We study the stability of two coexisting languages (Catalan and Spanish) in Catalonia (North-Eastern Spain), a key European region in political and economic terms. Our analysis relies on recent, abundant empirical data that is studied within an analytic model of population dynamics. This model contemplates the possibilities of long-term language coexistence or extinction. We establish that the most likely scenario is a sustained coexistence. The data needs to be interpreted under different circumstances, some of them leading to the asymptotic extinction of one of the languages involved. We delimit the cases in which this can happen. Asymptotic behavior is often unrealistic as a predictor for complex social systems, hence we make an attempt at forecasting trends of speakers towards 2030. These also suggest sustained coexistence between both tongues, but some counterintuitive dynamics are unveiled for extreme cases in which Catalan would be likely to lose an important fraction of speakers. As an intermediate step, model parameters are obtained that convey relevant information about the prestige and interlinguistic similarity of the tongues as perceived by the population. This is the first time that these parameters are quantified rigorously for this couple of languages. Remarkably, Spanish is found to have a larger prestige specially in areas which historically had larger communities of Catalan monolingual speakers. Limited, spatiallysegregated data allows us to examine more fine grained dynamics, thus better addressing the likely coexistence or extinction. Variation of the model parameters across regions are informative about how the two languages are perceived in more urban or rural environments.

No abstract

O monolinguismo social, longe de ser um fenômeno espontâneo, frequentemente é o resultado de uma série de operações glotopolíticas de homogeneização de populações falantes de várias línguas, um resultado que é mantido artificialmente pelo Estado. O artigo mostra como esses processos históricos se vinculam à emergência dos Estados-nação e das Nações-estado que se forjaram na Europa a partir do século XVIII, ao tempo que se espalhava a ideologia da ‘língua nacional’.

<p><span>O artigo ofrece unha ampla revisión da situación social da lingua galega, comezando cunha breve historia do seu contacto co castelán e centrada especialmente nos cambios sociolingüísticos das últimas décadas, despois da súa oficialización como “lingua propia” da Comunidade Autónoma de Galicia. O traballo presenta e analiza datos estatísticos sobre as variables sociolingüísticas e sociais máis relevantes (lingua inicial, competencia lingüística, lingua habitual), presenta unha síntese do proceso de estandarización e comentarios sobre as controversias normativas e os seus efectos sociais, a diversidade de prácticas e as representacións que xurdiron como consecuencia do contacto co castelán neste complexo escenario de intervencións políticas sobre o status e corpus da lingua galega.</span></p><div><span><br /></span></div>