Linguistic segregation?

After the frustration caused by the end of the Procés, Catalanism has been forced to review its strategy. Someone synthesized the analysis: "In trying to achieve our own state, we have neglected the nation." With the goal of the state out of the immediate radar, the return to concern for national construction has been imposed. And, singularly, for the language, which has historically been its articulating axis.

One of the expressions of this return to the nation is the identity and linguistic anxiety: a feeling of urgency and loss for a country that is fading away. Curiously, the same sectors that a few years ago believed that independence was within reach and were convinced of having solid backing, today see Catalan identity on the verge of extinction. It is an excessive pendulum swing, even though from a Catalanist perspective there are objective reasons to be concerned about the language.

The risk, however, is that anxiety may lead us to misdiagnose and, therefore, also the solutions. One example is the growing rumour about the need for a certain withdrawal. There are people who think and say that now is the time to protect the Catalan-speaking linguistic community from dissolution, creating spaces for the exclusive (or almost exclusive) use of Catalan. This would prevent the sons and daughters of Catalan speakers from becoming Hispanized in schools and institutes, as Xavier Gual explained on May 2 in this newspaper. And it would help to preserve a well-differentiated and sufficiently consistent Catalan-speaking (national) minority. One sees the risk that mixing in a context of minoritization will thin out Catalan identity until it dissolves.

This is a completely wrong approach. To begin with, because it tries to solve a problem that Catalan (in Catalonia) does not have. Beyond very minor cases, there is no data to suggest that the intergenerational transmission of the language, in Catalonia, has been interrupted. On the contrary: according to the EULP 2023, there are four times more transitions from Spanish to Catalan than from Catalan to Spanish. Only 2.5% of children of Catalan-speaking parents have Spanish as their usual language, while among children of Spanish-speaking parents, 10% mention Catalan as their usual language (and another 10% declare themselves bilingual). In fact, although Catalan is the initial language of 34% of the inhabitants of Catalonia, 44% speak Catalan to their children. That is a ten percentage point difference.

However, there are people who suffer because their children use Spanish a lot in their school or leisure environment. Regarding this, two things must be said: the first is that, effectively, it is very difficult for Catalan-speaking children and adolescents in today's Catalonia to grow up in a monolingual Catalan environment, but this does not lead to the abandonment of the language. The second is that linguistic uses evolve throughout life. And very probably these children of Catalan speakers who now use Spanish a lot, as they grow up, will remain faithful to the language and will pass it on to their children (if they have any).

Catalan is not losing speakers: it continues to attract new ones. It is not a language in regression, but in modest expansion. However, Spanish is expanding even more. The problem is that Catalan does not incorporate enough new speakers to compensate for the growth of the Spanish-speaking population in recent years. This leads to a decrease in the social use of the language, but it is a qualitatively different problem from the desertion of speakers, and it requires different solutions. Segregation is only useful for very small minorities for whom contact with other groups translates into linguistic desertion, and neither of these conditions exists today in Catalonia. An accurate diagnosis is vital to get the solution right and not kill the patient while trying to cure him of a disease he does not have.

A problem that may arise is that the particular interest of some Catalan speakers to preserve more or less monolingual environments for their children is contradictory to the collective objective of improving the health of the language. Reducing contact between linguistic communities would further limit the incorporation of new speakers. The balance of contact between languages is positive for Catalan: for example, among the children of bilingual couples, 60% have Catalan as their usual language, and only 22% have Spanish. Segregation would favor the chronic persistence of pockets of population with no contact with the language, nor the ability to learn it.

Furthermore, the indirect effects of a policy of linguistic segregation can be devastating. One only needs to do a quick calculation to understand that the political balance that must enable the maintenance and strengthening of linguistic policy is only possible with broad and transversal social consensus. And the disconnection between linguistic communities would only weaken it.

If we took the issue seriously, instead of a sentimental debate based on anecdotes and personal anxieties, we would have a debate based on data. And with the existing data, with few assumptions, we can model the dynamics of language contact in Catalonia. A simple modeling exercise quickly points to two feasible and effective ways to improve the position of Catalan: the first is to ensure that everyone has at least an understanding of Catalan, because this would allow Catalan speakers to always use Catalan everywhere.

The second, and fundamental, is to reinforce the attitude of language maintenance. If just one-third of Catalan speakers stopped switching languages when interacting with Spanish speakers, this would have the same impact on the social use of the language as a 10 percentage point increase in the demographic weight of Catalan speakers — an infinitely more complex objective, and unattainable in the medium term. Mixing, combined with a more determined attitude to maintain Catalan, is the answer the language needs.