TONGUE TWISTER

On January the 28th last, the historian and former President of Catalonia Joaquim Torra organised an informal meeting of people involved in supporting the use of the Catalan language, seeking ideas as to how the seemingly drastic decline in its use could be reversed or at least stalled. I say ’seemingly’ because certain recent surveys have claimed that the percentage of the population of Barcelona - for example - who habitually use Catalan has dropped to 36%. But there are a couple of snags with these statistics: one is that surveys (as opposed to censuses) are a notoriously unreliable way of charting something as difficult to pin down as language use; the second is the use of the word ’habitually’, (’habitualment’) which Catalan dictionaries of synonyms say can mean either ’generally’ or ’always’. Well, we can throw ’always’ out of the window: almost nobody in this multilingual country always uses just one language, the most common switching being between Catalan and Spanish, but also between these two tongues and English, Dutch, Urdu, Soninke, Quechua, Amazigh… you name it, and someone, somewhere in Catalonia is speaking it. So let’s go with ’generally’.

For three days a week I live in Nou Barris, the most Spanish-speaking district in the city (naturally enough, as it received a huge wave of newcomers from monolingual areas of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s, who have, also naturally enough, passed their language down to succeeding generations). Having said which, Catalan can be heard on its streets every day, and when I use Catalan, as I usually do (it’s easier for me) in the local shops and cafés, the person serving almost always replies in that language or occasionally in Spanish, but leaving no doubt that they’ve understood me. So the question is: are these people I speak to using Catalan generally or just sporadically? And what does it matter, if Catalan speakers can speak away to them without any problems whatsoever?

I spend the other four days of the week in Banyoles, a town of 22,000 people in which it is unusual to hear any Spanish spoken at all: so much so, that people coming to live there from other countries usually acquire passive or active knowledge of Catalan within a relatively short time. Indeed, some permanent residents there have told me that Spanish - which they can all speak - is a kind of fall-back language for them, used when they happen to come across a recent arrival who hasn’t yet picked up the town’s ’habitual’ language.

So what, someone might be asking, is the problem? According to the sociolinguists, the problem is youth. In Barcelona – again – people over 54 (!) are using Catalan more, but only 22%-37% of young people use it ’habitually’, if the surveys are to be trusted. This, apparently, is because of the predominance of Spanish on social media and in videogames, something which in itself could easily be remedied by supplying a Catalan language option for the games (especially the more violent, attractive ones) and beefing up Catalan on Instagram etc. (as well as urging the few Catalan influencers to be less twee). But the real problem is that young people in Catalonia live in a social world in which non-European phenotypes are frequent, and thus they automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) imitate their parents’ absurd habit of not using Catalan with anyone visually identified as foreign. Except, of course, in Banyoles, where Black Catalans, the descendants of an important wave of Gambian immigration, both speak and are spoken to in the language of the well-known local rapper Daura Mangara.

Opinion