Almost 45% of Catalan speakers in Catalonia do not use Catalan to search on sites such as Google and YouTube
Plataforma per la Llengua has published the twelfth edition of the InformeCAT, a collection of 50 significant data on the state of Catalan throughout the linguistic domain.
We focus on data that refers to the Internet and new technologies. Of which the following stand out:
Almost 45.0% of Catalan speakers in Catalonia do not use Catalan to search on sites such as Google and YouTube. Among Catalan speakers, slightly more than half, 55.4%, search the internet in their own language. On the other hand, Spanish speakers use Spanish in 87.4% of cases. These different uses indicate a situation of digital diglossia among Catalan speakers.
54.7% of the inhabitants of Catalonia believe that the presence of Catalan in the digital world is insufficient. According to the data from the second wave of 2022 of the Omnibus survey by the Center for Opinion Studies, 54.7% of the population of Catalonia believe that the presence of Catalan in the digital world (video games, applications, fiction) is insufficient, while 40.1% consider it adequate.
TikTok includes Catalan among its 47 language versions. The success of this application made the lack of a Catalan version of its interface particularly worrying, because it removed the language from a significant part of the young people’s experience and, consequently, could encourage them to abandon it. The inclusion of Catalan in TikTok in April 2023 as the 47th language version of the platform is therefore very good news.
Commonvoice in Catalan is consolidated as the second language in the world with the most recordings and validations. Commonvoice is a Mozilla Foundation project that aims to create a repository of voice clips from all the world’s languages based on voluntary collaboration. The initiative has been well received in the Catalan-speaking territories thanks to the impulse of the association of digital activists Softcatalà and the subsequent institutional reception of the Aina project by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, with the col· collaboration of the Government of the Balearic Islands.
The Catalan Wikipedia becomes the tenth language in the world in terms of the 10,000 essential articles. In 2022, Wikipedia in Catalan reached a new qualitative milestone. Specifically, the Catalan version of the free encyclopedia became the tenth language in the world with the highest quality standard in relation to the 10,000 essential articles.
