Catalonia independence referendum poll now up

The poll on the right has three answers because that's what the referendum/consultation in Catalonia is going to have.

• Yes, I want Catalonia to become a State, and for it to be independent.
• Yes, I want Catalonia to become a State, but not independent.
• No, I do not want Catalonia to become a State.

In Catalan the questions are:

• Vol que Catalunya esdevingui un Estat?
• En cas afirmatiu, vol que aquest Estat sigui independent?

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Link roundup, 7 July 2013

• The most recent episode of Radio Interlingua has an interview with a female interlinguist. The majority of IAL users tend to be men, so a female voice is always a bit of a novelty.
• After all the attention on Reddit and elsewhere, Mickey Mangan has begun making episodes of The Lernen to Talk Show.

• An article about using Kaapse Afrikaans in schools.
• 'Valencian and Catalan are the same language'.
• On the current situation of Spanish language teaching in the Philippines.
• Russia's planned reform of its space industry.
• SpaceX's newest Grasshopper test, this time making it to an altitude of 325 m:

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Catalonia votes today

Reminder: there's an election in Catalonia today that could play an important role in the future European linguistic and geopolitical map. Looking at a linguistic map of Europe shows how overextended Spanish is compared to Portuguese, which is in the opposite situation with a language (or very close fraternal language) extending beyond the border whereas Spanish is not quite dominant even within Spain itself.

Redrawing the borders along strict linguistic lines would make Spain look fairly awkward compared to today, with a country called Portugaliza all along the west side, Euskadi shrinking the coast on the north side, and Catalonia on the east shrinking the Mediterranean coast.


Not being involved with the area, I have no opinion on Spanish vs. Catalan and who should separate from or be united with whom, besides a bit of affection for Catalan and Occitan as languages that more closely resemble a lot of pan-Romance IALs than Spanish and French. I've often wondered what would have happened if France's official language had been Occitan instead of French and Catalan in Spain instead of Castillan. Then we would have had a much more mutually comprehensible region stretching from France to Spain and down into Italy.

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Government of Aragon to call Catalan spoken in Aragon "southern Aragon" or "northern Aragon"

I know little about the details of eastern Aragonese vs. western Catalan, so this post will suffice with two paragraphs from this article in Spanish and no extra commentary...except this page on the Benasquese dialect which apparently is about halfway between the two:

The government of Aragon (PP and Partido Aragonés) has decided to abolish any legal recognition of Catalan, according to a draft of the lew language law presented yesterday, which will repeal the law passed at the end of the last legislature, which was led by the socialist Marcelino Iglesias.

The new text will affect more than 50,000 Aragonese in the eastern regions and who will from now, according to the new Aragonese text, speak "southern Aragon" or "northern Aragon", despite that the entire academic community has no doubt in calling the language a dialect of western Catalan.

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Most requested interface languages on Twitter: Catalan, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Basque

This refers to currently unavailable languages, of course. Twitter has recently announced that it has begun translating these six (or rather, has begun allowing people to translate these six for them), which will mean 34 languages compared to the current 28.

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Tedx talks in other languages

Those can be found here, a page that categorizes Tedx talks by language, country, and so on. It is not entirely accurate as there are a good amount of English videos hidden there, especially in places where English speakers are more common than others (Germany, Hong Kong, etc.). Sometimes the title will help out here, but not always.


Since these videos don't have transcripts it wouldn't be worth mentioning on a post were it not for the number of languages contained there, namely:

American Sign Language
Arabic
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Lithuanian
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Rajasthani
Romanian
Russian
Slovak
Slovene
Spanish
Swedish
Tamil
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu

The ones in bold are those in the list that usually have very limited content online, especially audio content.
Catalan for example:

 

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Catalan is 14th-most spoken language in the EU, and other things

An article here in Spanish has some info on Catalan usage in the EU right now, and not just in terms of number of speakers but also where it is used and where it isn't. Some of the info from the article:

- Catalan has about 10 million speakers.
- The number of readers of Catalan daily newspapers increased by 29% last year
- The radio and TV audience for Catalan has also increased (doesn't indicate by how much), although only 3% of cinema in Catalonia are in Catalan.
- More than 30% of foreigners in Barcelona are learning Catalan, compared to 7% a few years ago.
- Education: 89% of primary schools in Catalonia use Catalan as a working language and all public universities there use Catalan in more than 50% of the courses given.
- There are 199 laws in the state that require labeling in Spanish, compared to 2 laws that require the same in Catalan.
- Justice is where Catalan is especially weak: 14% of sentences are written in Catalan, a decrease of 6%, and only 3% of the demands in court are in Catalan, even though 99% of the staff of the administration of justice in Catalonia know the language.

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Best languages to know for employment in Spain

An article here in Spanish goes into detail on that. The article claims that 27% of job offerings in Spain ask for knowledge of another language, a decrease from about 34% last year. 72% of these job offers require English, and French has increased by one point to 8.5%. Other languages have also increased, and Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Czech all together make up 14.17%.

One part of this particular to Spain is the value of knowing regional languages (Catalan, Basque, etc.). This of course depends on the region and so the only thing that can be said here is that if you know a regional language when working in said region then yes, you will have more job opportunities than otherwise. No surprise there.

The value of these languages in their own region differs though: in Catalonia Catalan makes up 38.38%, in Basque Country Basque makes up 18.57%, in the Balearic Islands Catalan is 9.09%, in Galacia Galician is 8.84%, in Valencian Community (Comunidad Valenciana) Valencian is 6.88%. Not much of a surprise here as Catalan and Basque are well known for being assertively (aggressively? depends on who you ask) promoted in their respective regions.

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Government of Catalonia may make knowledge of Catalan necessary for immigrants

From an article here in Spanish. Since apparently the proposition is still preliminary the article doesn't really have that much detail on exactly what the government would consider requiring for immigrants.

Catalonia to require immigrants who want to reunite families to speak Catalan

The Catalan government confirmed on Tuesday that it will consider requiring immigrants to have a good command of the Catalan language as a prerequisite for reuniting their families. The government will ask immigrants to certify their knowledge of the language as a "very crucial requirement" for their "efforts to integrate" into Catalan society.

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Wikipedia in Catalan now over 250,000 articles

See:



At the same time its linguistic cousin (Occitan) is at a bit less than a tenth that number, now at 21,925.

One area where Catalan seems to be lacking compared to its population though is here on Ted.com, where a mere 11 talks have been translated.

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94% of voters in Catalonia vote for independence, but turnout is only 25%

Each of those numbers is ammunition for both sides, and NPR has some information on today's referendum. This referendum is only one of many that will continue to be held until next year, as the pages on Wikipedia in English and Catalan show.

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Spanish language roundup, 22 November 2009: more radio and television stations in the United States, Spanish becomes "abnormal" in Barcelona

Lots of links today related to Spanish, most about the US and one about Spain itself.

First one is here - Comcast in Detroit has added 11 new Spanish-language channels, bringing the total now to 55. This link has the full list of channels, which are:

     Channel         Network         Channel          Network

     -------         -------         -------          -------

          98        Univision         *627          TeleFormula

         601   Discovery en Espanol    628           Canal Sur

         602      CNN en Espanol      *629       TVE International

         603   Fox Sports en Espanol  *630          TV Colombia

        *604        Caracol TV        *631           TV Chile

         605         MTV Tr3s         *632         Latele Novela

         606    History en Espanol    *633          TBN Enlace

         607         Mun2             +634           Sorpresa

         608       Cinelatino          635            Si TV

        +609       Venemovies         *637         EWTN Espanol

        +610     Cine Mexicano        *638        Cable Noticias

         611       Telemundo          +639          Mexico 22

         612     ESPN Deportes       *+640          TeleRitmo

       *+613      El Garage TV         641         Once Mexico

       *+614       AYM Sports         *642          SUR Mexico

        *615       HTV Musica         *643           SUR Peru

        *616  Ecuavisa Internacional  *644        TV Dominicana

       *+617      Canal 52 MX        *+645    Telemicro Internacional

       *+618      Multimedios         *646      Telefe Internacional

       *+619      Cultural.es        *+647          Utilisima

        +620       Gran Cine         *+648       CBTV Michoacan

       *+621     Canal 24 Horas       *649           HITN-TV

         622        GolTV             *650         WAPA America

        +623       Infinito           *652       Ritmoson Latino

        +624      Video Rola          *653          Tele Hit

        *625     TV Venezuela         *654          Banda Max

        *626  La Familia Cosmovision  *655         De Pelicula


The next one here is about another radio station (this time in Houston) switching from English to Spanish. Some switch from Spanish to English though and I haven't seen any numbers indicating an overall trend either way.

One more link here is a bit more about the importance of Univision's partnership with YouTube.

Finally we have this one in Spanish protesting a vote in Barcelona calling Catalan the "unique and exclusive language of "normal" use in all the activities of the city", which the article says effectively makes Spanish an "abnormal" language, in spite of being the language spoken by 70% of the city's residents.

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The eighth most active language in the blogosphere: Catalan

That's from an article here in Spanish. The article doesn't give a source for the claim that Catalan is the eighth most active language on the blogosphere and a quick scan over the site mentioned in the article doesn't show the number (it might be buried in there somewhere; the site is in a lot of languages) but it's definitely true that Catalan has a very large presence online compared to its population and lack of an independent country of its own besides tiny Andorra.

Catalan is the eighth most active language in the world in terms of activity on blogs and the 15th on Wikipedia, the popular electronic encyclopedia, which attests to "an online presence much greater than its demographic weight with 10 million speakers".

The director of Linguamón-Casa de les Llengües, Antoni Mir, is confident that Catalan enjoys "good health" on the internet. Mir, who inaugurated the 1th International Symposium on Multilinguism and Cyberspace, emphasized that this large activity of Catalan online is much greater than the demographic weight than 10 million Catalan speakers represent.

Mir believes that the Internet will not again ever be an exclusive territory to English as the internet opens incredible doors to multilinguism, and adds that there has been an explosion in minority languages online. The director of Casa de les Llengües is encouraged that Catalan occupies new spaces which are being created online, such as YouTube and social networks.

One example of Catalan showing up on YouTube out of nowhere can be seen here. Every once in a while one will see Catalan pop up when you least expect it.

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20 September 2009: Wikipedias in Occitan and Catalan approaching 20,000 and 200,000 articles

Here's a screen shot of their most recent article counts (click on the image to see it at full size if you can't make it out):


Occitan is at 19,373 articles and Catalan at 199,689. The two are linguistic cousins and are located right next to each other, with Catalan in the eastern part of Spain and Occitan in the south of France. Considering their similarities it would have been interesting to be able to see an alternate reality where the official languages of Spain and France (and their respective colonies) had been Catalan and Occitan instead of the much less related Spanish and French. That would have also meant that the French loanwords in English would have come from a more Occitan-influenced Norman language too. It would also mean a great deal of mutual comprehensibility between places like Quebec/Maine/Louisiana/Haiti and Mexico/the rest of Central America.

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Google to digitalize the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

And for some reason many in France are opposed to this. Can anyone explain just what is so bad about a company paying a library to digitalize and upload the content of some 13 million books in French that otherwise would not be able to be seen without going to the library in person? Catalunia for example has been very happy to let Google digitize books in Catalan, resulting in 35,000 books so far in the language that could not have been read otherwise.

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Subway in Toulouse (Tolosa) to start speaking Occitan from September 2009

From a site here in Catalan, which has quite a bit of information on smaller languages. It's from a longer article originally in French here though. The comments below that article are especially numerous, with a lot of heated discussion - depending on which comment you read Occitan is either a regional dialect that nobody speaks, or it's an awesome cultured language that was around when French was still a "Germanic patois". A lot of the comments are written in Occitan too.

The city has a festival called Occitania that goes from 25 to 28 September, which is when the announcements in Occitan in addition to French will begin. The metro has a total of 37 stations.

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Google digitalizes 35,000 copyright-free books in the Catalan language

From an article in Spanish here. Google has digitalized 35,000 books from the Library of Catalunia, a project that began in 2007. All the books are free of copyright and can be seen at http://books.google.cat. Most of these books are from the 19th century. It looks like the plan is to upload a total of 100,000 books from the library, and then go on to four other libraries in Catalunia that have agreed to participate.

According to the article, thanks to initiatives like this one Catalan has an online presence beyond its demographic weight, and Catalan is the 14th most used language on Google Books. I should also mention that the Wikipedia in Catalan is now near the top in terms of article quality.

You can also read a discussion on the article from Meneame (where I found it) here.

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Latin and Icelandic Wikipedias around 30,000 and 25,000 articles

At the moment the Icelandic Wikipedia is at 25,287 articles. This may seem quite small but remember that the population is barely over 300,000. Norway has about 14 times the population of Iceland and a total of 270,000 articles or so (Bokmål + Nynorsk), and multiplying the size of the Icelandic Wikipedia by 14 gives 350,000, giving the Icelandic Wikipedia the largest number of articles per capita out of all the Scandinavian languages.

The Latin Wikipedia is also quite close to a new milestone, being at 29,682 articles right now. Latin is a bit of an auxlang right now, meaning that its users are about as interested in promoting it as in the language itself, and the Taberna shows a lot of discussion about the number of articles. They'll probably have a special Wiki.png graphic for when the 30,000 number is reached.

One other interesting note from the Taberna: there is a list of Wikipedias by sample of articles, which is an attempt to ascertain the overall quality of a Wikipedia instead of relying simply on article count. It turns out that at the moment Catalan is in third place after English and German, with a very low number of stubs and quite a few long articles.

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Catalan, Basque and Galician can now be used in the European Court of Justice

There are quite a few articles on this in Spanish that pretty much say the same thing, so let's go with...this one.

Catalan, Basque and Galician can be used starting tomorrow (=27 April) in the European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg...then it goes on about an administrative agreement that has made the usage of recognized regional languages in this way possible, and that Spain is the first country to utilize this. With this citizens can send correspondences to the court in any of Spain's official languages and receive a reply in the same language.

Catalan and Galician are both Romance languages so receiving and sending letters in those two should be a pretty easy matter (there was even a common Galician-Portuguese language in the Middle Ages), but Basque is completely different and would require relying entirely on Basque native speakers, since no one else would be able to manage the documents, and I imagine this would place a bit more burden on those handling the correspondences to be accurate. I would imagine for example that any correspondences coming in in Galician or Catalan could easily be looked over by someone that doesn't necessarily know the language as a mother tongue to get an idea what the subject is after which it would get forwarded to the person in charge, but Basque doesn't look like other European languages so letters in Basque would just go straight to the native speaker in charge. At least, that's the way I imagine it would work.

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What does the Aragonese language look like?

I spend a lot of time watching the endless struggle online between atheists and the religious and everyone in between, and it turns out that in a city in Spain (I'll tell you which one later) some have put up an ad that says the same thing as the atheist bus ads in England and Canada and elsewhere: the one that says "God probably doesn't exist. Now go enjoy life" or something along those lines. Someone here took a picture of the same ad on a building under construction in Spain, and it looks like this:

I found the image on this site, where a commenter mentions that it's in both Spanish and "Catalan". But that's definitely not Catalan. Take a look:

Spanish: Probablemente dios no existe. Deja de preocuparte y disfruta la vida.

"Catalan": Probablemén dios no esiste. Deixa de alticamar-te y desfruta la bida.

What gives it away is that Catalan doesn't use -mén but rather -ment, and i for and instead of y. It also doesn't turn v into b like some Romance languages do. Using the translator here we can see that Catalan would look more like this (it's an automatic translator so it might be a bit off):

Probablement déu no existeix. Deixa de preocupar-te i gaudeix la vida.

That looks much better. The word for cross is also creu. Lots of words end in -eu in Catalan (deu, seu, lleu, creu, veu, europeu, extreu, podeu, etc.).

The ad is in the city of Zaragoza, which is the capital of Aragon.

To see more of what Aragonese looks like, just visit their Wikipedia.

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