Valencian Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
This page deals with language. For other uses of Valencian, see Valencia (disambiguation).According the Diccionari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, Valencian is the name of the Catalan language which is spoken in the Autonomous Community of Valencia, Spain. It is thus the official name for one of two co-official languages declared in the Valencian Statute of Autonomy: Valencian (Catalan) and Castilian (Spanish).
The word is also used to refer to dialect of this territory to differentiate it from Catalan as a whole, or from the Catalan of Barcelona. In this sense it can be considered a sub-dialect of the Western Catalan variety, which also includes the varieties of the Aragonese Fringe, Lleida province and most of Tarragona province.
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2 Features of Valencian 3 Sub-varieties of Valencian 4 External links |
Catalan was brought to the territories that became the Kingdom of Valencia during the Reconquista. Whilst Castile moved south conquering New Castile and Andalusia, the Aragonese and Catalan settlers from the Crown of Aragon came and conquered Valencia. Most of these settlers came from South-West Catalonia, and to this day Valencian is almost indistinguishable from the dialect of these people.
Since Valencian is the same language as Catalan, both names can be used almost interchangeably, with "Catalan" emphasising the pan-Catalan nature of the language, and "Valencian" emphasising local features. The choice to use one name or the other is more a matter of politics than anything else.
Maria Josep Cuenca, lecturer at the Department of Catalan Language Studies (note the name) of the University of Valencia, in her book El valencià és una llengua diferent? (ISBN 84-8131-452-8), notes that the number of people identifying with their Autonomous Community rather than with Spain is actually greater in Castile-La Mancha than in the Valencian Community. This is perhaps surprising in a region that is supposed to be one of the països catalans or Catalan countries. There is obviously a complicated mixture of feelings of belonging due to various historical events, and the result is that Catalan in Valencia is normally called "Valencian" and is often held to be a separate language, whereas in the Balearic Islands, Aragonese Fringe, Alghero and Roussillon the local dialects are at least as different from the speech of Barcelona as Valencian is, and yet it does not occur to these speakers to call their language anything but Catalan.
There is no mention of Valencian or Catalan or any language other than Spanish in the Spanish Constitution of 1978. The Autonomy Statute refers to the vernacular language as valencià, a name used traditionally since the fifteenth century. There is a private institution called Lo Rat Penat that campaigns for Valencian as a separate language with a different written norm and has firmly supported the motivated attempts of a minority of Valencian sectors (often related to right-wing political parties) to split Valencian and Catalan norms apart. However, their theories are not supported by Universities or Romance-language experts. Officially, the rules for Valencian are decided by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, which follows the same rules as for the rest of the Catalan language, set by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.
Catalan/Valencian is not spoken as much in the capital city of Valencia as it is in its surrounding areas. Spanish is the everyday language of most people, and in much cases the one used if the language of the other person is not known. One explanation of this fact could be that Catalan/Valencian was forbidden during several years and it suffered (and still suffers) from stigmatization, as usually happens with minorized languages. Also, the capital city has always, and specially during the half part of 20th Century, absorved a big amount of central-Spanish, castillian speaker immigration, attracted by the better economical situation in the Mediterranean coast area, which didn't had the need to learn and use Catalan, due to the political situation (dictatorship of general Franco), that prohibited and prosecution the use of Catalan.
Valencian was the home language of the Borgia family.
This is an Article on Valencian. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Valencian History and status of Valencian
Features of Valencian
Note that this is a list of features of the main forms of Valencian (Catalan spoken in the Valencian Community) that differ from those of other Catalan dialects, particularly from the Central or literary varieties of the language. For more general information on the features of the Valencian language, see Catalan language. Note also that there is a great deal of variety within the Valencian Community, and the features below do not apply to every speaker at all.
Some other features, such as the use of molt de or the lack of hom or geminate L (but, in contrast, gemination of D in some contexts does exist), are often given as examples of differences between Valencian and other forms of Catalan. However, these are in reality differences between colloquial and literary language, and, again, are particular of concrete geographical areas. In fact, northen and southern variants of Valencian share more features with oriental Catalan than with central Valencian and for this reason most of the features listed previously do not apply to them. As we have seen, the central / capital city area of Valencian suffers from the biggest Castillian interferences and are one of the causes of these differences.Sub-varieties of Valencian
External links