Last month this newspaper published an interview at Nicolas LevratThe UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, who recently completed a study visit to the European Union, was asked if Catalan is in danger. Levrat responded unequivocally: "No, my opinion is no; in the European Union there are many other languages that are in much greater danger than Catalan." No, Catalan is not in danger. However, for some time now, the perception of Catalan society regarding the future of Catalan has entered a pessimistic spiral. The latest CEO Longitudinal Survey, released on March 5, reveals the speed with which this perception has worsened. Currently, 52% of those interviewed believe that Catalan will be used less in the immediate future than it is today, compared to 48% in 2024 and 42% in 2023. That the perception has worsened is undeniable; the question that should be asked is whether reality has also worsened to such an extent.
The same Longitudinal Survey contains other data that help us to be wary of the discrepancy between people's perceptions and reality. In one of the questions, respondents had to estimate the percentage of residents in Catalonia who were born outside of Spain. In 2025, four out of ten respondents said that the percentage was higher than 50%, while the previous year only two out of ten respondents had made this exaggerated estimate. Overall, the 2025 respondents found that the average number of foreign-born residents was 36%, a figure that contrasts sharply with the actual 25%.
A concrete example of the gap between perceptions and reality has to do with so-called "interrupting children." In an interview in the newspaper Vilaweb In her article last November, significantly titled "We Are Living Through a Process of Language Replacement," sociolinguist Ester Baiget placed great emphasis on this supposed "phenomenon." In a classic language replacement process, it is the parents who decide not to pass on the language to their children. This is what happened in Northern Catalonia during the 20th century, to give an indisputable example of language replacement in our linguistic area. The case of "interrupting children" is the opposite: it is the children, who have been taught the language, who decide not to use it. In this case, the "interrupting children" would be the children of Catalan-speaking families who decide to switch to Spanish and who supposedly do not plan to pass Catalan on to their children.
The truth is that there is no empirical sociolinguistic study that has detected this phenomenon in Catalonia or that allows it to be considered significant. Not even in the city of Barcelona, where the figures for Catalan speakers always fall short, is it possible to identify this phenomenon. It is useless to look for it, for example, in the Barcelona Youth Survey 2025 released on March 11: potential language switchers under 15 years of age are not part of the sample, and those aged 15-19 do not have children to whom they are not passing on the language. (An interesting result of the EJOB, which has not been given sufficient weight, is that, among young people aged 15 to 24, the proportion of regular users of Catalan is clearly higher than that of young people aged 25 to 34.)
Regarding this supposed phenomenon, the report on the language of young people Laura Serra's article, published in this newspaper on March 7, is ambivalent. Serra stated what needed to be said: "The figures do not support the existence of [the 'interrupting children'] in Catalonia." But she also cast the specter of these children over the article, with conditionals and hypothetical futures: "if" the tendency of young people to identify with Spanish were to reach "the extreme," it "could" have an impact "on the generations yet to be born." Thankfully, the journalist hammered home the point with the words of expert Esteve Valls: the story of the "interrupting children" "is a warning, not a confirmation."
The greatest paradox of all is that this pessimistic spiral is intensifying at a time of maximum institutional support for Catalan. Catalan has an entire Department of Language Policy, which, as the Minister explained in Parliament, will have the best budget in history in 2026 (if ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia) acts with reason, of course), and Catalan has a National Pact for the Language that is unparalleled in any other European minority language. It remains to be seen whether the department, with its 85 million euros, will reverse the pessimistic spiral, or whether self-serving narratives will continue to distort reality.
