Although being now spoken by 9,856,000 people within its linguistic domain (where 13.6 million people live), Catalan faces enormous challenges for its survival, especially in some concrete areas. This is one of the main ideas contained in the Report on the situation of the Catalan language 2011, released today by the CRUSCAT Network of the Institute for Catalan Studies, one of the main academic institutions of the Catalan Countries.

The data refer to those people being able to speak the language, not those who speak it on a daily basis. According to the report, 5,915,000 people can speak Catalan in Catalonia, 2,895,000 in the Valencian Country, 777,000 in the Balearic Islands, 142,000 in Northern Catalonia, 61,000 in Andorra, 42,000 in the Franja (easternmost area of Aragon) and finally 24,000 in L'Alguer (a town in northwestern Sardinia). All in all, this means that Catalan now has some 750,000 more speakers than a decade ago.

Although being spoken by almost 10 million people, only 4.4 of them are initial speakers (i. e. those who learnt Catalan before any other language). According to the report, this means that Catalan has great "attractiveness", something which is not very usual among minorised languages. The role of Catalan in the education system of Catalonia, the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and Andorra, and its official status, are two main explanations for this.

Nevertheless, the knowledge of Catalan is not territorially homogeneous, the report says. The region of Alacant (southern Valencian Country), Eivissa and Northern Catalonia show relatively low levels of knowledge of Catalan, while the contrary happens in inner Catalonia, Menorca and the Franja.

Good or bad? Mixed conclusions

The report includes a set of conclusions by CRUSCAT director Miquel Àngel Pradilla. According to him, the trends for the language are positive in Catalonia, the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and Andorra, while they are negative in Northern Catalonia and L'Alguer and are stabilised in the Franja. In general, CRUSCAT believes that Catalan is growing although it faces an increasingly "adverse sociopolitical environment".

Pradilla considers that the "linguistic horizons of the power elites" in the Valencian Country should "significantly" change in order to recover the language there. In this respect, his conclusions point out that pro-Spanish linguistic policies in the education system and in the media that the Spanish conservative Popular Party (PP) is implementing in the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and Aragon is highly detrimental for Catalan.

But on the other hand, Pradilla underlines the fact that almost 10% of people in Catalonia who have Spanish as their initial language declare that Catalan is their "language of identification", while the figure the other way round is only 2%.