28 Facts About Catalan language

The Catalan language-speaking territories are often called the or "Catalan language Countries".

Old Catalan language shared many features with Gallo-Romance, diverging from Old Occitan between the 11th and 14th centuries.

The Catalan language reached Murcia, which became Spanish-speaking in the 15th century.

Catalan spelling was standardized in 1913 and the language became official during the Second Spanish Republic.

Since the Spanish transition to democracy, Catalan has been institutionalized as an official language, language of education, and language of mass media; all of which have contributed to its increased prestige.

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The teaching of Catalan language is mandatory in all schools, but it is possible to use Spanish for studying in the public education system of Catalonia in two situations – if the teacher assigned to a class chooses to use Spanish, or during the learning process of one or more recently arrived immigrant students.

Catalan language was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative.

However, despite being spoken mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, Catalan has marked differences with the Iberian Romance group in terms of pronunciation, grammar, and especially vocabulary; showing instead its closest affinity with languages native to France and northern Italy, particularly Occitan and to a lesser extent Gallo-Romance (Franco-Provencal, French, Gallo-Italian).

Spanish and Catalan have important differences in their sound systems, lexicon, and grammatical features, placing the language in features closer to Occitan.

Differentiation arose generally because Spanish, Asturian, and Galician-Portuguese share certain peripheral archaisms and innovatory regionalisms (Sp, Ast vs Cat, Oc "bullock"), while Catalan language has a shared history with the Western Romance innovative core, especially Occitan.

Traditionally Catalan language-speaking territories are sometimes called the, a denomination based on cultural affinity and common heritage, that has had a subsequent political interpretation but no official status.

Knowledge of Catalan has increased significantly in recent decades thanks to a language immersion educational system.

An important social characteristic of the Catalan language is that all the areas where it is spoken are bilingual in practice: together with the French language in Roussillon, with Italian in Alghero, with Spanish and French in Andorra and with Spanish in the rest of the territories.

Additionally, Catalan language has final obstruent devoicing, which gives rise to an abundance of such couplets as vs ("female friend").

Central Catalan pronunciation is considered to be standard for the language.

Catalan language has inherited the typical vowel system of Vulgar Latin, with seven stressed phonemes:, a common feature in Western Romance, with the exception of Spanish.

Catalan language is split in two major dialectal blocks: Eastern and Western.

Central Catalan is considered the standard pronunciation of the language and has the largest number of speakers.

In terms of pronunciation, Catalan has many words ending in a wide variety of consonants and some consonant clusters, in contrast with many other Romance languages.

Catalan language has inherited the typical vowel system of Vulgar Latin, with seven stressed phonemes:, a common feature in Western Romance, except Spanish.

Standard Catalan language, virtually accepted by all speakers, is mostly based on Eastern Catalan language, which is the most widely used dialect.

Literary Catalan language allows the use of words from different dialects, except those of very restricted use.

The incorporation of learned, or "bookish" words from its own ancestor language, Latin, into Catalan is arguably another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church.

Process of morphological derivation in Catalan follows the same principles as the other Romance languages, where agglutination is common.

Catalan language uses the Latin script, with some added symbols and digraphs.

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Standardization of Catalan was among the topics discussed during the First International Congress of the Catalan Language, held in Barcelona October 1906.

Catalan language has few suppletive couplets, like Italian and Spanish, and unlike French.

Thus, Catalan language can have, whereas in French one must say, and Spanish.