THE weekend's election seems to have cleared up little about the
prospects for Catalonian independence. The governing party,
which campaigned for Catalonia's right to self-determination but
not (yet) outright immediate independence, lost seats. An
outright secessionist party gained seats, but so did a party
vociferously opposed to independence. Overall, parties
affiliated with the self-determination movement will now have a
majority. What are the linguistic factors at play? Catalan is an
ancient language, recorded at least since the 11th century in a
form clearly distinct from vulgar Latin. This age puts it
roughly on par with the much bigger neighbouring French and
Castillian Spanish. Unlike neighbouring Occitan/Provençal (also
found in writing a thousand years ago), Catalan is the vibrant
majority language of its territory still today. A 2001 census of
Catalonia found that 4.6m of the 6.2m in the Catalan autonomous
region spoke Catalan (and 3.1m could write it). Unfortunately,
this doesn't distinguish level