ABSTRACT
Catalan is spoken in the eastern part of the Iberian peninsula (Catalonia, Valencia, a small part of Aragon close to the Catalan border, and a much smaller part of the Murcia region close to the Valencian border), in the Balearic Islands, in a region between the two eastern branches of the Pyrenees (Albera and Corbera Massifs) normally called ‘Northern Catalonia’, in Andorra, and the city of Alghero in Sardinia. This distribution includes four states (Spain, France, Andorra, and Italy), and a different status in every state and region. Catalan is the only official language in Andorra according to its constitution, and it is co-official with Spanish in the autonomous regions of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands in Spain. It is also a protected language according to the Law of Cultural Heritage (2016) of the autonomous region of Aragon, due to its presence in the most eastern part of this region, known as ‘La Franja’ (‘The Strip’). Co-officiality in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearics is unbalanced. According to the Spanish constitution, all citizens must know Spanish; according to the regional constitutions, citizens also have the right to use Catalan (also called Valencian – the Spanish High Court recognises Valencian and Catalan as two different names for the same language). In 2006, the new Catalan autonomy statute (effectively the constitution for the region) made knowing Catalan a legal requirement, but this was dismissed in 2010 by the Spanish Constitutional Court, leading to the current institutional crisis (as we write in 2016) and giving new impetus to the Catalan independentist movement.
