Catalan, known in the Valencian Community and Carche as Valencian, is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of three autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community, where it is called Valencian. It has semi-official status in the Italian comune of Alghero, and it is spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia. The Catalan-speaking territories are often called the Països Catalans or "Catalan Countries".
Occitan, also known as lenga d'òc by its native speakers, sometimes also referred to as Provençal, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as Spain's Val d'Aran in Catalonia; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in Calabria in a linguistic enclave of Cosenza area. Some include Catalan in Occitan, as the distance between this language and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance between different Occitan dialects. Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative.
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Valencian or the Valencian language is the official, historical and traditional name used in the Valencian Community of Spain to refer to the Romance language also known as Catalan, either as a whole or in its Valencia-specific linguistic forms. The Valencian Community's 1982 Statute of Autonomy and the Spanish Constitution officially recognise Valencian as the name of the regional language.
The Andalusian dialects of Spanish are spoken in Andalusia, Ceuta, Melilla, and Gibraltar. They include perhaps the most distinct of the southern variants of peninsular Spanish, differing in many respects from northern varieties in a number of phonological, morphological and lexical features. Many of these are innovations which, spreading from Andalusia, failed to reach the higher strata of Toledo and Madrid speech and become part of the Peninsular norm of standard Spanish. Andalusian Spanish has historically been stigmatized at a national level, though this appears to have changed in recent decades, and there is evidence that the speech of Seville or the norma sevillana enjoys high prestige within Western Andalusia.
Balearic is the collective name for the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands: mallorquí in Mallorca, eivissenc in Ibiza and menorquí in Menorca.
The Catalan Countries are those territories where the Catalan language is spoken. They include the Spanish regions of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Valencian Community, and parts of Aragon and Murcia (Carche), as well as the Principality of Andorra, the department of Pyrénées-Orientales in France, and the city of Alghero in Sardinia (Italy). It is often used as a sociolinguistic term to describe the cultural-linguistic area where Catalan is spoken. In the context of Catalan nationalism, the term is sometimes used in a more restricted way to refer to just Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands. The Catalan Countries do not correspond to any present or past political or administrative unit, though most of the area belonged to the Crown of Aragon in the Middle Ages. Parts of Valencia (Spanish) and Catalonia (Occitan) are not Catalan-speaking.
The voiced palatal lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʎ⟩, a rotated lowercase letter ⟨y⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is L.
The phonology of Catalan, a Romance language, has a certain degree of dialectal variation. Although there are two standard varieties, one based on Central Eastern dialect and another one based on South-Western or Valencian dialect, this article deals with features of all or most dialects, as well as regional pronunciation differences.
The Catalan and Valencian orthographies encompass the spelling and punctuation of standard Catalan and Valencian. There are also several adapted variants to the peculiarities of local dialects of Insular Catalan.
Rioplatense Spanish, also known as Rioplatense Castilian, or River Plate Spanish, is a variety of Spanish originating in and around the Río de la Plata Basin, and now spoken throughout most of Argentina and Uruguay. It is the most prominent dialect to employ voseo in both speech and writing. Many features of Rioplatense are also shared with the varieties spoken in south and eastern Bolivia, and Paraguay. This dialect is often spoken with an intonation resembling that of the Neapolitan language of Southern Italy, but there are exceptions.
The majority of languages of Spain belong to the Romance language family, of which Spanish is the sole one with official status as the national language. Others, including Catalan/Valencian and Galician, enjoy official status in their respective autonomous regions, similar to Basque in the northeast of the country. A number of other languages and dialects belonging to the Romance continuum exist in Spain, such as Aragonese, Asturian, Fala and Occitan.
Chilean Spanish is any of several varieties of the Spanish language spoken in most of Chile. Chilean Spanish dialects have distinctive pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and slang usages that differ from those of Standard Spanish. Formal Spanish in Chile has recently incorporated an increasing number of colloquial elements.
Dominican Spanish is Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic; and also among the Dominican diaspora, most of whom live in the United States, chiefly in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. Influenced by the peninsular hegemony of Al-Andalus in the early middle ages, Hispano-Romance varieties borrowed substantial lexicon from Arabic. Upon the southward territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Castile, Hispano-Romance norms associated to this polity displaced both Arabic and the Mozarabic romance varieties in the conquered territories, even though the resulting speech also assimilated features from the latter in the process. The first standard written norm of Spanish was brought forward in the 13th century by Alfonso X the Wise, probably drawing from the speech of the upper classes of Toledo. Features associated with the Castilian patterns of Hispano-Romance also spread west and east to the kingdoms of León and Aragón for the rest of the middle ages, owing to the political prestige achieved by the Kingdom of Castile in the peninsular context and to the lesser literary development of their vernacular norms. From the 1560s onward the standard written form followed Madrid's.
Colombian Spanish is a grouping of the varieties of Spanish spoken in Colombia. The term is of more geographical than linguistic relevance, since the dialects spoken in the various regions of Colombia are quite diverse. The speech of the northern coastal area tends to exhibit phonological innovations typical of Caribbean Spanish, while highland varieties have been historically more conservative. The Caro and Cuervo Institute in Bogotá is the main institution in Colombia to promote the scholarly study of the language and literature of both Colombia and the rest of Spanish America. The educated speech of Bogotá, a generally conservative variety of Spanish, has high popular prestige among Spanish-speakers throughout the Americas.
Old Catalan, also known as Medieval Catalan, is the modern denomination for Romance varieties that during the Middle Ages were spoken in territories that spanned roughly the territories of the Principality of Catalonia, the Kingdom of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and the island of Sardinia; all of them then part of the Crown of Aragon. These varieties were part of a dialect continuum with what today is called Old Occitan that reached the Loire Valley in the north and Northern Italy in the east. Consequently, Old Catalan can be considered a dialect group of Old Occitan, or be classified as an Occitano-Romance variety side by side with Old Occitan.
The Catalan dialects feature a relative uniformity, especially when compared to other Romance languages; both in terms of vocabulary, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Mutual intelligibility between its dialects is very high, estimates ranging from 90% to 95%. The only exception is the isolated idiosyncratic Alguerese dialect.
There is a variety of Vernacular languages spoken in Spain. Spanish, the official language in the entire country, is the predominant native language in almost all of the autonomous communities in Spain. Six of the seventeen autonomous communities in Spain have other co-official languages in addition to Spanish. Bilingualism in different degrees and in distinct communicative situations between Spanish and another language is a habitual practice for many of the Spanish people who reside in one of these autonomous communities.
The Norms of El Puig, also known as Norms of the RACV, are the linguistic rules developed by the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (RACV) proposed for Valencian treated as an independent language, as opposed to a variety of Catalan. The Norms were presented in 1981 at the Monastery of Santa Maria in El Puig and were drafted with the intention of regulating the Valencian language in accordance with and encompassing both the linguistic reality of present-day Valencian as well as longstanding Valencian literary and orthographic tradition. The Norms of El Puig were the official Valencian standard in the early 80s, and have been promoted by the Valencian Governments at various times. Nowadays, they are used by some publishers, associations and taught by the cultural society Lo Rat Penat that issues its own qualifications in Valencian.
