# How understandable / recognizable is Catalan for a Spanish speaker (from outside Catalonia)?



## AndrasBP

Hello,

When I was in Catalonia a friend told me how he and some other Catalans were travelling by train somewhere in Germany, and next to them was a Spaniard talking in Spanish on his mobile. The Spaniard could hear the Catalans talking but obviously didn't realize what language it was and asked them a question in English. They answered in Spanish. The Spaniard was surprised: 
- How come you speak Spanish so well?
- We learned it at school.
- Really? Wow! Where?
- In Barcelona!
- <puzzled face>

Do you think this is believable? Is Catalan just an unintelligible "non-Spanish foreign language" for a Spaniard who has never had any exposure to it?


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## germanbz

AndrasBP said:


> Hello,
> 
> 
> Do you think this is believable? Is Catalan just an unintelligible "non-Spanish foreign language" for a Spaniard who has never had any exposure to it?



I don't think so. It is really really strange that a Spaniard can't tell people speaking in Catalan. Maybe if we were talking about a Spanish speaker from America that could be like that, in fact recently when I was working in Uruguay and a workmate began to speak in Galician a waitress from the hotel asked me what language was my friend speaking in. But in the case of Spain I've never heard something like that.


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## Penyafort

Languages from the same family, as in the case of the Romance ones, may look very similar when written, specially if we are reading standard documents in which many pan-Romance and educated words are used. But understanding spoken language, at a fast pace, with local slang, etc, is a different story, specially if the exposure to it has been next to nothing.

You can see the same thing happening with Portuguese, a language which is closer to Spanish than Catalan, relatively easy to understand when written, but not that much when spoken. I've met quite a few people thinking the Portuguese speakers beside them were from a Slavic country when they heard them. Catalan, like Portuguese, has many sounds that are weird for a Spanish speaker. Moreover, Catalan also has a great share of words that are weird for all other Iberians, although they might be not that weird if those Iberians are acquainted with French or Italian.

However, for someone with some minimal exposure, there is always that occasional word or expression that is revealing, if not just by the intonation. So in the end, it partly depends on the language, partly on the person's experience. In fact, the non-learned language that seems the clearest to most Romance speakers tends to be standard Italian.


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## jmx

I agree with Germanbz. It's probably easy to find a Latinamerican who doesn't even know that Catalan exists; however in Spain pretty much everybody is well aware of the existence of at least Catalan, Galician and Basque. Even if the Spaniard in the train weren't able to understand the conversation, chances are he would still recognise the language as Catalan.


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## gvergara

Find it hard ti believe. Catalan has the same s sound that European Spanish has, and really that is a good starting point, at least for Spanish speakers. Also, Catalan doesn't have that many weird sounds, that's another advantage. And most importantly the lexical content is quite similar in both languages. It probably depends on a person's ability to pay attention to some linguistic details, and the amount of exposure you have, but at the end of the day to me or shouldn't be that difficult for a Spanish-speaking person to recognise a relative language in Catalan.

Gonzal·lo


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## AndrasBP

Thank you for your replies. So you're saying that even if a Spaniard has never been to Catalonia and never heard any Catalan radio or TV programmes, s/he would still be able to recognise the language? 
Do you think that in a similar situation, an uneducated monolingual Spanish speaker (unlike the one in the story, asking a question in English), who is uninterested in languages, would be able to recognize Portuguese, French and Italian?


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## germanbz

AndrasBP said:


> Thank you for your replies. So you're saying that even if a Spaniard has never been to Catalonia and never heard any Catalan radio or TV programmes, s/he would still be able to recognise the language?
> Do you think that in a similar situation, an uneducated monolingual Spanish speaker (unlike the one in the story, asking a question in English), who is uninterested in languages, would be able to recognize Portuguese, French and Italian?



Well, I see you're adding some new factors such as the one we are talking about was uneducated, isolated and has never heard any Catalan on TV. Obviously in this situation you can be sure that, this person won't be able to recognise any language, not only Catalan, but Portuguese, English or French...


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## gvergara

Just reread my last message, it has a couple of typos, sorry about that.

As to the question, look, I really don't think an uneducated person with no exposure to the language can identify it easily, but still I think if you pay some attention to a conversation held in Catalan, after a while you can come to identify it as a language belonging to the same family Spanish belongs to (kind of a relative of Spanish). I have spoken in Catalan to curious people who want to know what it sounds like, and they can partially understand it without going mad.

Cheers,

G.


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## Doraemon-

I find it hard to believe too. Catalan is usually not intelligible for a Spaniard (not Catalan speaker, of course), but it is easy to recognize. Everyone has heard Catalan in Spain and knows how it sounds. This could happen if the guy didn't hear them speaking in Catalan.
It's like hearing someone speaking Italian, you may not understand it, but you realize it's Italian if you went to primary school, at least.


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## AndrasBP

Thanks everyone.

@germanbz 
I was just trying to imagine a situation in which a speaker of a Latin language is able or unable to recognize other Latin languages.
Since my language, Hungarian, has no close relatives, monolingual Hungarians (of whom there are many) never feel they can understand "a bit" of another language and identify it as a relative of their own. It's either Hungarian they hear or some completely unintelligible foreign gibberish


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## Doraemon-

It's not only that they are cousin languages, but _familiar _languages.
A few years ago, for exemple, most Spaniards didn't ever heard speaking Romanian, so we were not able to recognize it. If you didn't pay much attention it sounded like Russian, Greek or whatever, even if our languages are closely related. Romanians were able to understand some Spanish without much effort, but Spaniards didn't understand anything in Romanian (and even now), because they were more aware of Spanish or French, that we were about them.
Maybe a Latin American guy could hear Catalan and not identify it at all, because he has never been exposed to it, but it's hard to imagine it from a Spaniard, unless he's 80 years old and never left his town.


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## Penyafort

People here are not paying much attention to context, which is often very important. If you are quite exposed to a language, you will recognize it anywhere. But if you have been exposed to it very little, even if you are aware of it, you may not recognize it if the interaction takes place in an unexpected setting. I have experienced it personally when abroad in both ways: not being able to recognize a language myself, and seeing Spanish speakers not recognize what I was speaking in to my tripmates.

It goes without saying that, if people are not even aware of the existence of a language, it is even less recognizable. South American Spanish speakers who recently watched a Catalan TV series, dubbed into Latin American Spanish but preserving the songs in Catalan, believed them to be in Portuguese or some Italian of sorts.

It also depends on the variety of Catalan. Typically, for a Spanish speaker, the Eastern dialects are more difficult to grasp than the Western ones, more "Iberian-sounding", probably due to both substrate and influence. (But then, I remember an article in which many speakers of non-Romance languages, after listening to a Western variety such as Valencian, identified it as Italian.) In the case of Northern Catalan or Algherese, many Spanish speakers would identify them with French and Italian, respectively.



gvergara said:


> Find it hard ti believe. Catalan has the same s sound that European Spanish has, and really that is a good starting point, at least for Spanish speakers. Also, Catalan doesn't have that many weird sounds, that's another advantage. And most importantly the lexical content is quite similar in both languages.



They are obviously languages from the same family, we will not be expecting sounds as different as those from Mandarin Chinese. But for two languages so related, the difference in sounds is noticeable. Without taking phonotactics much into account, for your average Spanish speaker /ɛ/, /ɔ/, /ə/, /z/, /dz/, /dʒ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ -and even /ʎ/ today- are weird sounds, or sounds they only know because of other languages. The /l/ is different in quality. Even in those sounds that are the same, a Spanish speaker does not expect /m/ and /ɲ/ or the stops /p//t//k/ to happen at the end of a word, for instance. Not to mention the unexpected _liaisons_, such as saying _quina hora és_ in just three syllables, etc.

Regarding the lexical content, remember that it is the least Iberian of the six Romance languages in the Peninsula. So things will vary deeply whether we are listening to a technical article or to a poem. (In other words, any Spanish speaker would understand a sentence like _El problema afecta la comunicació entre individus, _but I doubt they understood one like _Al vessant rost proper, dins balma ben pregona, hi van trobar la doll del regalim._)


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## Doraemon-

Penyafort said:


> but I doubt they understood one like _Al vessant rost proper, dins balma ben pregona, hi van trobar la doll del regalim._)


Coi, no l'entenc ni jo


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## anita mazzon

I think this is a joke made by Catalan people about Spanish people. If a Catalan person tells you this joke, they expect you to laugh at the punch line ("In Barcelona!") and maybe say some light insult about Spaniards. In fact, I have heard this joke before and that's how it was.


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## Rani_Author

I think, it was an ironical question. Those Spaniards did not want to recognize if Catalan really existed. 

I knew an awesome Catalan person. Since the first time we met, he said that he was so native in Catalan. Spanish was just his other language (a kind of foreign language). Not his mother tongue. Although, he was so native in Spanish. And I could understand the reason.

I think, the situation is almost same. 

I do not know in other countries, but here, it is nonsense that an uneducated indonesian does not know about Malayan (which is a brother-language of Indonesian). At least, all of indonesians know that Malayan exists and could understand it enough well. Although, they can not speak it at all. 

In Roman language's case, I have a cousin. He can not speak Roman languages at all. He is not interested in learning any languages. He is just interested in listening to any songs and watching any movies in Roman languages. Every time I give him any new songs and any new movies in Roman languages, he could know well which one is Italian, which one is French, Spanish, Catalan, Portugues. Just one of Roman languages he is always failed to guess. Romanian. Because, it sounds like Slavic languages in his ears.


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## wdstck

@Rani_Author

(*Romance languages*, not Roman languages)

In my opinion, albeit Romanian is supposed to use ~60% Latin words (~20% Slavic-origin, ~20% other), its grammar sounds way more puzzling to other Romance-language speakers than Portuguese, Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan or Italian do.


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## anita mazzon

wdstck said:


> In my opinion, albeit it is supposed to use ~60% Latin words (~20% Slavic-origin, ~20% other), Romanian grammar sounds way more puzzling to other Romance-language speakers than Portuguese, Spanish, French, Occitan, Catalan or Italian do.


Una salutación cordial.


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