The Pact for the Language: beyond compliance

On February 18, the first follow-up meeting of the National Pact for Language was held. According to the government of the Generalitat, by that date, 71 measures had already been completed and 124 more were in the process of execution. Now that the first anniversary of the signing of the Pact is due, it is likely that the government will update this quantitative assessment without delving too deeply into the substance of the matter. The question, in reality, is not how many measures of the Plan have been applied or are being applied, but to what extent the Plan has changed the statu quo that justified the approval of the Plan to begin with.If the question is this, the answer is easy. One year of validity is not enough time for a government to reverse a state of affairs that comes from afar and which was further aggravated during the years of the Process, when doing independence in Spanish seemed more urgent than safeguarding Catalan. This does not mean, however, that a reflection can be made on the progress of the Plan one year after its signing.The Plan has an original problem, which is the gap between the diagnosis of the situation of Catalan and the treatment to improve it. The Plan identifies five challenges or causes of the "decline" of Catalan in recent decades, the main one of which "is found in a set of economic factors and their socio-demographic consequences". This challenge includes "the transformation of a large part of the country's economic structure in recent decades" and, closely linked to this transformation, "the enormous [sic] migratory flows and the conditions for their social, labor and linguistic insertion".To face this challenge, the Pact only proposes palliative measures. In its assessment of the first year, for example, it is likely that the government will boast about the thousands of places for Catalan courses newly created at the Consortium for Linguistic Normalization; the reality is that the problem cannot be solved (only) by increasing the number of Catalan course places.To begin with, there is a purely numerical consideration. According to the latest Survey of Language Use by the Population (2023), there are 2 million people in Catalonia interested in learning Catalan or improving their knowledge of it: for obvious reasons of resources, Catalonia cannot create 2 million places to meet this potential demand. Beyond this observation, there is also a possible error in expectations. The Plan assumes a sequence of lack of knowledge – learning – use that is often not fulfilled. On the one hand, many learners abandon their studies halfway through, and what is particularly remarkable is that many learners leave the country before ever using Catalan and are replaced by other learners who may also not take root. According to the study Los límites de la inmigración para el ajuste demográfico en España, published by Funcas a fortnight ago, between 2002 and 2024 Spain welcomed 15 million people born abroad, half of whom left the country again.

But even if the learner does not abandon the courses or the country, the sequence that leads to use is difficult to fulfill. Too often, the learning of Catalan by adult foreigners is disconnected from their real lives: as also happens in the educational system with the wrongly named "immersion", many learners believe that Catalan is a language to know (out of obligation or to obtain some benefit) but not to use. In many work environments, for example, Catalan is not useful for working. On this issue, the Plan foresaw a very relevant measure that was not fulfilled in 2025 and will hardly be fulfilled in 2026: to promote the offer of Catalan courses within companies and during working hours.The foreigner who "does not integrate", the Catalan speaker who "does not maintain" Catalan, and the employer who "does not demand" the language from their workers are reflections of the same underlying problem that the Plan identifies and does not address with adequate measures. In recent times, from Josep Sala Cullell to the authors of the Informe Fènix, different voices have spoken directly or indirectly on this issue. The headline of the interview that Vilaweb conducted with the spokespersons of Sant Jordi per la Llengua could not be clearer: "To defend Catalan, the economic model must be changed." As for the language, after encapsulating linguistic policy in an "ad hoc" department, encapsulating the defense of Catalan in a National Pact for the Language is probably the most serious error of the Illa government.

"The situation of Catalan is like that of trains, it requires shock measures"