There's not only one Catalan

If you are learning Catalan don't panic with the title! It only means that, as any other language in the world, Catalan has different accents and dialects. I particularly find this subject amazing; I already found it interesting when I was at high school and I barely had heard any other dialect or accent other than the one in my area. However, on my arrival to Barcelona at 18, my ears filled up with different Catalan varieties and I was listening very carefully to all the new people I met to catch up all the details that, up to that moment, I had only read in school books. I was an avid listener. Now, at 27, I still do it. I can't help it, I love it. And I think it is wonderful to have such richness and explore it. And here is what I will do today: setting the basics of Catalan dialectology!

Catalan-speaking areas Catalan is not only spoken in Catalonia. In fact it is spoken in other regions of Spain, namely: La Franja de Ponent ("The Western Strip", Aragon), the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community and in one place in Murcia called El Carxe). And, furthermore, it is also spoken in "Catalunya del Nord" (Southern France); Alghero, in the Italian island of Sardinia; and Andorra. Together, this make a rough total of 9 million of speakers and 2 more million more who do not speak Catalan but understand it. And there also a few learners around the globe :).

Catalan-speaking areas

Western and Eastern
Mainly, there are two dialects in Catalan: Western and Eastern. This division is based on a very tangible difference: lack -Western- or presence -Eastern- of the schwa vowel (the schwa is also found in English, for example, the way the "e" is pronounced in "computer"). In other words: if "a" and open and closed "e" are turned -Eastern- or not turned -Western- to schwa in weak syllables.

There are other differences of course, but the most obvious and easily heard is this one.

More useful: the main 6 dialect distinction
Using the Western and Eastern dialect distinction only would be really simplistic and poor to describe all Catalan varieties. The official rules for oral Catalan are based on 6 Catalan dialects: Northern Catalan, Central Catalan, Balearic, Northwestern Catalan, Valencian and Algherese.

The official 6 dialect distinction

Let's make it more real: the 12 dialects distinction
Drilling down we even find that the 6 dialects distinction can't fit all purposes. This was what drove some professors of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) to publish a book with the specificities of 12 subdialects to help language assessment in the media. This distinction is more real, but still, in my opinion, it is too general in some cases and a bit misleading in the terminology.

The 12 accents map

I like to include myself somewhere in-between "olotí" (or transitional northern Catalan) and "the Catalan of Girona (not in the maps, part of Central Catalan). And my boyfriend is from Andorra, thus, his is a Northwestern dialect (he says "Andorran" :P). Schwa and not schwa in the same flat. He's one of my objects of study haha!

And with this variety... isn't it difficult to understand each other?
Not at all. Though some varieties might be hard to pick phonetically at the beginning (especially Balearic), after you get used to it, no one really needs to change their pronunciation much. Maybe some words are changed from a local to a standard form... but not big deal.

Accent and dialect
The concept of "dialect" in Catalan is not really the same as in the case of German or Italian, where their dialects are much more different among each other and a standard is really needed to make people from different dialects understand each other. In Catalan, there is one standard variety (and substandards in the Valencian Community and the Balearic islands), but there is not really needed in casual speech in a conversation with people who speak different dialects.

Accent is only restricted to phonetics, whereas dialect includes lexical and morphosyntactical characteristics. Thus, you could argue that Western and Eastern are accents and dialects at the same time, that there are 6 main dialects, 12 subdialects and many local accents.

I leave you with a test. Could you guess if these singers are Western or Eastern? (Catalan readers... don't tell :P)

Number one:



Number two:



Number three:

Number four:

Hope you enjoyed it! Next posts real examples with Catalan people. Any Catalan-speaker wants to help me make an accent map? Drop me a line :)

Code switching

In linguistics, code switching means changing the language (or code) in the same discourse. That is, when a bilingual o multilingual person is speaking they may switch the language in which they are talking. Everyone who knows more than one language can do that, but it may not be a usual thing for them. But what happens in a society, like Catalan society, who is bilingual by default and two languages are part of common life? What happens is that code switching is the meal of every day, a daily constant, and most people living in Catalonia do it all the time without even noticing or caring.

And what is more interesting, we can have a conversation when people speak in Catalan and other people speak in Spanish all the time and no one is amazed. It was not until an English asked me how we could do that and not finding it strange, that I did not realise how shocking this could be for a foreigner.

We are switching the code all the time! If I had to think how many times I changed from Catalan to Spanish and back to Catalan today, I could not be able to tell. I don't know...maybe like five times an hour depending to whom I spoke. Or even more. Haven't got a clue. However, if I have to say which is the language I speak most, I would say Catalan. A few years ago it was the only language I used, but since I came to live in Barcelona, I began to use Spanish and now I use about Spanish about 20% of the time.

But how code switching works? I have tried to think why do I switch code and about the different scenarios. Basically, in my everyday life I find myself doing this:

1- My colleague Judit is Catalan and we always talk in Catalan to each other. So that is one situation in which there is no code switching.

2- My colleague Marta is from Bilbao and Spanish is her mother tongue. She's been living in Catalonia for a few years and she understands Catalan, but we spoke in Spanish since we met and we always speak in Spanish to each other now. In this situation, as a Catalan native, I switch the code to Spanish, but there is no code switching in the conversation.

3- My colleague José is from Galicia and he came to live in Barcelona last year. He speaks Spanish at home and Galician with some of his friends. He learnt Catalan at university, he understands it perfectly and asks me to talk in Catalan to him so he keeps on learning it, but he feels a bit insecure still and replies in Spanish. In this situation, there is no verbal code switching, but our brains are processing the messages in two languages at the same time!

4- My colleague José sometimes tries to talk in Catalan as he wants to gain confidence. On my side, I sometimes forget that he wants me to talk in Catalan to him and we are moving from Catalan to Spanish all the time. This means that we are switching the code all the time!

5- In a conversation possibilities multiply, but the most usual thing in my everyday life is that some people always talk in Catalan, some others always do so in Spanish and some other switch the code depending on the person they talk to, even in the same group conversation.

I usually do not mind to change the code and, as I pointed out I don't even realise I do so. On the other hand I also think that code switching can be a trap. Does it really means language command? What are the negative effects? It is always positive?

For me, code switching, its pros and cons. It is indeed enriching to have this phenomenon, but it can show lack of language command. Typical code switching means occasionally introducing words and syntactic structures from Catalan into Spanish and the other way round. If the speaker is aware that they may do so and is able to know what belongs to what language, then it is ok, nothing happens! It is very difficult to speak perfectly all the time, managing two language in the same casual conversation! On the other hand, it is indeed a problem if the person does not know it, because they will reproduce these errors in writing and in speaking all the time. And this can be very annoying, because it is no longer code switching but lack of linguistic competence and it can be very annoying both for native speakers of Catalan and of Spanish.

I am not really feeling to go deeper into this today as my aim waysjust explaining what happens with code switching in Catalonia and how I, as a Catalan, experience it as a real fact. Pondering about it will be a topic for another post.

Voluntaris per la llengua

My post today is dedicated to my mother, a "voluntària per la llengua"; a language volunteer in the capital city of my area, Figueres.

What is a language volunteer?
A language volunteer is someone who helps newcomers in Catalonia improving Catalan by giving them the opportunity to speak in this language in a natural context. Learners must have some knowledge of Catalan and volunteers have to be people who usually speak Catalan. Both should have a minimum of 1 free hour a week during 10 weeks. No BA, no MA, no certifications are needed: just the will to learn and to help learning.

Volunteers and learners or, simply "parelles lingüístiques" (language couples) meet, as I have pointed out, once a week at a place of their convenience. Some places (bars, restaurants, museums, etc) are volunteer-friendly and language couple might get discounts or special offers if they go there. A volunteer-friendly place will usually show this sticker near its door:

Besides meeting once a week to talk in Catalan, language couples are encouraged to take part in the cultural local activities promoted by the Consorci per la Normalització, Lingüística (Consortium for Linguistic Normalisation) which is the organisation in charge of coordinating the whole initiative.

Language volunteering is an initiative by La Generalitat (the Catalan government) to promote the use of Catalan. Though direct government implication in the programme began in 2003, the idea comes from university language volunteering, which began at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 1996 and rapidly extended to other Catalan universities.

This is indeed a great way to promote Catalan, as opposed to boring, imposing language policies. Besides, volunteers and learners enrich themselves culturally and help the former see "the other" as an equal and the later can fully integrate in Catalonia, as the language will no longer be a barrier.

My mother became a language volunteer in March-April this year. She first was a volunteer for a very smart Moroccan girl until June and, since last week, she is a volunteer for a Colombian and a Polish girl. She is so happy people are eager to learn Catalan and she takes it very seriously. I believe she passed on this will to me too, as I am thinking to become a volunteer too! I just hope I find some free time ;).

By the way...my mother and "her" learners have become locally "famous" (just joking) because of this picture in one of the local newspapers in my area:

This is the main page of the local newspaper "Hora nova" (New hour).
My mother -in the centre- with the learners.

Notes:
Hora Nova's main page taken from the paper's website
Voluntaris per la llengua official webpage: http://www.vxl.cat (only Catalan)

A hit on the Internet

Before anything else I would like to warn you: in this post the proud girl inside me is writing. Why? I read something it made me feel proud of my mother tongue.

Catalan has roughly 9 million speakers, which means that it is the 88th most spoken language in the world -out of the more or less 6000 that have been identified nowadays. (One could say, looking at this figure, that Catalan enjoys good health. It is not really the case, however. Anyway, this is would fit much better in another post.)

What catched my attention some days ago was that a minorised language as Catalan is, has an extraordinary presence on the Internet:

- It is the 15th most used language on Wikipedia -or Viquipèdia in Catalan (200,000 entries).
- It is the 17th most used language on web pages.
- It is the 8th most used language on blogs.

I could not believe my ears when I heard and then read this. Especially the figure related to blogs. Even bearing in mind that 90% languages in the world have no presence on the Internet, that makes an impressive number! This is really good for the language, as it indicates that people see it as a normal vehicle of communication. Besides, the Internet, is a powerful tool for less spoken or minorised -made minoritarian- languages: on the net these language can have a voice which reaches the whole world.

There even has been a congress, which discussed this case success and what could be done to take advantage of the Internet in similar cases. The congress was held by the "Casa de les Llengües" (The House of Languages), which is financed by the Catalan government and aims at studying and taking advantage of multilingualism, exploring the richness of languages. By the way, I strongly reccomend you to visit their webpage: it is really complete with all kinds of activities and...it is truly multilingual! (I think I would really love to work there).

Why was I so happy then? I'm sick of hearing offence against Catalan, and Catalans (most of times by politicians and conservative people), I am sick of how little by little our language is blurred by monolingual strategies which disregard it (why some people in Spain see bilingualism as bad?). This piece of new was a new breath of fresh air, something positive among all this.

So this is all: proud girl mode Off :D.

References:
"El català, un exemple a Internet" (Catalan , an example over the Internet)
-Ethnologue, Languages of the world: http://www.ethnologue.com/
-Casa de les Llengües: http://www.linguamon.cat/
- Viquipèdia: http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/

A spot for Andorra

A couple of days ago I was asked to translate a project from English into Catalan that required installing a new software programme.

After several hours fighting with the programme's version, I could successfully install it and I opened it to adjust the required settings for the project: language, filter, dictionaries, working file, etc. In a CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tool you usually have some place where you can set all this up. Most importantly, there must always be some place where to set the source -the language you will be translation from- and target-the language you will translate into.

So the first thing I did was setting working language and I was really amazed when I saw this:


It is really curious. Up to then, I never found Catalan related to Andorra in a translation programme. It made me think why that was the case, as I was used to see a Catalan flag whenever I set up a project to be translated into Catalan. And then I get the system: a language associated to a country where it is official. And Andorra is the only country of the world where Catalan is the only official language (the language you hear on the streets of Andorra is another matter...) and the programme's developers knew it. For other cooficial languages in Spain, namely Basque and Galician, there was a Spanish flag.

This case is really curious and also brings along some questions: it is correct to associate language and country? It is a good decision to use country flags in translation programmes? Well, that is not a really big deal for many people, that is true, but it kept me wondering for a while. For example, for the first question: there are lots of languages which are not only exclusive of one country. That is true, you can specify the region (as in EN_US (English, United States) but that does not solve the problem. To stay home, in Catalan, this region specification is not really necessary -variants are not so different among them (well, some would say Catalan and Valencian are different languages, but that is another thing to talk about in another post). Anyway, supposing no region is necessary for Catalan, what flag do we use? Andorran, Catalan, Valencian, Balearic, Aragonese, French, Sardinian? In all these places Catalan is spoken.

Anyhow, in this specific case I am showing you, software developers chose the language-country-flag association. I won't say it is good or bad, as everybody has its own opinion and can find good arguments for it. Above all, I was surprised and it made me smile. Andorra is a tiny country in the middle of the Pyrenees, and if, even Catalans in Catalonia do not usually remember that there Catalan has exclusive officiality...how are other less-related to Andorra countries are to thoroughly know about this fact? Well, in this CAT application, they had some recognition and their name and flag is used to represent Catalan.

My boyfriend is Andorran and when I told him this by mail he wrote in big bold letters: Graaaaan! (That's biiiiiig!). He says that, little by little, Andorra is invading Catalonia...of course, that only a joke between us...I hope :P. He added malevolous laughter after "Graaaan!".

This is a bilingual place. Part 1

The gift of bilingualism
There is no native Catalan in the world who only knows one language. All Catalans are bilingual de facto and live with two co-existing languages, Catalan and Spanish. This is not, as many want to see, a problem at all -or at least it shouldn't. It is a gift, a richness we should benefit from at take advantage of. Not only because we learn Spanish, the 3rd most spoken language (but the 2nd in terms of native speakers) in the world, since we are little kids but also because, according to linguists, it is then easier to learn new languages when you know more than one.

Code switching
One of the most striking things for people outside bilingual areas where both languages are alive, is the fact that one can have a conversation in two languages at the same time: one speaking Spanish and the other Catalan, according to which language they feel more comfortable with. This of course, happens, but it is not the general rule. Usually, one of the two languages -I must say a lot of times Spanish- becomes the language of the conversation. For most of us this is not a problem, and switching between languages is something we do constantly.

It's there really 100% bilingualism?
So yes, bilingualism exists, but it is not a balanced bilingualism. First of all, people in Catalunya can have Catalan, Spanish, or both languages as mother tongues. Excluding the case of those who have two mother tongues and speak both at home normally, people usually have more command over one language. This is not something wrong or bad, it is just a fact and it is the most normal thing in the world.

At school we learn both Spanish and Catalan since we are kids (besides English, of course). In public life, despite the fact that Catalan is the main language in education (as the Catalan Government has competency over Education and favours the use of Catalan) most of the linguistic input out of the academic context is in Spanish (cinema, magazines, most newspapers, ads, food packages, music for teenager).

Feeling uneasy: the need to say more about it
By now you might have the suspicion that this bilingualism is not free of problems, mainly political but also linguistical (like everything-sigh). In this post I tried to be as objective as possible, but I found it quite hard, as I have very strong feeling of support for Catalan. I really feel I should write something more personal about it. It is for this that I have decided to split the subject in two. Therefore, I will write another more subjective post on bilingualism.

Welcome back

Hello again! It's a long time since I last wrote. I like writing this blog and have many ideas on what to write, but to be honest, I never get to establish writing it as regularly as I wished. Why I don't is a constant question I ask myself. I think that now is the time to gather some will and do it. Just because I enjoy it and I would like to share this with you.

My first post after my firm decision of writing often is to show you how Catalan greetings and presentations sound like and what do they mean. I had this post into my head since I came back from the summercamp where I worked for two weeks. These days have been full of greetings and "will miss yous" and "see you soons", and I thought maybe it would be a great idea to "restart" the blog. So here you are:

LESSON 1:

Words to remember:
Hola = Hello / Hi
Com va? = How are you? (literally "How is it going?")
Adéu = Bye
Bon dia = Good morning
Bona tarda = Good afternoon / Good evening
Bona nit = Good night / Good evening

A short note on grammar: both "bon" and "bona" stand for "good", the difference being gender ("bon" is masculine, while "bona" is feminine")


LESSON 1 BONUS TRACK:

WORDS TO REMEMBER:
Et trobaré a faltar = I will miss you
Fins aviat = See you soon

WARNING!: Most of these dialogues are spoken in informal contexts.

Special thanks to Xavi, the same guy who wrote
the boasting words for Sant Jordi's legend special effects.

A beautiful landscape

Last Tuesday a new weekly TV programme began in TV3 -the public Catalan television channel. It is called "El paisatge favorit de Catalunya" (The favourite landscape of Catalonia).

It aims at letting users choose which is their favourite landscape by voting. In each programme, three famous public personalities who live in Catalonia talk about their favourite landscapes and encourage people to vote for it. Besides voting, people can also post their own pictures of Catalan landscapes in the programme's web.

I also see another aim as well: make people in Catalonia know their own land. And believe me, there is so much to see!

I was captivated, moved by the beauty of the images. We have a treasure: a land which offers us every kind of landscape: mountains up to 3140 metres, rocky coast, sandy coast, hills, rivers, pintoresque villages, medieval towns, a big city, volcanos (inactive...and hopefully extinct), plains... A bunch of possibilites and wonders!

I see one weak point in this programme: it is so hard to say which is my favourite landscape in Catalonia!

You can watch the programme in TV3's website. They will upload every week 's programme, so anyone can watch it after it is broadcasted. The only thing is that is narrated in Catalan, but landscapes speak no languages, so I invite you to enjoy it. I hope you like it.

http://www.tv3.cat/elpaisatge

Catalan phonetics

I love phonetics. And I specially love the phonetics of Catalan dialects (as my friends know very well). I will, definetely, write about phonetics some day, but I am still think about how to make is sound easy and interesting.

Now I'd like to post the phonetics of the word "català" (Catalan). for the so-called standard phonetics (not all dialects pronounce it like this). If you know the International Phonetics Alphabet you will know what every symbol means. For the ones who do not know, I try to explain how to disentangle this mess ;).

CATALÀ

Explanation:
- "k" its easy :).
- The inverted "e" represents the "schwa" sound like the "e" in "water".
- The "t" you know, the thing is the little symbol below. That means this "t" is dental, which means that it is pronounce with the tongue between your teeths (the "t" in Catalan is always like this, in opposition to English, where to pronounce this letter you place the tongue in the alveolar ridge).
-The apostrophe marks the strong syllable which in the word is "là".
-The following that looks like a Polish letter, mean a "retracted l". What is this? A retracted "l" is an "l" which is pronounce by curling the back of the tongue toward the palate/roof of the motuh. I don't know how I do it because all Catalan "l" are pronounced like this, but for a Polish this is very important because they difference between the "normal l" (like the "l" in "lullaby") and the retracted "l". Not for Catalans, we only have the "retracted l".
It worth mentionin that this is what betrays a Catalan speaker speaking Spanish. I had a hard time learning not to force my "l" when speaking Spanish and, though, I've improved, this still betrays me.
As for you, just know this is a minor issue, interesting to phonetic-lovers, but just say the sound "l" and don't worry about retractions, we won't notice the difference. In fact, I didn't know about this issue until I took Catalan phonetics at university.
- The "a" is easy. The two points above it only mean that the breath falls in the a.

NOTE: all syllables have the same length (unlike English!), as well as all the vowels: CA-TA-LÀ. Don't make weak syllables shorter.
NOTE 2: some dialects (western Catalan dialects) don't have the "schwa" sound, they would pronounce all as a tonic "a". For example, I would say it like the phonetics above, ie, pronouncing the "schwa" because I have an Eastern dialect, but my boyfriend, who has a Western dialect, would pronounce all "a". But this is not a problem for communication, it's just a feature and sometimes something to laugh and have fun specially when trying to imitate each other's dialects.

What is Catalan?

There are a lot of misconceptions around the notion of Catalan as a language outside Spain. Inside Spain the question of language is a completely different story, intertwined with prejudice and politics.

Let's start with the conception of Catalan abroad. For travellers visiting us, Catalan might be either conceived as a pictoresque peculiarity, some remnant of a language which is almost death, or as a Spanish dialect.

As for the first consideration, I recall now that some years ago, when I worked in a campsite a tourist came, guidebook in hand, that he had read in the book that we had another language different than Spanish in the area (I don't know which area he meant exactly…). He thought it was something “typical” and that it was like a kind of old tradition –at least that was my impression. He then asked me if I knew and spoke the language. He obviously expected me to say “No”. Or if he expected me to say "Yes", I gave him the kind of "Yes" he did not imagine. When I said: “Yes of course, I usually, if not always, speak Catalan" (I would say that at that moment in time I was not as bilingual as I am now). “I speak at home, with my friends, when I go shopping". He was amazed, and all he could say was: "But the book says it as a curiosity...But you learn it at school?" I answered, for his further amazement: "Yes, since we are kids. We also learn Spanish, but all other subjects are taught in Catalan". I would have knocked him down if I had told him there are 9 million speakers of Catalan and that it is one of the most spoken minority languages of Europe and that it is a very active literary language and lots of foreign books are translated into Catalan. I do not know if he was very convinced but he was surprised. I am happy that he learnt about a new reality and I hope that he began seeing Spain as something plural with more than one language or culture. That is what I always try to explain: Spain is not a WHOLE UNIQUE ONE but MORE THAN ONE, and we should take advantage of it and promote it this way.

As for the second consideration: it is also very usual that foreigners consider Catalan a dialect of Spanish or ask if it really is. This is a logical deduction, as Catalan and Spanish come both from Latin, and also because the conception of "dialect" is different here than in other countries. For languages with very different dialects, like German and Italian, I would say this conclusion would be very easy to reach. For me, dialects are regional linguistic peculiarities which do not difficult communication and add richness and colour to a language. The case between Spanish and Catalan is not that. A monolingual Spaniard will not understand a conversation or a book in Catalan unless s/he learns the language first. S/he might understand some words, of course (some words are similar because of their common origin), but not the message. Catalan and Spanish have enough differences to be considered different languages.

Believe it or not, Catalan is more similar to French than it is to Spanish. Or at least it can be conceived as similar to French and Spanish. Catalan has some difficult tricks because there is a lot of contact with Spanish. As a colleague told me once to make fun: “Catalan takes the worse of Spanish and the worst of French and puts it together”. I don’t know if this is true, but I would say Catalan is as beautiful as any other language can be and it is as worth studying as any other language. And, like any other language it has its own peculiarities.

PD: Thanks to a special friend who asked me about this a few days ago and gave me the idea to write this post, making me realise this was needed to clarify some things about the issue of language first.