Within the ranking of the 20 most important languages in the world, Catalan climbed positions in the barometer of the French Ministry of Culture, reaching 12th place.
In 2010 it reached the twentieth place (behind the Greek) and in the latest ranking of 2022 it climbed 8 places.
Although the social use of Catalan is questioned, in the end the report assesses the number of speakers of each language, their presence on the Internet and the role that each language plays in society.
Catalan versus other languages of the world
In the 2012 barometer, it moved up one position to 19th place, ahead of the Czech and behind the Romanian.
By 2017 it was no longer part of the ranking of the 20 most important languages, a fact that coincided with the politicization of Catalonia and the climax of the procés.
And he reappeared again until 2022 when he jumped to the 12th position, behind the Dutchman.
Most notably, Catalan came out ahead in terms of influence over languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Scandinavian languages.
The 12th place obtained by the Catalan in the ranking was obtained thanks to a score of 6,729 points.
However, if we take the number of speakers of Catalan, we conclude that it is the language with the lowest rate of the fifteen most influential languages.
But although it has a lower status, there are other factors that make it rise as an influential language.
One of them is that with respect to Internet penetration, Catalan has a higher rate than English, French, Spanish and Russian. This is based on the proportion of speakers who use this language on the network.
Other factors that promote Catalan and other languages
The Catalan language occupies a good level in the human development index according to UN data. These data measure the degree of economic, political and social development in the linguistic area of a language.
The most important languages in the world are: English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Italian. Although the latter language has the fewest speakers, it makes up for it by the weight of Italian culture and by being used in Italy and in the Vatican.
Spanish, on the other hand, declined in 2012 to second place, ahead of French, and in 2022 it returned to third place.
In the latest version of the ranking, the graphic system was introduced as a new factor to be taken into account. As a result, the Korean disappeared from the rankings.
The French Ministry of Culture compiled the barometer on a total of 6,102 languages. It was directly designed by Louis-Jean Calvet, PhD in humanities and human sciences and professor of linguistics, and Alain Calvet, PhD in science.
