“We have the opportunity to demonstrate that the coexistence of different cultures, traditions and languages make us better”, proclaimed the new president of the Congress, Francina Armengol in her first speech in the chamber. The third authority of the State promised last Thursday in the constitutive session of the Cortes that in the plenary session of the Lower House it would be possible to debate and speak in all the co-official languages.
The question is not new. The use of Catalan, Basque, Galician and Valencian in the institutions is an old nationalist aspiration that returns to the fore in the framework of the negotiations between the left-wing bloc and the pro-independence parties to form a sufficient majority capable of investing Pedro Sánchez. Now, beyond the political use of the co-official languages as a bargaining chip, what does the data say about how much each language is spoken?
According to the latest Survey of Essential Characteristics of the Population and Housing collected by the INE with data from 2021, in Spain the three most spoken languages are Spanish (45.8 million), Catalan (7 million) and Valencian (3.7 million). ) out of a total of 46.1 million people.
According to these figures, in our country there are eleven languages that are spoken well by at least 1% of the population. The most frequent is Spanish, which is understood by 99.5%, followed by English (24.9%), Catalan (16.4%) and Valencian (9.4%). Ahead of co-official languages such as Galician, which is understood by 6.3%, and Basque (4.3%), is French (7.4%).
In which areas are the co-official languages spoken? According to this statistic, Catalan is spoken more at work (85.92%), while 85.43% use it with friends and this percentage drops with family (74.64%). This pattern, that the co-official language is used more outside the home than in the family environment, is repeated in the case of Majorcan, Basque and Valencian. And it is striking that the percentage who speak Catalan and Basque with friends is slightly higher than with family members.
This is not the case in Galicia, where speaking Galician is more common with family (85.20%), then with friends (85.14%) and drops to 78.56% in the workplace.
Despite Spain’s linguistic richness, the truth is that we are still far from bilingualism: 57.1% of the population only speak one language. When it comes to writing, 28.6% of the population can write two languages well. And almost three out of 100 people (2.7%) understand four or more languages well.
The most common initial language – that is, the first language a person uses when they begin to speak – is Spanish. Specifically for 74.7% of the population. Following are Catalan (5.3%) and Galician (2.4%). For its part, there is 2% of the population that had Spanish and Catalan as their initial languages jointly.
Also, throughout the Spanish geography the most common language is Castilian. In all the provinces without co-official languages, the second language is English except in the two autonomous cities, where the second most common language is Arabic: 28.3% in the case of Ceuta and 8.8% in the case of Melilla .
Most frequent languages by provinces
In Navarra, where Basque is the official language under the terms provided in article 9 of the Organic Law for the Reintegration and Improvement of the Foral Regime of Navarra, and in those of this Foral Law, 63% of the population speaks Basque.
Another curiosity is presented by Huesca and Teruel, where the third language is a co-official language, Catalan: 9.4% in the case of the first and 6.2% in the second.
The case of provinces such as Badajoz, where 4.7% speak Portuguese, Guadalajara, Cuenca and Segovia (where more than 3% speak Bulgarian) or Toledo, Murcia and Almería, where Arabic is the third most frequent language, is also striking.
The four Galician provinces have the highest percentages of people who speak a second language well, in this case, Galician, over 95%. They are followed by the Catalans with Lleida as the province in which 93% speak Catalan well and Barcelona as the least, with 89.3%.
It is in the Basque Country where the greatest difference is produced by provinces. While in Guipúzcoa 76.5% speak Basque well, this percentage drops to 61.2% in Vizcaya and 53.5% in Álava.
On the other hand, the Balearic Islands, Navarra and Barcelona are the provinces where three languages are best spoken. In the first, in addition to Spanish (99.05%) and Catalan -Mallorcan, Menorcan, Ibizan and Formentera- (77.89%), 28.6% of the population speak English. In Navarra, where 99.53% and 63% speak Spanish and Basque, respectively, 27% speak English. And in Barcelona, together with Spanish (99.4%) and Catalan (84%), 27.12% speak English well.
In the territories without co-official languages, Madrid and Malaga are the provinces where English is the second most widely used language. In the capital of Spain, 35.65% of the population does so, followed by French with 8.9%, while in the Andalusian province, 29.24% speak English and 7.45%, French.
What are the co-official languages in Spain?
Spain is a multilingual country. The Constitution establishes in article 3 that Spanish is the official language of the State and that the other Spanish languages are also official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes: Catalan in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, Valencian in the Valencian Community, Basque in Basque Country and Basque-speaking areas of Navarra and Galician in Galicia.
With this, Spain declared in 2001, through the Instrument of ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, that «regional or minority languages are understood as languages recognized as official in the Statutes of Autonomy of the Autonomous Communities of the Country Basque, Catalonia, Illes Balears, Galicia, Valenciana and Navarra and (…) those that the Statutes of Autonomy protect and protect in the territories where they are traditionally spoken». Thus, other official documents establish the co-official status of Aranese in Aran (Catalonia) and grant special protection to other regional or minority languages. This is the case of the Aragonese and Catalan of Aragon enjoy protection and their recovery is encouraged, the bable, which enjoys promotion and protection in the Principality of Asturias, the Galician in the western territories of the provinces of León (El Bierzo) and Zamora (Sanabria) by Castilla y León or the Gomeran whistle, which is recognized in the Canary Islands Historical Heritage Law as ethnographic heritage whose preservation must be encouraged on the Island of La Gomera.
The data used in this information comes from the Survey of Essential Characteristics of Population and Housing (ECEPOV-2021), carried out by the National Institute of Statistics, which complements the 2021 Population and Housing Census by providing information not available in administrative records. . It is a five-yearly structural survey whose population scope is people residing in Spain in family homes. The information was collected from March 29, 2021 to February 15, 2022. The sample size is 172,444 homes in which 424,493 people reside, distributed in 2,152 census sections and the type of sampling, stratified random sampling and sampling stratified two-stage. The information was collected from an interview completed by the informant himself via the web, a telephone interview, an interview by postal mail, and a computer-assisted personal interview.
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