The Catalans who define themselves as “only Catalans” and not Spaniards are becoming fewer and fewer. This is a particularly pronounced decline among young people, which coincides with their growing detachment from pro-independence theses, but which affects more or less all ages, all types of municipalities and all Spanish and Catalan speakers.
According to the different barometers of the Centre for Opinion Studies (CEO) between 2014 and 2024, the proportion of people who feel solely Catalan has gone from 29.1% to 18% in the last decade. Young people between 18 and 24 years old are those who have most abandoned this feeling: if ten years ago they were slightly above the average with 29.3%, today the figure is 11.4%, the age group with the lowest percentage.
The trend of those who feel Catalan only is decreasing in all age groups, but not in the same proportion. In the CEO Barometer of March 2014, the identity with which respondents aged 18 to 24 felt most comfortable was “Catalan only”, followed by “more Catalan than Spanish” (28%) and “both Catalan and Spanish” (26.7%). Over the course of this decade, young people who identify exclusively with the Catalan identity have fallen, while those who defend both identities with equal weight have jumped by 20 points.
Conversely, those aged 65 and over who say they feel solely Catalan are 21%, with a drop of only five points over the last ten years. If in 2014 the elderly were the least favourable to this identity with 26% of those surveyed, they have now become the age group that dominates the feeling.
The figures contrast with those who say they are both Catalan and Spanish, which increases considerably at all ages, while the options for a more Spanish identity, or exclusively Spanish, remain as residual as in 2014: 5.6% of respondents from all groups identify more with Spain than with Catalonia, and 6% of people feel only Spanish.
The downward trend in recent years is also particularly marked among Catalans. At the gates of 9-N, in 2014, 87% of those who said that Catalan was their own language said that they were more Catalan than Spanish or exclusively Catalan, a percentage that in July 2024, a few weeks before the inauguration of Salvador Illa, had dropped to 77%.
In turn, Spanish speakers who consider themselves to have both identities equally increased during this period from 54% to 60%, a smaller increase, and which is non-existent among those who feel more Spanish than Catalan or only Spanish, stable at 25%.
Fall among people born in Catalonia
There are also more significant differences between those born in Catalonia than among the rest of the citizens, since 68% of the former defended the most Catalan options ten years ago and this proportion has fallen to 52%, in favor of those who are equidistant between the two identities (from 26% to 41%).
The left is also losing its typically Catalan feeling more clearly than the right. In 2014, almost half of the ideologically far-left defined themselves as exclusively Catalan (47%), and today only 27% do so.
