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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

>>>Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian.

TIL people in Valencia speak several different versions of Spanish: http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valenci...

"In Valencia they speak a form of Catalan (the locals call it 'Valenciano' but this is not officially recognised anywhere outside of Valencia).

Everyone in Valencia speaks Castillian Spanish, but many will speak to each other in Catalan in the street. This will be a bit of a hindrance to your learning experience."

"You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish. Even road signs and advertisements are in Catalan. You will find newspapers, TV and radio in both languages."

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This website is very wrong. Firstly, there are no such thing as "different versions of Spanish" in Spain. People from different regions speak with (sometimes very) different accents, but it is the same language. Everyone can understand each other while speaking spanish.

"Valencià" (Valencian) is the catalan dialect spoken in Valencia. Catalan itself is a whole other language than spanish. They are as different as, say, spanish and portuguese or italian and french (and any combination of those).

Secondly, Valencian knowledge and use is being lost in the whole region [1]. By 2008, only 32% of the population claimed to use it as their primary language, whereas 54% said that spanish was their primary language.

Moreover, only 76% of the population _understood_ valencian, only 56% was able to speak it, and just 25% claimed to be able to write it correctly.

The numbers today are probably even worse.

BTW, road signs and advertisements are written in both languages almost everywhere (just like in Catalonia, or any spanish region where there is more than one official language).

[1] http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valenci%C3%A0

It is a bold exaggeration to say that catalan is as different from spanish as portuguese or french. It is definitely a language, but extremely similar to spanish, much more than any other. Valencian resembles spanish even more.

While you're quick to conclude that valencian is getting extinct, don't forget about all the areas in Valencia where valencian was never, ever spoken, but it was forced into schools, and laws that require an official degree in valencia to work as a government official were set up.

> It is a bold exaggeration to say that catalan is as different from spanish as portuguese or french.

Sources? Being a lazy guy, I turned to wikipedia [1], where it explicitly says:

> Despite being mostly situated in the Iberian Peninsula, the Catalan vocabulary exhibits marked lexical differences with Ibero-Romance (Spanish and Portuguese), instead showing general affinity towards the Gallo-Romance group.

The Gallo-Romance group includes French and Italian.

About regions where valencian was never spoken and forced into schools, what is your point exactly? I just said that valencian usage is becoming less frequent lately, and the numbers support this affirmation. Are you trying to say that, with the current laws, the language can not become extinct? Then I may agree with you, but laws can be (and have been) changed...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language (lexical comparison section)

Edit: missing link.

Just because it has (obvious french) Gallo-Romance influences, doesn't mean it's less similar to spanish than poruguese.

My point is that you're complaining that it's being used less, while it's actually being forced onto places where it simply has never been used.

I reply here because I can't reply to the below comment.

The claim in wikipedia says that it has more general affinity to the gallo-romance group than to the ibero-romance group. I may be wrong, but I read that as "it is more similar to french/italian than to spanish/portuguese".

Also, I'm not complaining about anything (and I couldn't care less about wheter valencian becomes extinct or not). I was just refuting the op affirmation statement that "You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish".

>* The claim in wikipedia says that it has more general affinity to the gallo-romance group than to the ibero-romance group. I may be wrong, but I read that as "it is more similar to french/italian than to spanish/portuguese".*

There might be a terminology mismatch here and you are talking about different things.

Perhaps the core language (syntactic structure, regular verb conjugation patterns, core words) is very like Spanish and that comment on Wikipedia is referring many non-core words in the common vocabulary being pulled from languages common in other neighbouring areas.

Caveat: I am no linguist nor do I speak anything much other than Correct English and American English.

"It is a bold exaggeration to say that catalan is as different from spanish as portuguese or french."

What?

Catalan at source is probably as different to Spanish as French or Italian are. But probably, centuries of stronger influence have induced more similarities: most people in Catalonia are bilingual.

Especially for those who don't speak either:

Spanish: "Hay muchas cosas", "Tenemos una vez" French: "Il y a beaucoup des choses", "Nous avons une fois" Catalan: "N'hi ha moltes coses", "Tenim una vegada" Italian: "Ci sono molte cose", "Abbiamo una volta"

I think it's a quite representative example of the kind of differences & similarities.

Portuguese: "Há muitas coisas", "Temos uma vez"

"Hi ha moltes coses". That "N'" is a common error. That "Tenemos una vez"/"Tenim una vegada"/etc. doesn't really make a lot of sense to me, but it's technically correct.

I'm Portuguese. I'm fluent in French, and minimally capable in Italian. Without formally studying Spanish, I can understand spoken and written Spanish, as well speak it (albeit poorly). I can't understand most words in spoken Catalan, and can't speak it altogether.

Catalan is a close enough language that I can understand its written form, but it is not as close to Spanish as Spanish is to Portuguese.

I can confirm this. I was born in the Valencian community and I was "forced" to study Valencian language at the school as part of a "normalisation" process so the language wasn't lost.

When I was working as OSS consultant in Valencia one of the main issues was the translation of OpenOffice to Valencian language because for political reasons (mostly) the Catalan version couldn't be used. Let's say it is complicated. To cut the story short: some people in Valencia don't want to accept that Valencian is dialect of Catalan and they insist that it is a completely different language (total BS, but politics isn't about science, is it?).

Yes, some words are different, like en_US is different from en_GB; but the whole absurd thing got to the point that they didn't want to use the locale for Catalan (ie. ca_ES@valencia or similar). Again, because political reasons they wanted to use va_ES but then OpenOffice couldn't integrate the translations in their source tree because va_ES is not an accepted locale in the IANA database.

It was a total mess and it meant that they were always playing the catch up game translating again and again OpenOffice with each new version (I don't know how things are now in LibreOffice, but OpenOffice was a total nightmare).

All together is a little bit sad to see how resources are wasted.

indeed!

Valencian (Valencià) is not a version of Spanish, but a different language. It's the same language that is spoken in Catalonia (and which there is called Catalan), and in the Balearic Islands (where it's called Balear).

It's amazing the amount of languages that are everywhere...

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