La Franja

Eastern Aragon: facts and figures

franja | 29 Setembre, 2006 00:11

EASTEN ARAGON: FACTS AND FIGURES

Eastern Aragon, or Franja de Ponent, is made up of a number of counties pertaining to the Autonomous Community of Aragon but with both Catlan culture and language. The counties of Ribagorça, Llitera, Baix Cinca and Matarranya have a population of over 50.000 inhabitants.

In order to understand the socio-linguistic reality of these counties, between December of the year 2003 and January of the year 2004, the Government of Catalonia and the Government of Aragon carried out a demo-linguistic study of the Catalan language in the area based on a telephone survey of 869 people.

In terms of understanding of the language the results are as follows: 98.5% of the population understands it and it is spoken by 88.8%, read by 72.9% and 30.3% of the population is able to write the language.

If we are speaking of the general use of Catalan we can say that on average the languages is used 64.4% of the time against the 35.2% use of Castilian. It must be understood that only a small part of the population uses both languages in a more balanced way. Some 10.3% of those surveyed use Castilian exclusively, and some 4.4% make use of Castilian in 90% to 99% of their language dealings.

In terms of generational transference to the languages, an evolution towards a mono-lingual structure was noted within families. The figures regarding Catalan show that 70.4% of the children speak Catalan with their parents and 71.7% of the parents, with their children. Castilian is spoken by 21.8% children to parents and 22.7%, parents to children. In mixed language families 7.2%of children use both languages when speaking with their parents and 5% of parents use both Catalan and Castilian when speaking with their children. Where other languages are concerned the percentages is 2.6% in both cases. The conclusion is that both Castilian and Catalan develop within mixed family situations even though it could be suspected that there could be interference in the transference of the language; Catalan, in fact, is maintained more than Castilian.

The study concludes with a clear premise that the use of Catalan is not universal in the area given a 12.2% of the population do not speak the language and 69.7% do not write it. The use of Catalan is widespread, although there is some clear erosion. When it comes to the language of birth and the language of identification, in which case the Spanish has gained ground.

Information taken from the interpretive study: "El català a la Franja. Enquesta d'usos lingüístics,2003" by Natxo Sorolla, PhD in Sociology University of Barcelona, published in the magazine revista Ripacúrtia ( Centre d'Estudis Ribagorçans, 2005).

http://www.estudinord.com/clb/index.asp