There must be many things which are being done very badly to have a situation where in not one single district of Barcelona do the majority of young people employ Catalan as their normal language of use. Yes, you read that right, in none of the 10 districts of Barcelona city. In Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, 44.9% of young people use Catalan. At the opposite end, in Nou Barris, only 5.1% of young people use it. In fact, in half of the districts, the use of Catalan does not reach 25% among 15-34 year olds. This is the case in the capital of Catalonia, and the position of the Catalan language cannot be much better in the conurbation of Barcelona, in the large metropolises of the industrial belt where several million Catalans live. The issue is what do we do with this data, which suggests a situation almost impossible to turn around, to regain the positions that Catalan has been progressively losing in recent years. An indicator: in 2015, 35.6% of young people had Catalan as their language of current use and five years later, in 2020, this percentage has dropped to 28.4%. The linguistic decline has been 7.2 percent in five years, which is scandalous.
At this rate, by the end of this decade, overall use of Catalan may even be below 20% among young people. It is true that use is one thing and knowledge is another, but the truth is that it is little help for Catalan to be the language used at school or university if it simply disappears from everyday life later on. There are reasons to explain, not to justify, why the situation in recent years has not been easy, and you can find arguments here such as the major waves of immigration and the sudden growth of the streaming platforms that have greatly penalized Catalan. But, although these things have occurred, the problem goes much deeper and has to do with the immovable status as minority language that Catalan suffers from in Catalonia. Catalan is persecuted in schools, justice puts itself in the path of the language and the hostility it has suffered from a very significant sector of the political class and the media as well has ended up placing it in a position of resistance, very far from where it was located, for example, 40 or 50 years ago.
Without going any further, this Wednesday we once again were presented with one of those examples that occur periodically with the door once again being slammed on Catalan - also on Basque and Galician - in a resolution presented to the Senate in favour of the European Union's recognition of all three of these languages as official. The Socialists abstained, but that was enough for the motion to be rejected, as the PP voted against it. There is, at the heart of all this, an agreement made at the dialogue table formed by the Spanish and Catalan governments to solve the political conflict, in which it is stated that Pedro Sánchez will defend the use of Catalan in the European Parliament. It is true that the European Parliament is only one of the European bodies alongside the EU instances and the Commission, but who knows if this is the harbinger of a new retreat.
With a state that is against Catalan, it is very difficult for Catalonia's own language to have a minimal chance. It will always be a second class language, subsidiary to Spanish. The Barcelona city council has certainly not done its homework. But neither has the country's government done them, with its hands tied by linguistic legal disputes that are reducing its ability to manoeuvre in a critical issue such as language. Maybe it's too late and the most that can be aspired to is to give comfort in its agonizing but irreversible situation. Unfortunately definitive. What doesn't help is the attitude of concern that is shown every time a survey is released about the use of Catalan and all that happens are a few reactive statements, tweets or a plan, which one day is pompously presented and then is not used for anything, and no one ever thinks of it again. It is the latest fashion, a political prêt-à-porter, along with those institutional statements that are made without letting journalists ask questions on them. Today's version 2.0 of "today is not the moment for that", under which the effect is achieved without anyone noticing the care that was taken to obtain it. This is very good as a play to the audience, but there are now many governors who appear in this rogue's gallery of political incompetents who end up leaving things in a worse state than their predecessor did.