Vanished Secession Urges in Catalonia: Family Language, Media and Age Variations

• Authors: José M. Oller, Albert Satorra and Adolf Tobeña
• Humanities and Social Sciences Communications..

The secession campaign in Catalonia (2010–2017) created a deep fracture between two citizenry segments: those who favoured secession from Spain and those who were against it. In longitudinal studies covering periods from 2006 onwards, we showed that this fissure operated through an ethnolinguistic cleavage based on family language and ascendancy origins, and that media outlets linked to pro-secession Regional Governments accentuated the political division. Here we extend these analyses till the end of 2025, to portray variations on such division across the eight years following the failed secession attempt in October 2017. Present findings confirm the persistence of the fissure through similar lines: family language interacts with regular following of regional media to keep the fracture alive despite a clear attenuation of opposed identity alignments during recent years. The entrenchment along unique and exclusionary national identities significantly diminished in several measures. Elapsed time after secession failure and the incidence of both internal and external political events might have helped to calm tensions and repair a social fracture. Potential effects of age and ongoing changes on left-right ideological self-positioning are accrued as additional factors that may have also contributed to dampening down divisions within an alleviated though latent conflict.