What the Catalan Language is NOT
25 April by Marc Sardon on Flickr Sometimes when I hear people talking about the beautiful language that they speak in three regions of Spain—Cataluña, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands—they often describe it in a way that, to me, is like nails on a chalkboard. Let me explain: Catalan isn’t Spanish. It isn’t French. It isn’t a fusion/mixture/combination of French and Spanish. It isn’t a dialect of Spanish. It does look a lot like French, and Spanish, too; but it’s neither one of them. It’s Catalan. The Catalan language arose from the Latin spoken by the common people in the northeast corner of the Iberian peninsula, centuries after the Roman Empire had dissolved into the Mediterranean Sea, in just the same way as French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese similarly developed. Although, like all Romance languages, it’s related to French and Spanish, it’s nevertheless individual and unique. For example, here’s the Universal Declaration...