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  • Catalan language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Catalan IPA : [ˈkʰæ.təˌlæn] ( català IPA : [ˌkə.təˈla] or [ ˌka.taˈla ]) is a Romance language , the national language of Andorra , and a co-official language in the ...

  • Catalan Language

    General Overview of the Catalan language ... Catalan Language General Overview. Area of Distribution and Number of Speakers

  • Catalan language, alphabet and pronunciation

    Catalan (català) Catalan is a Romance language spoken by about 12 million people. It is the official language of Andorra and an official language, along with Spanish, in ...

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Catalan Language

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Catalan Language, language that originated in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain. Catalan is spoken in Spain, in the autonomous regions of Catalonia and València and in the Balearic Islands; in France, in nearly the whole of the Pyrénées-Orientales; in Andorra; and in Alghero in Sardinia.

The Catalan language is a Romance language. For years some philologists held that it was merely a dialectal offshoot of Provençal and that during the Middle Ages it had raised itself for a time to the dignity of a literary language. Subsequent research led other scholars to claim the complete independence of Catalan as a language. Ranged in the group of Hispanic languages, Catalan has a character as distinctive as that of Castilian, Portuguese, and Galician. Among the characteristics of Catalan are the following: A number of perfect participles are formed from the perfect stem instead of from the infinitive stem; the pronunciation of b and v has not merged; the voiced sound of intervocalic s has persisted; in unaccented final vowels, a is retained and other vowels are dropped; the Latin au is changed to o as in Castilian; final dentals are vocalized, which is held to be the essential characteristic of classic Catalan; noun declensions are totally absent; and the original pronunciation of the Latin ū is retained in cases in which French and Provençal use ü.



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