After the latest data was releasedSurvey of Linguistic Uses of the Population It is clear that the Catalan language's recovery must involve providing it with clear rules for its use. I am not referring, of course, to grammatical rules, but to political rules. The most important would be to make its knowledge as mandatory as Spanish. To live and work in Catalonia, it is necessary to know Catalan.

The habitual use of Catalan is declining across all the districts of Catalonia. The Girona region, with a 9-point drop in habitual Catalan use in just five years, is the area most affected by this loss of language: it is now the sole habitual language of less than half the population (45%). The Alt Pirineu region has also seen a 9-point decline, but there Catalan is still the habitual language of 56% of the population. Following closely are areas like Terres de l'Ebre (where habitual Catalan use has fallen by 5 points) and Penedès (a 4.3-point drop), two regions where Catalan is losing ground and bilingual use of Catalan and Spanish, or Spanish alone, is on the rise. According to the latest data from the 2023 Survey of Language Use in the Population (EULP), the steepest declines compared to 2018 are occurring in some areas considered bastions of Catalan. The territories where the language remains most vibrant are precisely the Terres de l'Ebre (where 67% of the population speaks it as their sole language), followed by the central regions (60%), the Alt Pirineu (56%), and Ponent (51%); the only four territories where exclusively Catalan speakers constitute a majority.

Half of the Catalan population (48.7%) says they always or often start conversations in Catalan, but the other half never or almost never do so. However, this glass half-full is emptied by another new finding: when bilingual Catalan speakers start a conversation in Catalan and respond in Spanish, 7 out of 10 switch to Spanish.

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.

Who knows Catalan at the moment? Who speaks it? How does this vary according to age or origin? These and many other questions are answered in the Survey of Language Uses, the exhaustive five-year report prepared by the Generalitat on the health of Catalan and its evolution. Idescat and the Department of Language Policy have made public this Wednesday the results of the survey for 2023. These are the most relevant graphs that emerge from it.