that has lost its narrative, that is no longer necessary as a social elevator, that has a State against it, that has minimum laws that are not enforced and that has not been able to foresee that the new global world - of social networks and audiovisual platforms - would place it in an increasingly residual trend. On the road to invisibility, with each wash we lose a sheet. And the political hesitations, and the lack of decision of the Catalanist/independence parties that have ruled the Generalitat throughout the 21st century, are paid dearly. They have not had the language as a priority and the initiatives were for show. With the Process parked on a dead end, now perhaps it is their turn to row for real. To save the language, wisdom, imagination, emotion, determination and urgency are necessary.
2. Not everything is lost, far from it. The same survey provided a quantity of data that allows us to make less victim-like headlines. There have never been so many people who know or speak Catalan in Catalonia. As Laura Serra, the language specialist at ARA, pointed out, there are 117,000 more people who use it than five years ago, and another 267,000 people who understand it. Logically, if there are already 8 million people in Catalonia, and more than a quarter of them were born abroad, the potential number of Catalan speakers is greater, but, at the same time, the habitual use of Catalan is proportionally lower. These are few and far between if, in the last twenty years, 1,150,000 new inhabitants have arrived who do not know a word of Catalan. Of these new arrivals, Latin Americans perceive that Spanish is enough for them to live in a part that, for the time being, will continue to be Spanish territory. Two decades ago, Johan Cruyff already made this clear to Antoni Bassas on Catalunya Ràdio. He had settled in Barcelona in 1973 and had never needed Catalan to live. This was said by someone who fought to register his son in the register like Jordi, who was the Catalonia national team coach but who never said two sentences in Catalan. Messi, who arrived here at 13, never spoke to him either. But the day we saw his son singing "Joan pequeño cuando baila" (Little Joan when he dances), because it was played on Spotify in the car, the scene was broadcast on CNN. Of course, Piqué could have spared him the irony: "In Catalonia we do not stop indoctrinating children".
3. "School is not enough, but without school there is nothing." The sentence, which hits the mark, is from Miquel Àngel Pradilla, the professor of sociolinguistics who says things bluntly. We can complain about the laws on the percentage of compulsory Spanish in classrooms, we can get upset because Catalan has disappeared from the playgrounds or we can point the finger at public television for having eliminated the Super3 Club, but looking back will do us little good.
