The Finding of a New Bilingual Variant in Catalonia arouses the Interest of the Press
A study published in Languages, elaborated by the Catalan linguist Silvia Perpiñán, from the Department of Modern Languages and Literature of the University of Western Ontario (Canada) and visiting scholar at the University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), reveals the birth of a new “native bilingual variety” of Catalan, with elements that are different from the Catalan spoken both by Catalan-dominants and Spanish-dominants.
The work deals exclusively with people born in Catalonia, i.e., with people who learnt Catalan and Spanish in their infancy. Perpiñán points out that the “native bilingual variety” is characterised by a linguistic comprehension of Catalan equal to that of the Catalan-dominants, but a production which is similar to that of the Spanish-dominants.
This finding has received a great deal of media coverage in the Catalan press:
Currently, around 7 million people live in Catalonia. Of these, 31% have Catalan as their first language, while Spanish is the mother tongue of 55% of Catalans. A total of 65% of the people born in Catalunya are used to speaking both languages, meaning that an important portion of the population uses the second language regularly.
Reference article: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/3/2/14.