What history explains about today's Catalan
From spoken Latin to a new language
Catalan doesn't come from Cicero's Latin, but from the Latin spoken by soldiers, traders and settlers from the time Rome landed at Empúries in 218 BC. That street Latin changed in its own way in every corner of the Empire, and when political unity broke down, each area went its own way. Between the 8th and 10th centuries, in the counties that arose between al-Andalus and the Frankish kingdom, people were already speaking a Romance language we would now call Catalan, even though they still wrote in Latin.
That's why Catalan is so like Spanish in some things and so like Occitan in others. Many words choose a different Latin root from Spanish: “parlar”, from “parabolare”, against Spanish “hablar”, from “fabulare”; “taula”, from “tabula”, like English “table”, against Spanish “mesa”, from “mensa”. And the loss of Latin final vowels, except “a”, explains why so many Catalan words are shorter than their Spanish relatives: “fill” against “hijo” (son), “llop” against “lobo” (wolf), “nit” against “noche” (night).
Why there's Balearic and Valencian
In the 13th century, Jaume I conquered Mallorca in 1229 and the city of València in 1238, and the settlers took their Catalan to the islands and southwards. The differences between Balearic, Valencian and central Catalan don't come from different languages, but from where the settlers came from, from centuries of separate development and from contact with other languages. That's why in Mallorca they say “es cotxe”, with the article that comes from “ipse”, and in València “parle” where Barcelona says “parlo”.
The unity of the language is a consensus among philologists, and it shows in the way a speaker from Palma, one from Girona and one from Alacant understand each other effortlessly. What changes is above all the pronunciation, some verb forms and part of the vocabulary, much as between British and American English. The standard is set by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and, in the País Valencià, by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua; the two agree on the essentials and accept each area's own forms.
The Decadence, the Renaixença and Fabra
Between the 16th and 18th centuries the court and much of the elite switched to Spanish, and after the War of the Spanish Succession the Nueva Planta decrees brought Spanish into the administration and the courts. Cultured written Catalan declined, but the language stayed alive at home, in the street, in sermons and in popular theatre. In the 19th century the Renaixença brought it back to poetry, the press and the stage, though without a common spelling: every author wrote it their own way.
That scattering is what Pompeu Fabra, a chemical engineer, resolved from the Institut d'Estudis Catalans: the spelling rules of 1913, the spelling dictionary of 1917 and the grammar of 1918, crowned by the general dictionary of 1932. That's why the Catalan studied today has such regular spelling and is written practically the same in Barcelona as in Palma. The IEC's 2016 spelling reform touched up a few details, such as the list of diacritic accents, but didn't change Fabra's foundations.
From Francoism to today
After the Civil War, the Franco regime drove Catalan out of schools, the administration, the press and radio, and for years persecuted it in public life too. The language held on at home, in literature written in exile and, from the sixties, in the songs of the Nova Cançó, which took it to a young audience that had never been able to study it. That's why many speakers born in those years speak it with complete fluency and yet feel unsure when they write it.
With democracy came the language normalisation laws of the eighties, Catalan in schools, and public radio and television in Catalan. Today it's an official language in Catalunya, in the Illes Balears and in the País Valencià, where it's called Valencian, and the only official language in Andorra. That history explains why lifelong Catalan speakers live alongside many who learnt it as adults, and why learning it as an adult is perfectly ordinary.
