Welcome to
Catalan Nation
Catalonia - Catalunya The biggest non independent nation in Europe

Catalan is the official language of Andorra. It is co-official in the Spanish regions of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia. It has no official status in the parts of Aragon where it is spoken (Spain), in the city of l'Alguer (Italy) and in Northern Catalonia (France).

To understand the origins of catalan we must go back to 778 when the Franks of Charlemagne conquered a narrow strip southward of the Pyrenees with Barcelona and established there the so called Marca Hispanica (Spanish mark) as a buffer state against the muslims. The local Romance idiom since then evolved in close relations with Occitan.

By the end of the 10th century Catalan was already a fully-formed language, clearly distinguishable from its Latin origins. It appeared for the first time in written documents in the second half of the 12th century (a charter and six sermons); the Homilies of Organyà, written in the late 12th or early 13th centuries, is the first extant text written originally in Catalan. Catalan poetry flourished from the 13th century, before which time Catalan poets wrote in Provençal (Occitan).

Catalan retained its vigour until the union of the Aragonese and Castilian crowns in 1474. After that, although mainly grammatical works appeared, it gradually entered a period of decline. Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1705-1715), Philip V abolished all the government institutions then existing in Catalonia and implemented Spanish laws. Catalan went through various periods of prohibition and even of repression, beginning with the Decretos de Nueva Planta (Decrees for a New Political Order) of 1716.

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