Catalan is residual in the sports and leisure activities of young people in Barcelona. Only 11% of conversations between young people are exclusively in Catalan and 76% are exclusively in Spanish (the remaining 13% are bilingual uses), according to a pilot study conducted by the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) on the use of Catalan in 14 municipal sports and leisure entities in the capital. In contrast, the percentages flip when it comes to conversation between instructors: 32% of instructors converse exclusively in Spanish among themselves, but the majority, 68%, speak in Catalan.

Only a third of Catalans have Catalan as their habitual language. This is one of the new developments that emerge from the Survey of Language Uses of the Population (EULP) that the Government publishes every five years. If in 2018 36.1% of the population had Catalan as their habitual language, now it is 32.6%, four points lower and fourteen points lower than twenty years ago. The Spanish language also fell by two points (46.5%), but bilingualism grew (from 7.4% to 9.4%) and so did the use of other languages (from 3% to 5.6%). However, there are more Catalan speakers (117,000 more, who use it with other languages) and more people who know it (267,600 more). The explanation for the percentage drop is the high volume of migration, which dilutes the effect of those who join the language: the growth of speakers is lower than the population growth.