Francesc was recorded speaking Valencian Catalan in Stockholm by Cameron Willis. Catalan is a Romance language in the Indo-European family. It is mostly spoken in Catalonia (Spain) and North Catalonia (France), but it is also spoken in the southern Spanish county of Valencia, as well as in Andorra, the Balearic Islands, Aragon, and Sardinia. There are approximately 7.3 million mother tongue users of Catalan and 9.8 million users including second language learners. The language is spoken in multiple varieties, but they are all mutually intelligible and vary mostly in terms of vowel pronunciation and some regional vocabulary.

Catalan was prohibited by Castilian forces in Spain in the 18th century due to political conflicts stemming from the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), but in the 19th century there was a resurgence of the language’s prevalence as Catalonia’s economy and cultural capital grew. It was made an official language between 1931-1939, but the Spanish Civil War changed this status and it was banned once again. During the Francoist regime, there were harsh punishments for speaking the language; it was not made an official language again until after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. It is now taught in public schools as the main language in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, as an optional language in Valencia, and privately taught in Andorra. It has entered the sphere of public discourse as an important language in all of these places.

There is a strong movement within Catalonia for independence from Spain, and the Catalan language reflects part of this political and linguistic identity. A controversial independence referendum was deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Spain in 2017, but many Catalonians still consider themselves to be culturally distinct and therefore deserving of their own sovereignty. The desire for change has been voiced in modern and technologically advanced ways, one example of which is Democratic Tsunami, a Catalan protest app that has recently been important for mobilizing protestors and voicing political concerns.

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.