Catalan Linguistics: Conjunctions, Dialects, and Sociolinguistics

Types of Conjunctions

• Copulative: and, or
• Disjunctive: or, or
• Distributive: neither... nor, or... or, now... now, the other one
• Adversative: but
• Explanatory: i.e., that is, it is
• Illative: so, therefore

Subordinated Clauses

• Substantive:
  • Completive: that
  • Wh-clauses: what, how, where, who
  • Relative: who, what
  • Infinitive: non-personal form of the verb (e.g., I like smoking)
• Adjective: Adjective clauses
• Adverbial: Circumstantial complements

Catalan Dialects

North-Western Catalan

Also called West Catalan, this is the variety spoken in the western counties of Catalonia (e.g., approaching, spare, escatxigar, Godfather).

Valencian

The historical name for the traditional and statutory language of Valencia, which is officially called Catalan in Catalonia (e.g., Not a bit, Nueter, larger collective panties, calbot).

Central Catalan

The Eastern dialect with the most demographic weight, including the province of Barcelona (e.g., normal).

Catalan-Valencian-Balearic

The name used by Ethnologue for the Catalan language. While "Catalan" is the most common term, this is the most widespread syncretic denomination in academia (e.g., the boy, ca, faldeta).

Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics

• Monolingualism: The use of a single language by an individual or population. It is statistically much less frequent than multilingualism.
• Bilingualism: A term referring to the existence of two languages in an individual or social group; a realization of multilingualism.
• Minority Language: A sociolinguistic term referring to any language historically spoken in a territory that is in a situation of linguistic anomaly due to language shift.
• Language Conflict: A term expressing tension between groups where language differences become a symbol of fundamental antagonism.
• Language Shift: A process where a linguistic community abandons its language to become part of another linguistic community.
• Normalization: The recovery of a minority language's use in all areas, moving beyond its original scope.