Ten Catalan expressions you need to know
Steve Tallantyre - [email protected]
Published: 3 Feb, 2014 CET.
Updated: Tue 4 Feb 2014 10:41 CET
In this week's The Local List we look at Catalonia's most colourful colloquialisms to stop you getting lost in translation next time you roam beyond the Ramblas in Barcelona.
Are you baffled by the bar-room chit-chat every time you head off the tourist trail in Catalonia? Don't worry, your Spanish is (probably) fine. What you're hearing is Catalan, the co-official language spoken by around ten million people in this part of the world. While it's perfectly possible to navigate the souvenir shops armed only with a Spanish phrasebook, and to chat to bilingual barcelonins exclusively in castellano, your visit to Catalonia will be deeply enriched by knowing a few phrases in the local lingo. Despite a common misconception that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish, it is actually a separate Romance language more closely related to French and Italian. It's spoken by more people than Danish, Norwegian or Finnish and has a history dating back to the Middle Ages.
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Are you baffled by the bar-room chit-chat every time you head off the tourist trail in Catalonia?
Don't worry, your Spanish is (probably) fine. What you're hearing is Catalan, the co-official language spoken by around ten million people in this part of the world.
While it's perfectly possible to navigate the souvenir shops armed only with a Spanish phrasebook, and to chat to bilingual barcelonins exclusively in castellano, your visit to Catalonia will be deeply enriched by knowing a few phrases in the local lingo.
Despite a common misconception that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish, it is actually a separate Romance language more closely related to French and Italian. It's spoken by more people than Danish, Norwegian or Finnish and has a history dating back to the Middle Ages.
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