Will the Catalan Language Disappear? An Analysis via Mathematical Modeling
摘要
We investigate the evolution and possible extinction of the Catalan (Valencian) language in the Valencian Community, Spain. Considering its co-existence and competition with Spanish, we use a compartmental system of ordinary differential equations to analyze and fit to real data from the Valencian Government along the years 1989–2021. Social interactions between speakers that mostly use Catalan (C), speakers that mostly use Spanish (S), and speakers that use both languages equally (B), as well as non-Valencian fluxes, play the main role in the model. A deterministic formulation, with least-squares calibration, and a stochastic version, with uncertainty quantification and Bayesian bootstrap, are proposed. Essentially, it is observed that C will tend to monotonically decline toward extinction. Group B will exhibit a slight increase with low figures for some decades, but it will die out equally in a few hundreds of years. Therefore, the response to the title of the work is “yes with high confidence, for the Valencian part, if demography, laws, and attitudes keep being the same”.