Spanish is a very influential language. That is known and you don't need to be an expert to realize it: just reviewing factors such as the number of speakers on the entire planet or the number of publications is enough. On the other hand, the fact that Catalan is an influential language worldwide is not so easy to sustain. Even in Catalonia, where the debate on the use of the language is recurring and there is not much confidence among many Catalans regarding the health of Catalan.
However, the French Ministry of Culture places the Catalan language twelfth in the world ranking, above languages such as Mandarin, Japanese or Hindi, which indicates from the outset that the criterion for the number of speakers is not the same. the only one used by the French authorities to carry out this classification. According to the same ministry, Spanish is the third most influential language, and French, the second.
In its fourth edition, the 2022 French Language Barometer -coordinated by Louis-Jean Calvet, Ph.D. in linguistics- uses about thirteen factors that allow for a holistic study of the language and some notable developments since the last edition of 2017.
With these criteria, the ranking highlights the influence of Spanish and Catalan, through their respective positions (they achieve 8,924 and 6,729 points each) that show, among other things, the confirmation of Spanish as one of the most important languages in the world. along with French and English (undisputed number 1). As far as Catalan is concerned, in addition to his position, his evolution is surprising, since in the previous barometer he had classified in 23rd position.
Professor Calvet's model globally distinguishes two types of factors on which to rely to obtain an "objective and global" result. In the first place, the intrinsic factors, that is, the purely linguistic factors, among them the number of speakers or teaching at the university level. On the other hand, the contextual factors, which group all the social, political, cultural and technological elements related to the environment in which a certain language exists, such as the human development index or the fertility index.
As far as intrinsic factors are concerned, it is evident that the number of speakers is probably the first factor. Here it is used differentiating native speakers, who have a greater weight in the model, and foreign speakers. Spanish obtains the highest score (0.912) among the first 14, which has some 460 million native speakers, that is, 81 million more than English. In comparison, Catalan obtains the lowest index (0.357), which reinforces its projection capacity despite its geographical and demographic limits.
In most of the three contextual factors, Catalan has very good scores, even higher than those of Castilian, such as the Human Development Index (0.9 against 0.7), or Internet penetration, which calculates the proportion of speakers of a language who regularly use it online. It has an index higher than four of the five most powerful languages in the world: English (0.911), French (0.909), Spanish (0.701) and Russian (0.813) with an exceptional level of 0.934.
The high position of the Castilian is explained by being regularly well positioned in most of the 13 indices, with relatively high scores that allow it to prevail in the top 3. The brilliant thrust of the Catalan is explained by relatively important indices in almost half of the factors, and the almost absence of low indices: fertility (0.032), international prices (0) and status of recognition by the political instances of the countries in which it is spoken (0.025). Languages like Mandarin or Japanese are much more widely spoken, but have lower rates on some 5 factors, particularly the HDI or fertility level.
As a curiosity, other co-official languages of Spain such as Galician or Basque are located in positions number 37 and 38, respectively, just above Hindi, a language that has around 341 million native speakers.
