After Spanish and Portuguese, Catalan is the third most commonly heard language on the Iberian Peninsula. Some 4 million people there speak Catalan natively and another 5 million have acquired it. Strongest concentrations occur in northeastern Spain surrounding Barcelona (Catalonia), Valencia, the Balearic Islands, extreme southern France, part of Sardinia, and the tiny country of Andorra where it's the official language. Belonging to Indo-European's Romance group, Catalan is quite closely related to Provençal and slightly less so to French and Spanish. Theologian/poet/mystic Ramon Llull (c.1235-1315) was the first notable author to challenge the supremacy of Latin and Provençal in his region by expressing the balance of his written output in Catalan — in roughly the same way Geoffrey Chaucer championed written English a few decades later. Compared with Spanish, Catalan has a wider range of sounds and its words tend to be shorter and more inclined to end in consonants. The Spanish nouns tiempo (weather), dinero (money), mantequilla (butter), and sello (postage stamp) map closely to temps, diners, mantega and segell respectively. Other dictions are entirely different: desayuno (breakfast) vs. esmorzar in Catalan; cama (bed) vs. llit. To many ears, spoken Catalan resembles French without the nasal sounds. |
