De més verdes en maduren: la situació de la llengua catalana a Santa Coloma de Gramenet

Resum

"Lawless City": this was the nickname by which Santa Coloma de Gramenet was known 30 years ago. Yet statistics show that today it is one of the safest towns in Catalonia. This change is indicative of many other changes that the town has undergone in recent years, but clichés are hard to break. In an attempt to do just that, the authors present the results of a survey conducted in the town at the end of 1994 on usage of and attitudes towards the Catalan language amongst local people. Santa Coloma was one of the towns that received most non-Catalan immigration in the 1960s. This accounts for the fact that today only 18% of local people regard Catalan as their own language. As far as social usage is concerned, individuals claiming to use Catalan habitually amount to 28% of the total. As regards attitudes, it should be noted that 70% of the population show a positive attitude towards the language, and that 72% consider that in Catalonia everyone ought to be able to speak Catalan. Thus, although the use of Catalan is scant, the situation presents real prospects of improvement, since attitudes are, generally speaking, positive. The stumbling block is the younger generation; this sector of the population do not use Catalan any more than older people, despite having greater proficiency in it, and furthermore their attitude towards the language is more reticent. In short, the article presents a set of data that paints a picture which is neither black nor white but, as is so often the case, ambiguous and complex.