A quick glance at the Catalán language

Do you speak Catalan?

I'm sure you have seen or heard, as I have, recent news reports of the independence movement in Catalonia, Spain.  How little I know about this autonomous region of Spain, and how little I know about the Catalan language!

A previous spark of interest in this language hit me several years ago during a family trip to Barcelona, the capital city of Catalonia (see "So many languages, so little time" in this blog, 2/10/16).

Barcelona

But as usually happens with me, I visit a country, get super-hyped about learning the local language, and then let my fickle language learning self put it to one side when I return home.

Now Catalan is calling to me again, although I am realistic enough to know I will never be a Catalan speaker.  But I would like to become better acquainted with this language that plays such a large part in cultural identity.

First, some basic facts about Catalan.  It is a Romance language, descended from Latin, like its sister languages French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, among others.  Nine to ten million persons currently speak Catalan.

Romance Languages Family Tree

Catalan is spoken in the small country of Andorra, where it is the national and official language, and in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Valencia (called valenciano), and even a town in Italy and some regions in France.

Catalan-speaking regions

Beware of calling Catalan a dialect of Spanish!  It is a separate language. Monolingual Spanish and Catalan speakers cannot readily understand each other. Also, Catalan itself has six different dialects, evidence that it is a separate language. The written versions, however, of both Spanish and Catalan may appear similar enough for the reader to make an educated guess at meaning.

Because Catalan sounds like a mixture of Spanish, French and Italian (closer to French and Italian than Spanish), and I study those Romance languages, I am lulled into thinking that I should be able to at least understand Catalan.  Not! So I turn to my favorite online language learning program, Duolingo, to investigate Catalan.  It is available as a language for Spanish speakers to study.

Duolingo Catalan Lesson One

I tried out the first Catalan lesson on Duolingo. If you are acquainted with Spanish, see if you can guess the meaning of these Catalan words and expressions that I encountered.

un home
una nena
una dona
un nen
Sóc un home.
Jo sóc un nen.
Jo sóc una nena.

Some words look comfortingly familiar.  Un and Una are indefinite articles (a or an in English). Home looks like a shortened form of hombre (man), nena is close to niña (girl), and nen is fairly close to niño (boy).  Jo looks like yo (I), so  jo sóc  probably means yo soy (I am).

The spoken language may be more of a challenge, however.  A web search revealed some letters that  take special attention.  The letter combination "nya" is equivalent to the Spanish ñ, which is why you will often see the province name of Cataluña (in Spanish) written in Catalan as Catalunya. 

The "x" is a distinctive letter.  Can you guess the meaning of xocolata, one of my favorite comfort foods? The ç is an "ss" sound, as in the Catalan word for "to begin," començar. The "ny" is like a Spanish ñ, but with no vowel sound afterward, so baño (bath) becomes bany in Catalan.  And I also discovered that the "ll" is a different, harder sound than  the "y" sound those letters make in Spanish.

I'm going to leave Catalan on my list of Duolingo languages to study daily. The allure of using knowledge from other Romance languages to make quick progress in Catalan is too strong to pass up.  What an enjoyable way to learn about another culture!