Origins and comparison

Catalan is a neo-Latin, or Romance, language alongside a number of European ‘national’ languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French – the so-called western group – and Italian and Romanian – the eastern group) and several other languages that have an official status at sub-state level, or are spoken only in part of a state (Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Ladin, Rheto-Romance, Friulian, etc.) Several of these languages became the languages of worldwide empires but within Europe itself, their borders coincide, broadly speaking, with the limits of the Roman Empire. This is especially clear in western Europe, the Romance–Germanic language divide being more or less close to the line running down the borders between French- and Dutch-speaking Belgium; between France and Germany, and between French- and German-speaking Switzerland.

Badia i Margarit (2004) reminds us that Catalan and the other Romance languages are a living heritage of the active romanization that lasted for centuries across the Empire (seven centuries, in the case of Catalan, in the north-eastern corner of Hispania, the cradle of what was to be become Catalonia). However, as Roger Wright (1999) underlines, it is impossible to point to a specific date when these languages emerged as clearly separate from the Vulgar Latin spoken throughout the lands that had been part of the Roman Empire before its collapse in the fifth century. According to Moran and Rabella (2004), all the so-called Romance languages emerged in the seventh or eighth centuries, but were not used in documents until much later, as Latin continued to be the only written and taught language (with increasing traces of the new spoken languages over time).

Badia i Margarit considers the language spoken was fairly clearly differentiated by territory at the time of the Saracen invasions in the early eighth century, though nowhere were the requirements yet met to be able to regard them as minimally organized languages, supported by independent linguistic structures. These were to appear in the ninth and tenth centuries, at least in the case of Catalan, and the first attempts to write it can be traced to the eleventh century. Of special significance in this context in the promotion of the vernacular is the Third Council of Tours (813), just before the death of Charlemagne.