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date: 12 February 2025

History of the Catalan Lexiconlocked

History of the Catalan Lexiconlocked

  • Josep MartinesJosep MartinesUniversity of Alicante

Summary

Catalan is a western Romance language closely related to the Gallo-Romance languages, especially to Occitan. Therefore, most words of the Catalan basic lexicon have a great affinity to Occitan. Throughout its history, Catalan inherited from Latin many words of non-Indo-European (Iberian and Old Basque) and Indo-European (Proto-Celtic and Celtic) origin. It had contacts and received borrowings from several languages, mostly Germanic (Gothic and Frankish), Arabic, Aragonese, Occitan, Italian, French, and more recently English. Eventually, the use of Catalan gained strength in formal contexts (literary, scientific, administrative texts, among others) during the Middle Ages, which in turn encouraged the development of varied lexical resources (popular vocabulary and learned words), norms of correct usage, and elaborate register variation.

The progressive expansion of the Crown of Aragon toward the south and east of the Iberian Peninsula (13th century)—and its later integration into the Spanish monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages —prompted its contact with Spanish and a process of Hispanization of the Catalan lexicon. At the end of the Middle Ages, a change of its sociopolitical status provoked the beginning of a process of loss of social prestige and the interference of the Spanish lexicon. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century witnessed a process of recuperation of the usage in all spheres of society, the elaboration of a linguistic norm, the depuration of interference, and the activation of the resources of lexical and terminological production.

Subjects

  • History of Linguistics

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