CATALAN LANGUAGE, one of the groups of the Romance tongues which has been considered politically in Spain as but a dialect of Spanish. It is, however, as distinctly dif ferent from Spanish and the other Romance languages as is Portuguese. Catalan was long the language of an independent kingdom; and the influences under which the Latin language passed in Catalonia and the other districts where the ancient Catalan was spoken were quite distinct from those of the other countries of Roman conquest. And it is these influences which have made the Catalan tongue. Modern Catalan seems to be a mixture of the ancient language spoken on the west coast of Spain and the north of Italy on the coming of the Romans for the first time to the Iberian Penin sula, and the Latin of the lower class of Italy influenced in a literary way by classical Latin. But Catalan has come under other influences. The Phoenicians, even before the arrival of the Romans in Spain, carried on a trade of some considerable extent and importance with the west coast of Iberia, the people of which, we are told, had attained to considerable civic organization and had important cities in many parts of their territory. It has been claimed for the people of this region, with some show of reason, that they were of the same origin as the Romans and that they spoke a Latin tongue, which differed, however, very widely from that of the Italian Peninsula, which was itself divided into widely different dialects. Others claim that the Catalonians were of Pheenician origin, or that the country had been populated from Carthage, and that there fore the original language of the east coast of the peninsula was Carthaginian. According to various other accounts of their origin, they came variously from Palestine, Greece, Britain, central Asia or even Mongolia. Still others have claimed for them a Celtic origin common with that of the other Celtic inhabitants of various parts of Europe.
Thus there is no certainty as to the origin of the ancient inhabitants of Catalonia. But that their language persisted throughout the Roman occupation of their country seems cer tain, during which period it continued to amalgamate with that of the Latin soldiers. If the ancient Catalan were really a Latin tongue which had gone the road toward the formation of an analytic language, the rise of modern Catalan soon after the disappearance of the Roman power about the beginning of the 5th century would be easily explained. But this ancient tongue would have to have been dialectically decidedly different from that of the Italian Peninsula.
Catalan is spoken in a part of France bor dering on Spain, in the greater part of the Pyrenees Orientales, Barcelona, Lerida Tar ragona, Gerona, Valencia, Alicante, Castellon de la Planta, a part of Sardinia and the Balearic Islands. It has also had a strong influence on
the pronunciation of the Spanish spoken throughout the Latin American countries, notably in Cuba and some parts of Central America. While Catalan was strongly in fluenced by Provencal in a literary way, the language of the people of Catalonia and ad jacent territory resisted this foreign and un natural influence. The result was somewhat curious. Catalan poetry, strongly influenced by the Provencal troubadour, reflected the Provencal mode of thought and form of verse, while Catalan prose, which at first was not looked upon as worthy the name of litera ture, is instinct with Catalan genius and racial feeling, idiom and point of view. This is one of the best proofs of the artificiality of the Provencal influence in Catalonia and of the unfoundedness of assertion that Catalan was nothing more than a variation of Provencal. Catalonia, owing to the fact that it came into contact at such an early period in its history, with tie Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, British, Celts, Greeks and probably other races, and that it was later conquered or partially conquered by Romans, Carthaginians and Goths, assumed a mixed character. This was accentuated, in the first half of the 8th century, by the very considerable foreign population which had flowed into the country for com mercial and other purposes. At this time the population of Catalonia was made up of the ancient native stock, Latins, Greeks, Arabians, Chaldeans, Hebrews, Celts, Valencians, Canta brians and people from other parts of Spain. Business seems to have been carried on in the Catalonian country, or more properly speaking, where the Catalonian tongue or some dialect thereof was spoken, that is, all along the east coast of Spain, from Alicante to Genoa, and over most of the adjacent islands. And it was undoubtedly during this protracted trading period that the Catalan language assumed more or less definite form. Certainly by the 9th century it had become a strong independent language spoken over all the country already indicated. It had discarded Latin grammar, if it had ever had it as a part of the tongue of the masses, and had assumed all the earmarks of a living, aggressive, popular language. There can be no doubt that Catalan existed apart from Provencal, as the speech of the masses of Catalonia and the countries where Catalan is still spoken; for we find the writers of the later period of Provencal influence in Catalonia conforming to the popular and court usage of the age and writing poetry in Provencal and prose in Catalan. Moreover, when the Provencal influence was suddenly removed, after domina tion of considerable time, the native Catalan sprang up fresh and vigorous as the medium for both prose and poetic expression.