Estimated total population of people who understand Catalan: 11,011,168

Estimated percentage of people who say that they understand Catalan:

Eastern Aragon: 98.5%
Catalonia: 97.4%
Andorra: 96%
The Balearic Islands: 93.1%
Alghero: 90.1%
Valencia: 81.6%
Northern Catalonia: 65.3%

Estimated total population of people who can speak Catalan: 9,118,882

Estimated percentage of people who say that they can speak Catalan:

Eastern Aragon: 88.8%
Catalonia: 84.7%
Andorra: 78.9%
The Balearic Islands: 74.6%
Alghero: 61.3%
Valencia: 58.4%
Northern Catalonia: 37.1%

Catalan is also spoken in northeastern Murcia, where there are under 700 speakers (data from 2006).

Source: estimates by Joaquim Torres, based on statistics on the use of languages for 2003 in the case of Catalonia, and for 2004 in the cases of the Balearic Islands, Northern Catalonia, Andorra, Alghero and eastern Aragon.

Official Status

Official language in Andorra, the Principality of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.
Legally recognised in Alghero.
Non-specific protection in Northern Catalonia and eastern Aragon.
Unrecognised in northeastern Murcia.

Catalan, which can be considered to date from the 8th century, is the autochthonous result of the evolution of the Latin that was spoken during the Roman Empire in the region comprised approximately between the valley of the River Isábena and the Mediterranean and between the massifs of Corberes and Garraf.

The earliest known texts written entirely in Catalan date from the 12th century. With the conquest of the Balearic Islands and the Kingdom of Valencia in the 13th century, regions where the autochthonous Romance Mozarabic languages had already given way to Arabic, the linguistic dominance of Catalan practically reached its present day borders (and since then, leaving aside certain minor modifications, the language has only disappeared in the south, in Murcia and the Baix Segura region, and in Alghero on the island of Sardinia).

During the Lower Middle Ages, the language was used in all aspects of daily life and was routinely used as the official and cultural language throughout the Catalan-speaking territories, which, along with Aragon, made up the Catalano-Aragonese Crown. This situation was prolonged until the beginning of the Modern Era. In the 16th century, however, Spanish was increasingly used in the cultural and social life of the region.

In 1659, Northern Catalonia became part of France by virtue of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, and the new authorities immediately embarked on an intense process to bring the region into line with the rest of France. In other parts of the Catalan-speaking territories, except for Andorra and Minorca, as the island was under British domination for several decades, the creation of the absolutist and centralist Spanish State resulted in a growing use of Spanish not only as a cultural language but also as the official language.

The dismantling of the Catalano-Aragonese Kingdom also accentuated a series of interrelated phenomena which had appeared earlier: the weakening of the links between the different Catalan-speaking regions, the reinforcement of the compartmentalised view of the language and the dialectalisation of the written language, which, nevertheless, has survived. Throughout the 19th century, the spreading influence of Spanish throughout the region increased, given that the official imposition of Spanish in more and more fields of public life led to a large part of the population becoming bilingual.

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the ensuing, long Francoist regime represented a severe blow to the vitality of Catalan: the total prohibition of the language from use in government, education, the media, associations and literature, etc., and the prohibition of the language in public use - tolerated only in private - completely disrupted the linguistic standardisation process of Catalan as the country became increasingly influenced by Spanish.

Today, the situation of the Catalan language in Spain is the following: although the legal recognition that the language enjoys is considerable, it is less than that of Spanish, which, unlike Catalan, is compulsory in educational terms and, in addition, is the official language beyond its linguistic domain. The effectiveness of the linguistic policy carried out in Catalan-speaking regions, which are rather uncoordinated in this respect, has been affected by this status of legal inferiority. It has also been affected by the attitude of unsympathetic state authorities towards linguistic diversity, in addition to the lack of action from the various administrations (especially important in the region of Valencia).

Modern Standard Catalan started to take form at the end of the 19th century and was definitively established in the early decades of the 20th century, with the modern orthography being standardised in 1913 and 1917, and the publication of its grammar and dictionary in 1918 and 1932 respectively. The similarity between various forms of Catalan dialects made it possible to establish Standard Catalan, which admits regional variations. This standard language is based on all of the language's major dialects and not only on a single dialect, albeit with a certain predominance of the central dialect due to demographic and cultural reasons. For this reason it was adopted not only throughout the Principality, where it had the support of the self-governing institutions of the era, but also throughout the rest of the Catalan Countries.