Catalan language: history, distribution, varieties and cultural role

Catalan has about 11.5 million active speakers, and about 12.6 million people understand Catalan. The area of distribution of the language includes the following regions:

• In Spain, Catalonia, most of the region of Valencia - the local variety of Catalan is also called Valencian (valencià) -, the Balearic Islands, where the dialects called Mallorquín (mallorquí), Menorquín (menorquí) and Ibizan (eivissenc) - grouped together as Balearic - are spoken, and a strip of land in eastern Aragon, the Franja de Aragón, with català ribagorçà.
• in the south of France, the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, also known as "Northern Catalonia" - the local variety of Catalan is called rosellonès,
• in Italy, the town of Alghero in Sardinia (Catalan L'Alguer, where few people still speak alguerés, see below),
• Andorra.

These areas are also collectively referred to as Països Catalans ("Catalan Lands"). Today, the Porta dels Països Catalans near Salses-le-Château stands on the northern linguistic border.

The Catalan language area as a whole is divided into two dialect groups: Eastern Catalan, which includes the eastern part of Catalonia, the Catalan-speaking part of France, the Balearic Islands and Alguer, and Western Catalan dialects. The main criterion for this division is the pronunciation of the unstressed vowels o, e, and a. While in Western Catalan they are always pronounced as they are written, in the pronunciation of Eastern Catalan o in unstressed position becomes u, e and a become short open vowels or a schwa sound ([ə]) similar to German e in bitte.

The status of the language varies depending on the region. In Andorra, Catalan is the sole official language; in Spain, it is the regional official language. In the "Language Law of Aragón" (Ley de Lenguas de Aragón), passed on 9 May 2013 by the Aragón regional parliament under the leadership of the Partido Popular, the language is designated for its own governmental area with the glottonym Lengua aragonesa propia del área oriental (LAPAO). In the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales, a Charter for the Promotion of the Catalan Language (French: Charte en faveur du Catalan) was adopted in December 2007 to protect and develop Catalan in northern Catalonia. In Alguer, the local language variety is taught by the hour in school.

Alphabet and pronunciation

Orthographic peculiarities

• Catalan written language, like Spanish, uses the tremolo to make the pronunciation of the phoneme /u/ clear when it is placed between g or q and e or i.

Ex: llengües 'languages'.

Ex: qüestió 'question'.

• In addition, Catalan (unlike Spanish) also uses the trema to indicate that i and u after vowel are syllabic:

Ex: països (trisyllabic, without trema it would be disyllabic) 'countries'.

Ex: diürn (two syllables, without trema it would be one syllable with i as syllable carrier) 'belonging to the day'.

• Furthermore, Catalan uses a so-called punt volat (German Mittelpunkt, literally 'flown point') between two 'l's when the pronunciation [l] is to be maintained.

Ex: coŀlecció 'collection', pronunciation [l], pronounced elongated by some speakers: [l:]

as opposed to castellà 'Castilian language', pronunciation [ʎ].

The use of this midpoint is linguistically unique in its meaning. Comparable are at most the use of the hyphen to separate "s" and "ch" in Engadine, the punt interior (German Mittelpunkt) in Gascon or the punt volat in Franco-Provençal.

Morphology and syntax

Catalan grammar has a number of similarities to Spanish and French grammar, but also some peculiarities. In the area of nouns, as is generally the case in Romance languages, there is a distinction between feminines and masculines in Catalan; case forms are only connected, clitic personal pronouns, which in the 3rd person also distinguish between accusative and dative objects. Catalan, like Spanish but unlike French, is a pro-drop language, i.e. it allows the omission of subject pronouns and therefore uses unconnected subject pronouns mainly contrastively.

Conjugation includes simple (synthetic) tenses in the subjunctive, conditional, preterite and future tense (which is also formed here, as e.g. in French, on the basis of the infinitive forms). There are three verbal classes with regard to conjugation patterns, the first group with the infinitive on -ar, the second on -er and -re, and the third on -ir. It is noticeable, however, that not all verbs with the same infinitive ending are conjugated in the same way; there are a large number of exceptions. Els verbs conjugats by Joan Baptista Xuriguera lists 120 conjugation tables.

In the case of compound tenses, Catalan also has the frequently encountered passive forms with the auxiliary verb 'to be' + participle and perfect formations with the auxiliary verb 'to have'. In addition, Catalan also has another and very unusual periphrastic past tense (called pretèrit perfet perifràstic), formed with an auxiliary verb anar 'to go', whose present tense forms derive from Latin vadere (cf. vaig, vas, va, vam/vàrem, vau/vàreu, van/varen), plus the infinitive of the full verb. Example:

Compare the outwardly identical French construction (il) va venir, which, however, has the meaning of a future tense (as does Western Romance in general, so also Spanish port. ir (+ a) + inf.). Catalan is the only Romance language (and perhaps the only one ever) where the auxiliary verb "to go" denotes a past tense. It should be added, however, that some forms have a different meaning in the proper sense of "to go" than in this function as an auxiliary verb, such as anem "we go" versus vàrem venir "we came".

Particularities can also be found in the word order. In most cases, the word order in Catalan sentences (as in other Romance languages) is given as subject-verb-object (SVO). On closer inspection, however, we find that the position of the subject, in particular, varies significantly according to the informational structure: When the subject corresponds to a topic, i.e. takes in known information, it is placed before the verb, but when it corresponds to new information, it must be placed at the end of the sentence. This can be seen in the behaviour in the context of questions:

This behavior is different from that in strict SVO languages like English: What did John bring? - John brought the BOOK. and likewise Who brought the book? - JOHN brought the book.

Furthermore, with intransitive verbs, one finds that it is generally "difficult to determine whether the position of the subject before or after the verb has a more neutral effect." These and other properties of postposed subjects have led some linguists to consider the position of the subject at the end of the sentence (i.e. VOS) as the basic position. The possibility of a postposed subject (inversion) also exists in other Romance languages, but is more extended in Catalan (similar to Spanish and Portuguese) than in French or Italian, for example.

Vocabulary in comparison with other Romance languages

Catalan is very closely related to Occitan within the Romance languages, as can be seen from its vocabulary, among other things.

Unlike Spanish, Catalan did not undergo extensive diphthongization (from /o/ to /we/ and from /i/ to /je/). Nor was there the development of shifting f-initial words to /h/ (now silent):

Other etyms also serve as a basis for Gallo-Romance than in Ibero-Romance. Here, too, the position of Catalan as a transitional language (llengua-pont) becomes clear:

Other words, on the other hand, indicate no relationship with Spanish or French:

A special feature of Catalan is that the final /n/ has disappeared from many words. However, it is respected again in the formation of the plural:

The Catalan lexicon also features words of Germanic origin that found their way into the language during the Migration Period. However, they only make up a small part of the vocabulary: