Catalan language

• 1. A Secret Instruction

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  Catalan, the Romance language its speakers call català, was once the target of an order that officials were told to carry out quietly. Secret instructions went to local officials known as corregidores in Catalan territory. They "will take the utmost care to introduce the Castilian language", using measures that were meant to be temperate and disguised, so that nobody would notice the effort.

  The order did not erase the language. Catalan went on to produce chroniclers, poets, a standardized spelling, and a daily newspaper of its own.

  This documentary asks how a language that grew up around the eastern Pyrenees became one of the major voices of the medieval Mediterranean. It asks why linguists place Catalan closer to Occitan and French than to its Spanish neighbor. It asks how a language can lose its schools and its press and still be spoken at kitchen tables. And it asks why a single word, Valencian, still divides opinion.

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• 2. Rise Across the Mediterranean

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  By the 9th century, Catalan had already split off from Vulgar Latin on both sides of the eastern end of the Pyrenees. It had also taken root across the old Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis to the south. From the 8th century onward, Catalan counts pushed their territory south and west at the expense of Muslim-held lands, and their language traveled with them. The separation of the County of Barcelona from the Carolingian Empire in 988 gave this movement its decisive push.

  The written record follows the same path. In the 11th century, documents in macaronic Latin, a Latin mixed with local speech, begin to show Catalan elements. By 1080, some texts are written almost entirely in Romance. Old Catalan shared many features with Gallo-Romance, and between the 11th and 14th centuries it drifted away from Old Occitan.

  The map kept growing. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Catalan rulers expanded south as far as the Ebro river. In the 13th century they conquered the lands that became the Kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca. In the 14th century the city of Alghero in Sardinia was repopulated with Catalan speakers. The language also reached Murcia, which turned Spanish-speaking in the 15th century.

  The Low Middle Ages brought a golden age of maturity and cultural richness. Examples include the work of Ramon Llull, a polymath from Majorca who lived from 1232 to 1315. The Four Great Chronicles date from the 13th and 14th centuries. A Valencian school of poetry reached its peak with Ausiàs March, who lived from 1397 to 1459.

  By the 15th century, the city of Valencia had become the cultural center of the Crown of Aragon, and Catalan was heard all around the Mediterranean. The Royal Chancery spread a highly standardized form of the language. Catalan served as an official language in Sicily until the 15th century and in Sardinia until the 17th. The scholar Costa Carreras calls it "one of the 'great languages' of medieval Europe".

  Martorell's chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc, from 1490, captures a shift from medieval to Renaissance values, and the work of Metge shows the same change. The first book produced with movable type on the Iberian Peninsula was printed in Catalan.

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• 3. Centuries of Pressure

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  In 1479 the crowns of Castile and Aragon were united, yet the Spanish kings still ruled separate kingdoms. Each had its own culture, language and politics, and the kings had to swear by the laws of every territory before its own parliament.

  That balance ended after the War of the Spanish Succession. Under Philip V, Spain became an absolute monarchy, and the Nueva Planta decrees folded the Crown of Aragon into the Crown of Castile. This was a first step toward a Spanish nation-state, and as in other European states it meant imposing the traits of the dominant groups. The defeat of the pro-Habsburg coalition in 1714 started a series of laws that required Spanish in legal documents across Spain. Catalan use declined through the 18th century, and assimilation policies toward national minorities have been a constant since the unification of 1714.

  The measures reached down to small details. In 1799, a Royal Certificate forbade anyone to "represent, sing and dance pieces that were not in Spanish". Spanish steadily gained prestige. Already from the 16th century, Catalan literature had fallen under Spanish influence, and nobles and part of the urban and literary classes had become bilingual.

  North of the Pyrenees, the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 handed the northern part of the Principality of Catalonia to France. Local Catalan soon came under French influence, and in 1700 French became the only official language of the region. Shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, the French First Republic banned official use of the regional languages of France and enacted discriminating policies against them. The list included Catalan, Alsatian, Breton, Occitan, Flemish and Basque.

  Catalan also crossed the sea to Africa. After the French colony of Algeria was established in 1830, many Catalan-speaking settlers moved there. People from the Spanish province of Alicante settled around Oran, while settlers from French Catalonia and Menorca went to Algiers. By 1911 about 100,000 people spoke Patuet, the name given to their speech. After Algeria declared independence in 1962, almost all of these Pied-Noir Catalan speakers fled to Northern Catalonia or Alicante.

  Yet the language had never fallen silent at home. In 1807, the Statistics Office of the French Ministry of the Interior asked prefects for a survey on the limits of the French language. In Roussillon, almost only Catalan was spoken. Napoleon wanted to bring Catalonia into France, which happened in 1812, so the consul in Barcelona was questioned as well. He reported that Catalan was taught, printed and spoken at every level of society, "with the exception of the royal courts".

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• 4. Revival and Silence

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  Aribau's Ode to the Homeland, published in 1833, opened a Catalan literary revival known as the Renaixença. Verdaguer wrote its poetry, Oller its realist novels and Guimerà its drama. The revival ran through the second half of the 19th century and reached a high point in the early 1900s.

  Organizing the language came next. In October 1906, Barcelona hosted the First International Congress of the Catalan Language, where standardization was among the topics. The Institut d'Estudis Catalans was founded in 1911, and its Philological Section published the Normes ortogràfiques in 1913. Antoni Maria Alcover and Pompeu Fabra directed the work.

  The Second Spanish Republic, which lasted from 1931 to 1939, brought a brief period of tolerance. Most restrictions on Catalan were lifted, and the language became official. The Generalitat, Catalonia's autonomous government established in 1931, used Catalan as a matter of course in its administration. It also worked to promote the language socially, including in schools and at the University of Barcelona.

  The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, left Catalan language and culture still vibrant. The decades of dictatorship that followed crushed them at an unprecedented level. Franco's regime abolished the official status of Catalan, imposed Spanish in schools and public administration across Spain, and banned Catalan from both. Between 1939 and 1943, Catalan newspapers and book printing almost disappeared. Francisco Franco's wish for a homogeneous Spanish population resonated with some Catalans, mostly from the upper class, who began to reject their own language. Pressure was applied in schools, government bodies and religious centers.

  Despite all this, Catalan kept being used privately within households. At the end of World War II, some of the harshest measures began to lift. Spanish remained the only language promoted, but a limited amount of Catalan literature was tolerated. Prizes were created to reward works in Catalan, among them the Joan Martorell prize in 1947, the Carles Riba award in 1950, the Víctor Català prize in 1953 and the Honor Award of Catalan Letters in 1969. The first Catalan-language television show was broadcast in 1964.

  Migration made the problem worse. During the 1950s, people moved into Catalonia from other parts of Spain, because Catalonia was the economic powerhouse of the country. Many of these newcomers did not know Catalan existed and saw no need to learn it. Job opportunities shrank for anyone who was not bilingual. Daily newspapers stayed exclusively in Spanish until 1976, when Avui appeared as the first daily in Catalan since the end of the Civil War.

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• 5. Speakers Today

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  Andorra is the one state where Catalan is the sole official language, and Andorrans speak a Western variety of it. In Spain, Catalan is the indigenous and official language of three autonomous communities: Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community. In the Valencian Community it is called valencià. It has semi-official status in the Italian city of Alghero, and it is spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France. It is also spoken in La Franja, the eastern strip of Aragon, and in the Carche area of the Region of Murcia. The whole zone is often called the Països Catalans, or Catalan Countries, a name based on cultural affinity and shared heritage. It has also been given a political reading, but it has no official status.

  Counting speakers is slippery. A 2011 study put the total at over 9.8 million, with 5.9 million of them living in Catalonia. More than half spoke Catalan as a second language. Ethnologue counted 4.1 million native speakers and 5.1 million second-language speakers in 2021. Very few people speak only Catalan. In Catalonia, 99.7% of Catalan speakers can speak Spanish and 99.9% can understand it.

  A 2019 survey by the Catalan government found that 31.5% of the inhabitants of Catalonia mainly spoke Catalan at home. Another 52.7% mainly spoke Spanish, 2.8% used both, and 10.8% used other languages. In Barcelona, the 2013 linguistic census counted 1,501,262 residents. Spanish was the most spoken language there, yet 95% of residents understood Catalan and 72.3% of those over the age of two could speak it. Knowledge of Catalan has grown significantly in recent decades thanks to language immersion in schools.

  Since the Spanish transition to democracy, Catalan has been an official language, a language of education and a language of the mass media. Teaching it is mandatory in all schools in Catalonia. Spanish can still be used for study in the public system in two cases: when the teacher assigned to a class chooses it, or while recently arrived immigrant students are learning. In May 2022, the Spanish Supreme Court urged the Catalan regional government to enforce a rule that 25% of all lessons be taught in Spanish. In Andorra, the 1993 constitution brought policies that favor Catalan, including Catalan-medium education.

  Elsewhere the language is giving ground. In Northern Catalonia in France, most native speakers were 60 or older as of 2004, and 30% of primary students and 15% of secondary students study Catalan as a foreign language. The association La Bressola runs a network of community-run immersion schools. On the 10th of December 2007, the then General Council of the Pyrénées-Orientales officially recognized Catalan as one of the department's languages. In Alicante province, Spanish is replacing Catalan, and in Alghero, Italian is. Diglossia, in which two languages hold unequal roles, is well ingrained in the Valencian Community and Ibiza.

  The language has also traveled with people. During the 20th century, many Catalans emigrated or went into exile to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and other countries in the Americas. They formed many Catalan colonies and founded associations called casals, and those communities still maintain the language.

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• 6. Closer to France

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  Pèire Bèc classifies Catalan as an Occitano-Romance language within the Gallo-Romance group. Not every linguist agrees, and Spanish scholars such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal are among those who do not. What nobody disputes is the kinship with Occitan. Catalan was treated as a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century, and Occitan remains its closest relative.

  Catalan is spoken mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, yet it differs markedly from Spanish and Portuguese in pronunciation, grammar and especially vocabulary. It shows its closest affinity with languages native to France and northern Italy. Ethnologue measures its lexical similarity at 87% with Italian and 85% with Portuguese and Spanish. The figure is 76% for Ladin and Romansh, 75% for Sardinian and 73% for Romanian.

  During much of its history, and especially under Franco, Catalan was ridiculed as a mere dialect of Spanish. That view rests on political and ideological motives and has no linguistic validity. Evidence points to a split that is old: at least from the 2nd century AD, the vocabulary and phonology of Roman Tarraconensis differed from the rest of Roman Hispania. The verb for boiling shows the pattern. Spanish has hervir, while Catalan has bullir, just like Occitan bolir. Likewise, Spanish novillo means bullock, while Catalan torell sits beside Occitan taurèl.

  Catalan also keeps native words that are rare elsewhere. Enyorar means to miss someone or to pine for them, and rebutjar means to reject. Even the layers of borrowed words fall differently than in Spanish. Catalan alfàbia, a large earthenware jar, comes from Arabic. Still, the Arabic element is generally much more prevalent in Spanish.

  In the 14th and 15th centuries, Catalan took in far more Greek and Latin learned words than other Romance languages did, as the writings of Roís de Corella attest. Most literate Catalan speakers also read Latin, so they easily carried its vocabulary first into their writing and eventually into their speech.

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• 7. Sounds and Grammar

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  Amic and amiga, the Catalan words for a male and a female friend, show one of the language's signature habits. A voiced consonant at the end of a word turns voiceless, so the last sound of amic is not the one heard inside amiga. Catalan also packs in many one-syllable words, and they can end in a wide range of consonants, including some clusters.

  The sound system rests on seven stressed vowels. Other Western Romance languages share this contrast between open and closed vowels, but Spanish does not. In Central Catalan, the standard pronunciation, unstressed vowels shrink to three. Gel, meaning ice, becomes gelat, meaning ice cream, and the vowel of the first syllable softens into a schwa. Most dialects also pronounce a dark l, made with the back of the tongue raised, which stands out compared with Spanish, Italian and French.

  Spelling is systematic and largely based on sound. The letters ll and ny each stand for one sound, as in lloc, meaning place, and Catalunya. The pair tx gives the sound of English ch, as in despatx, meaning office. Between vowels, the special sign ŀl marks a doubled l, as in noveŀla, although speakers usually pronounce a single l.

  Nouns and adjectives have two genders and two numbers, and only pronouns keep case. The masculine ending -o of Portuguese, Spanish and Italian is gone, so masculine forms carry nothing and feminine forms take -a, as in el gat and la gata. Catalan keeps related forms for boy and girl, noi and noia, and for cock and hen, gall and gallina. French uses unrelated words such as garçon and fille.

  The unstressed personal pronouns have 13 distinct forms, against 11 in Spanish and 9 in Italian. They can combine in 65 ways. This freedom lets speakers place almost any element at the start of a sentence without using the passive voice. Catalan can say m'hi recomanaren, meaning they recommended me to him. French needs ils m'ont recommandé à lui, and Spanish needs me recomendaron a él.

  Verbs are traditionally sorted into three conjugations, but only the first is truly productive, with about 3500 common verbs. The third, the type of servir, is semiproductive with about 700. The second has fewer than 100 and gains new members only through compounding. Most dialects have replaced the old synthetic past with a form of anar, meaning to go, plus an infinitive.

  Word order is flexible, though the basic pattern is subject, verb, object. Ha arribat el tren and El tren ha arribat both mean that the train has arrived. The first puts the focus on the train and the second on the arrival. The difference is described as "what you might say while waiting in the station" versus "what you might say on the train".

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• 8. The Valencian Question

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  In 2004, while the European Constitution was being drafted, the Spanish government sent the EU translations of the text into Basque, Galician, Catalan and Valencian. The Catalan and Valencian versions were identical. The episode captures a long-running quarrel over whether Valencian is a language of its own.

  Linguists, including Valencian scholars, treat Catalan and Valencian as the same language. Valencian counts as a Western dialect, alongside the North-Western varieties of the provinces of Lleida and the western half of Tarragona. Central Catalan has 90% to 95% inherent intelligibility for Valencian speakers. The Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, created by the Valencian parliament, declares the linguistic unity of Valencian and Catalan. Its standard is based on the Normes de Castelló, which Valencian writers and intellectuals adopted in 1932 at Castelló de la Plana, following Pompeu Fabra's norms.

  Public opinion disagrees. An opinion poll carried out between 2001 and 2004 showed that most Valencians consider Valencian different from Catalan. That view is promoted mainly by people who do not use Valencian regularly, and younger people educated in Valencian are much less likely to hold it. The Royal Academy of Valencian Culture, supported by a minority of scholars outside linguistics, uses its own standard called the Norms of El Puig.

  The dialects as a whole are unusually uniform for a Romance language, with mutual intelligibility estimated at 90% to 95%. Algherese is the isolated exception. The main split is between Eastern and Western blocks, and it comes down to unstressed a and e, which merge into a schwa in the east but stay distinct in the west. The Western block holds North-Western and Valencian. The Eastern block holds Central Catalan, Balearic, Roussillonese and Algherese. Central Catalan has the most speakers and covers the Barcelona province, the eastern half of Tarragona and most of Girona.

  Vocabulary and verbs mark the divide too. Eastern speakers say mirall for mirror, noi for boy and sortir for to exit. Western speakers say espill, xiquet and eixir. The phrase meaning I speak is parlo in Central Catalan, parl in Balearic, parli in the north and parle in Valencian.

  The written standards differ in small ways. The Valencian standard writes anglés where the Institut d'Estudis Catalans writes anglès, and meua where it writes meva. In the Balearic Islands, the university favors cantam for we sing. In Alghero, the standard uses lo as the definite article instead of el. In 1999, Italy's Law No. 482 recognized Algherese Catalan among twelve historical linguistic minorities. In 2011, the Aragonese government approved the statutes of a new regulator for Catalan in La Franja, the Institut Aragonès del Català.

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