Catalan is a Romance language spoken almost by 9½ million persons in the world. It is the territorial language of Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Isles and the Aragon strip, in Spain; Northern Catalonia, France; Andorra; and the city of l'Alguer on the island of Sardinia, Italy.

Territories where the language has official status

Territories where the language does not have official status

The Catalan in the eastern strip of Aragon

The eastern strip of Aragon is called “the Western strip” because it consists of four districts lined north to south alongside Catalonia, forming a strip in the west of the Catalan linguistic territory but in territory being administered by the Autonomous Community of Aragon.

This territory currently consists of 62 villages with some 47,500 inhabitants where practically the whole population has Catalan as their own language.

More specifically, between 86·28% (an Aragon Regional Government figure) and 99·03% of the population talks Catalan. As a matter of fact the Euromosaic report [1994] spoke of 97% of the population.

It is also of interest to know that the 96% of the population learns Catalan at home, the transmitted vernacular language being indisputably then this generation behind generation and ascribed to the life of the family and the villages. This figure reaches 100% among those aged over 60.
Another significant figure on Catalan as a territorial language is that Spanish is learned by more of the 87% of the population at school.

In recent years, however, a language shift is increasing, Spanish being used more and more the Catalan less and less, especially in the younger generations that often use Spanish as their main language of communication.
The basic conclusions of sociolinguistic research are that we face a very high percentage of oral knowledge, as compared to the rest of the Catalan linguistic territory and, at the same time, a very low knowledge of the written language.

The mentioned studies indicate that, among those aged under 34, between 16·66 and 17·69% no longer have Catalan as a preferential language, while between 4.58 and 7.69% never speak it.
Analysts warn that the intergenerational transmission of the language has started to decline and Spanish is starting to replace the territorial language, Catalan.

The helplessness of the language.

In spite of the Catalan linguistic and cultural reality the Government of Aragon has not taken measures to respect and to protect the Catalan and in fact this is the only autonomous community of Spanish State that has not legislated the use of the language of part of its inhabitants.
The discrimination oo the Catalan speakers in this region of Europe is severe. At the npresent time the authorities only use Spanish, there are no measures of positive discrimination of promotion of the language and culture and, worst of all, Catalan-speaking children receive an inferior treatment compared to Spanish-speaking ones that can study in their language. For education is still only in Castilian.

For all these reasons and given that this situation of helplessness of the language and its speakers that condemns to the progressive disappearance of our culture
we require
official status for our language in the eastern strip and, urgently, education therough the medium of Catalan in the schools and educational centres of our territory, following as an optimum model that of the Government of Catalonia.

References: http://www.uoc.edu/euromosaic