What is catalan?
in my heart
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and the only official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian, as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of Sardinia. It is also spoken, with no official recognition, in the autonomous communities of Aragon (in La Franja) and Murcia (in Carche) in Spain, and in the historic Roussillon region of southern France, roughly equivalent to the current département of the Pyrénées-Orientales (Northern Catalonia).
Although recognized as a regional language of the department Pyrénées-Orientales since 2007, Catalan has no official recognition in France, as French is the only official language of that country, according to the French Constitution of 1958.
The Catalan language developed from Vulgar Latin on both sides of the eastern end of the Pyrenees mountains (counties of Rosselló, Empúries, Besalú, Cerdanya, Urgell, Pallars and Ribagorça). It shares origin and features with Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, and the Gallo-Italian speech types of Northern Italy.
The number of persons fluent in Catalan varies depending on the sources used. The 2004 language study cited below in this article does not indicate the total number of speakers, but an estimate of 9-9.5 million can be made, by matching the percentage of speakers to the population of each area where Catalan is spoken ("Sociolinguistic Situation in Catalan-speaking Areas." cited in the Section, External Links, of this article). The web site of the Generalitat de Catalunya gives the number, as of June 2007, as 9,118,882 speakers of Catalan. And according to Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Catalan has a total of 11,530,160 speakers