When in 2009 the writer Quim Monzó said in a discussion with former Catalonia president Jordi Pujol that the Catalan language was on its way to becoming a dialect of Spanish everyone attributed it to two things. On the one hand, to the tone of unrelenting provocation that the gifted writer adopts whenever he takes part in a public debate. And, on the other, his reaction of skepticism in some cases, pessimism in others, to the suggestion that the public authorities have any ability or desire to reverse a situation that has led to the impoverishment of Catalan on the street and in the media. Monzó concluded that people now identify with a language called bilingualism.

It has been ten years since that diagnosis by a person who is, without a doubt, the most brilliant, ironic and unique of an exceptional generation of Catalan writers, and the current state of Catalan is what it is: adapting badly to multilingualism at educational and societal level and losing importance as a vehicular language. The reasons are many, and some, probably the most important, are the political ones. If during the dictatorship there was one party that did everything possible so that Catalan was perceived as a social elevator among the popular classes, it was the party of the Catalan communists, the PSUC. There was also the Catalan Socialist party, the PSC, but nobody campaigned among working class sectors as the PSUC did.

Then, with the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, there was rapid growth in Spanish nationalism and, led by the Ciudadanos party, an end to any inhibition about attacking the policy of linguistic immersion in Catalan throughout Catalonia's school system. So that now, when there's very little left of Ciudadanos, one should remember what it was: a receptacle that gathered together people from very different ideologies but with one single obsession, the Catalan language. Albert Rivera's party quickly drew in the Popular Party leaders who couldn't stand up to the tsunami that was breaking over them. The young Falange-influenced types were more belligerent than the PP with Catalan and Catalanism and, in just a few years, they took over the party to the point where it eventually became a marginal political group.

Curiously, the weakening of both Cs and the PP in Catalonia could have led to the deactivation of the highly electorally-oriented issue of language. Yet it is precisely now that the new PSC, led from the Catalan Parliament by Miquel Iceta and Eva Granados and from the always-decisive organizational secretary Salvador Illa, has decided that this will not be the case and has agreed to present a proposal for a new linguistic policy for education in Catalonia which breaks with immersion. Destroying immersion. This step taken by the Socialists is very dangerous for Catalan, which, however you look at it, continues to be the weaker language in Catalonia. You can scarcely speak of equality when the two languages do not need the same assistance and anything other than situating Catalan in a position of advantage implies dragging it irretrievably towards a marginal status.

In this regard, no half-measures are possible. Either Catalan is given an obligatory priority or Quim Monzó's prediction will be fulfilled much sooner than even he thought.