The point is not that Catalan already only is not only the habitual language of 32.6% of the Catalan population, but also still It is the habitual language of that third of the population. The Survey of Language Uses This confirms, and worsens, the trend that we already knew about. On the one hand, the language has more speakers now than ever before. On the other hand, the percentage of speakers is decreasing, due to the demographic change caused by the strong waves of immigration to Catalonia in recent years. As a result, the language is growing, but not as much as the population is growing.
The survival of Catalan, therefore, depends on becoming, also, the language of expression of these more than two million people who have arrived in Catalonia in the last twenty years (and who will foreseeably be three million, or three and a half, in the next ten years). I underline the "also" because it will not be the only language of these people, who have another as their mother tongue. But the work must concentrate on making Catalan the language of encounter for all Catalans: for those who have been rooted in Catalonia for fifteen generations, and for those who have just arrived from any place in America, Africa, Asia or Europe. For them and, above all, for their children. Catalan has a future if it manages to become the language, yes, of social cohesion. The language of neighbourhood, of civility and of coexistence (to those who think that what I say is woke: I was refuted).
This is already happening: not in large numbers, far from it, as the data we are talking about make abundantly clear. But it is by no means unusual or exceptional for immigrants to learn Catalan, regardless of the culture they come from, the religion they profess or the language they speak at home. For months now, Òmnium Cultural has been insisting that it is aware that two million people want to learn or improve their Catalan and cannot do so due to the difficulties in accessing courses and classrooms: this is an absolutely priority area of work. It helps a lot, by the way, that Catalan speakers do not change language when we address an immigrant.
It is essential to distance the language from patriotism, speeches, proclamations and prejudices, that is, from the depression and anger of the post-process. Catalan must be, in Catalonia, the language of the separatists, of the pro-Spanish, of those who don't care and of those who don't want to hear or speak. It must be the language of school and administration, but also the language of the media, the networks and leisure. It cannot in any way allow itself to be reduced to the language of patriots, because then we are lost. The saviors of the country, those who give lessons and quarrels, those who detect the guilty, those prone to fits of solemnity: all this is counterproductive. Also the refrain of the death of the language, a concept that began to be debated as a conjecture but that has become a topic used to vent nationalist defeatism and frustration. Catalan does not need saviors, it only needs speakers.
