Catalan Becomes 'Unfriendly' as Speaker Numbers Decline

Language policy turns Catalan into an 'unfriendly' tongue

Catalan isn't dying from a lack of affection; it's dying by decree. This diagnosis comes not from a Madrid editorial, but from within. 'Catalan has become unfriendly. Young people speak it less than ever,' states Santi Rodríguez, who calls for a language policy 'that isn't based on imposition or punishment.' The die is cast, and 286 days later, the issue has shifted from language to demography, from schools to politics, and from Valencia to Buenos Aires. Few dispute that its use is declining. What's being debated is who is to blame.

Why do young people speak less Catalan?

There's broad agreement on the fact; disagreement on the reason. The first thesis points to schools: the Catalan taught is normative, distant from what's heard in the market and the bar, and ends up as a subject passed through rote learning, forgotten once the bell rings. The second points to family transmission: when a child answers their Catalan-speaking parent in Spanish, the chain breaks abruptly, rendering the parent's good intentions useless. The third thesis is colder. Any minority language competing in the same market with a global language loses speakers by gravitational pull, with or without a decree.

All three explanations coexist, and none can be entirely refuted. That's where the interest lies.

Imposition as a Rejection Factory

'I try to get my children to speak good Catalan for their future professional and social benefit, and there's no way they'll speak it outside the classroom,' summarizes one of the voices gathered, adding a domestic detail: even parents who address their children in Catalan hear them respond in Spanish. The conclusion—obligation generates repulsion—is central to many opinions. The argument has a flip side, and it's uncomfortable: if Catalan is declining even where there's no obligation or penalty, then the cause isn't the rules, but the weight of Spanish, English, and screens.

Valencian: The Normative Tongue Not Spoken at Home

The Valencian case serves as a laboratory for the above. A native Valencian speaker explains it bluntly: Valencian is their first language, and they've read in Catalan all their lives, but the texts assigned to their children in school seem implausible due to the deliberate effort to construct a language as far removed as possible from Spanish. Their comparison, between a current children's novel and the work of a classic Catalan author, points to the same thing: what's taught isn't what's spoken.

The opposite view comes from another resident of the same region: in their experience, eight out of ten service providers they deal with communicate in Valencian, including in the capital, and the language is understood without problem if someone starts with a 'bon día.' The question, then, isn't whether it's known. It's who decides to start.

Galician Already Went Through the Same Ordeal

One intervention brings up the Galician precedent: according to that reading, it was affluent sectors that promoted a cultured norm to avoid being confused with the peasants who spoke the language daily, resulting in rejection that would have reduced the number of speakers. The parallel has supporters and detractors, but it serves its purpose: to remind us that Catalan isn't the only peninsular language whose official version has diverged from the vernacular.

Immigration, Birth Rates, and the Uncomfortable Variables

Some opinions attribute the decline to the arrival of populations whose mother tongue isn't Catalan; others argue the exact opposite, that the problem is demographic and boils down to fewer births within families who spoke Catalan at home. It's important to state clearly: these are conversational hypotheses, not verified data, and no official statistics are cited to support them. What is a recognizable fact is the repeated complaint about the register: the normative texts reaching classrooms and the language spoken in the playground are two different languages with the same name.

And in the Background, Politics

The exchange quickly moves away from linguistics. Some argue that the language has been used as a tool of confrontation, and that this use explains much of the rejection, while others respond that no language disappears from antipathy and that the real problem is the lack of generational replacement. The conversation even crosses the Atlantic, with mutual reproaches about who has the right to opine and who arrived where first. It's the least useful and loudest part, as usual.

What Could Happen to Catalan in the Coming Years

The most repeated prediction, and the hardest to refute, is that in thirty to forty years, Catalan will continue to lose ground in spontaneous speech, regardless of who wins the political battle, unless schools and the street start speaking the same language again. Whoever claims to know how this ends is lying. And whoever claims it doesn't matter, is also lying.