My piece three weeks ago on the curiosities of Catalan raised a question, which I had in fact intentionally avoided in the post, about how many people speak Catalan. In fact, the Catalan situation is in fact a perfect demonstration of almost every conceivable difficulty with such a question...

Firstly, like it or not, there is almost invariably politics involved. The map here is of what some people refer to in Catalan as "Els Països Catalans" or the "Catalan Lands", the area in which, they claim, Catalan is spoken (or, some would specify, is the native language).

Historically it is true that a language derived from Latin but which was plainly - both politically and linguistically - neither "French" nor "(Castilian) Spanish" was spoken across the entire Northern Mediterranean, in fact encompassing much of the above area and indeed territory arguably beyond it into what is now northwestern Italy. The language spoken in that area had various names, but it encompassed what is now known as "Occitan" (largely in the south of France) and "Catalan" (largely in the northeast of Spain). This immediately introduces a further political point - the boundary between "Occitan" and "Catalan" is essentially a political one, although that political boundary has in time also arguably become a clear linguistic one.

So, in other words, you have to define "language". In fact, the linguistic situation of Alghero in Sardinia and it is simply not true, as the above map suggests, that it is Catalan-speaking. The majority of the population there in fact speak a language somewhere along a spectrum between Italian (by which we mean the standard language of Italy based on Tuscan) and Sardinian (a regional language noted for being phonologically conservative and thus in many ways "closest" to Classical Latin); a minority speak a language which can be placed somewhere in the Occitan-Catalan sphere, but whether it is fair to declare it one or the other is debatable.

Secondly, that does bring us to the concept known in linguistics as Dachsprache (literally, "roof language"). To some extent, people themselves determine which language they speak. If some people in Alghero say they speak "Catalan", then to a degree at least they do - linguists may point out that it is considerably different from the standard version based on the educated speech of Catalonia, but that is balanced against a social reality that if people say it is "Catalan" then it is Catalan. This can work the other way: most people in the Valencian region who speak a language similar to that spoken in Catalonia in fact say they speak "Valencian", not "Catalan"; whether they are making a particular political point (like someone quite reasonably stating they speak "Norwegian" rather than "Danish" despite the similarities between them) or whether they are just assigning a local name (like Dutch speakers in Belgium who often refer to their language as "Flemish" not because they are arguing it is not "Dutch" but just to give themselves a sense of ownership of it) is a matter for local experts and local people themselves rather than outsiders to determine.

Thirdly, you then have to define "speaker". Including its Valencian variant, Catalan is widespread in three autonomous communities of Spain (Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands) which, despite being barely a sixth of the total in Spain, in fact account for almost a third of the entire population of the country. So if Catalan were the predominant language across them all, that would mean close a third of the entire population of Spain would in fact be Catalan-speaking. No one, however, seriously argues this.

Fourthly, there is a spectrum here. Even people who speak good Spanish or French will be able to some extent, or at least with minimal training, to read Catalan (and Valencian); whether they can understand it when it is spoken is a different proposition; whether they can actually use it (speak it or write it) is still another. So at what stage are they deemed "speakers"?

Fifthly, there is also the key but understated issue of language maintenance. Ultimately, does someone use a language at home? Or in the workplace? Or when pursuing leisure activities? Do they need just to understand it for some or all of these, or do they actually use it?

How far we go with any of this is not straightforward. Do Norwegians, who speak a very similar language to Danish, all get counted as "Danish speakers" just because they can read it? Do native Afrikaans speakers who use English at work but not at home and not during leisure time count as "English speakers" (and, if so, is there a further designation, like "passive" or "occasional"?)

Proponents of Catalan, perhaps understandably, nowadays quite like to quote the figure "10 million" (including "Valencian"). However, in fact Catalan is the home language of a minority even in the three autonomous communities in which it is "at home" - roughly 40% in Catalonia and the Balearics falling to below 30% (for "Valencian") in Valencia. In Catalonia, Spanish is not the majority language either according to most surveys, as the "linguistic balance of power" is held by households which either use both or neither. Therefore "10 million" appears to refer to passive competence or occasional use, not to native speakers who use the language in the home. A further peculiarity in both Catalonia and the Balearics is that Catalan is the predominant language of education, but decreasingly the language of immigrants (as there has been significant immigration to the area particularly from Latin America in the past decade), meaning that the "gains" for Catalan among the younger population have been "offset" by Spanish-speaking immigration.

Therefore when we ask how many people speak a given language, we can see just from this one case how complex a question that is...

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