There’s an Irish saying, tír gan teanga, tír gan anam: a country without a language is a country without a soul. Representatives of some of Europe’s estimated 60 minority languages – or minoritised, as they define them – met in Barcelona recently to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes to save it.

Language diversity is akin to biodiversity, an indicator of social wellbeing, but some of Europe’s languages are falling into disuse. Breton, for example, is dying out because its speakers are dying, and keeping languages alive among young people is challenging in an increasingly monolingual digital world.

Catalan, which is spoken by about 10 million people, is the poster child of successful minoritised languages. Thanks to decades of linguistic immersion in public education, from nursery to university, about 93.4% of the population can speak or understand Catalan, in addition to Spanish. Both are co-official languages in Catalonia, and the result is a culture that is almost completely and unselfconsciously bilingual.

However, the latest figures show that only 32.6% of adults say Catalan is the language they habitually use, and the numbers are falling, especially among younger people. Not without reason, many Catalans view the language as being in constant danger of being engulfed by Spanish (and, increasingly, by English too). One consequence of this concern is a tendency to treat Catalan more as a sacred, unalterable cultural artefact than a living language.

In addition to regular subeditors, Catalan media employ “correctors” – effectively a language police, who stamp out any perceived impurities, word play or neologisms from broadcast or published output. The result is that the language can seem stiff and uncool, which partly accounts for its declining use among young people.

“I speak a Valencian dialect of Catalan and it annoys me that........

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