How Many People Speak Catalan
Unlike other languages, there is no linguistic census that keeps track of how many people use Catalan as their main language of communication. However, the people who understand and know how to speak Catalan in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands are counted periodically. In Catalonia, nearly 100 percent of the population understands the language, and over 75 percent knows how to speak it. Among young people, especially university students, the proportion of people who know how to speak Catalan is close to 100 percent. Overall, we could say that of the 11 million people who live in the Catalan-speaking regions, , about 10 million use it at least passively, more than 7 million know how to speak it, and at least 5 million use it as their main language of communication. Depending on the figure used, Catalan ranks differently among the European languages. In the worst-case scenario, Catalan has more speakers than Danish, Slovak, Slovenian, Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian an
