My target language Catalan belongs to the Western Romance branch of the Indo European language family, descending from Vulgar Latin. Its exact classification is debated — some linguists group it with Gallo-Romance (alongside French and Occitan), others with Ibero-Romance (alongside Spanish, Galician and Portuguese). Occitan is probably the most similar language to Catalan that survived into modernity, although it is only spoken by a small amount of people in northern Spain and southern France. Catalan shares a lot of features with French, but it has also had a lot of contact with Castilian Spanish due to geographical proximity and centuries of political incorporation into the Spanish state. The result is a language linguistically positioned between Spanish and French, much like how Catalonia itself sits geographically between the Castilian-dominant parts Spain and France. For example, like French, Catalan elides articles before vowels (cat. el home → l’home (eng. the man), like fr. l’homme, unlike sp. el hombre). On the other hand, both Catalan and Spanish distinguish between ser and estar (to be), while French uses a single verb être.
The history of contact with other cultures is also seen through the language’s lexicon. I have found that Catalan, just like Spanish, has loan words from Arabic, like rajola (tile) and alfàbia (jar), which reflects the centuries of Moorish presence on the Iberian Peninsula. More recently, Catalan was suppressed under the Franco period (1939–1975), during which Castilian Spanish was imposed as the only official language, leading to increased Spanish influence on Catalan vocabulary. Understanding the history of Catalan has been important for me during my learning of the language: knowing that Catalan developed alongside French and Spanish allows me drawn parallels while learning grammar and vocabulary, speeding up my learning process.
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