Native languages in autonomous communities with co-official languages[1]
Autonomous community
Co-official language
Spanish
Co-official language
Equal use
Others
Catalonia
Catalan and Aranese
55.1%
31.0%
2.4%
10.1%
Valencia
Valencian (variety of Catalan)
60.8%
28.8%
9.5%
0.8%
Galicia
Galician
30.9%
40.9%
25.3%
2.9%
Basque Country
Basque
76.4%
17.5%
6.0%
n/d
Balearic Islands
Catalan
48.6%
37.9%
3.6%
9.9%
Navarra
Basque
91.9%
6.1%
2.8%
n/d
There is a variety of Vernacular languages spoken in Spain. Spanish, the official language in the entire country, is the predominant native language in almost all of the autonomous communities in Spain. Six of the seventeen autonomous communities in Spain have other co-official languages in addition to Spanish. Bilingualism in different degrees and in distinct communicative situations between Spanish and another language is a habitual practice for many of the Spanish people who reside in one of these autonomous communities.
According to the Survey of the Involvement of the Adult Population in Learning Activities[2] distributed by the National Institute of Statistics with data from 2016, in regards to the languages in Spain that are native languages or languages that are not native but used, 98.9% of the population speaks Spanish, 17.5% speaks Catalan, 6.2% speaks Galician, 5.8% speaks Valencian (a variety of Catalan) and 3.0% speaks Basque. For autonomous communities, Catalan can be used by almost 85% of the population of Catalonia and 63.1% of the Balearic region, Galician is used by 89% of Galicians, Valencian is used by 51.8% of the residents in that community and Basque is spoken by 55.1% of the Basque population and 21.7% of people in Navarre. With regard to native languages alone, Galician is the native language of 82.8% of Galicians, Catalan is the native language of 31.6% of people in Catalonia and of 42.9% of the residents in the Balearic region. Valencian (a variety of Catalan) is the native language of 35.2% of the population in that community and Basque is the native language of 33.7% of the Basque people and of 14.6% of those from Navarre.[3]
With the exception of Basque, which is a language isolate, all of the vernacular languages spoken now in Spain are Romance languages, within the family of the Indo-European languages. The majority belong to the sub-group of languages Iberian Romance, with the exception of Catalan/Valencian and Aranese, belonging to the Occitano-Romances and Aragonese. Affiliation between one subgroup or the other is a cause for active discussion.
^Datos de lengua materna: Cataluña (2013), Baleares (2015), [12];0[all]&C=1[0];2[2013]&F=&S=&SCF=Galicia (2013), País Vasco (2016), Navarra (2011) y Comunidad Valenciana (2007).
^"INEbase / Society /Education and culture /Survey on the Involvement of the Adult Population in Learning Activities / Results/ Year 2016". ine.es. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
^"La mitad de los españoles habla un segundo idioma y 4 de cada 10 elige el inglés". abc (in Spanish). 30 November 2017. Retrieved 1 June 2019.
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