.DO YOU WANT TO GET MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CATALONIA, CATALAN COUNTRIES AND CATALAN LANGUAGE?
Catalan Countries are a little nation without sovereignty, in the east of the Iberian Peninsula and south of the Pyrenean mountain range. There are 4 important capitals: València, Palma de Mallorca, Perpinyà and Barcelona.
They have a population of about 12 million people and their native language is CATALAN.
In Catalonia,more than the 40% of the population is in favour of independence: we demand complete national sovereignty for the Catalan Countries, that is total political independence from France and Spain.
Politically the Catalan Countries are, at the present, 3 Autonomous Communities within the Spanish state plus a region of the French state. They have 3 parliaments, which, however, have little legislative power, and 3 autonomous government called Govern Balear, Generalitat Valenciana and Generalitat de Catalunya. They became part of the Spanish state in 1707-1714. In those years, the army of the kingdom of Castlile invaded the Catalan Countries and from then on they were no longer a sovereign state.
Until the present, the Castilian kings, at first, and then the different Spanish governments and dictatures have tried to eliminate the Catalan cultural identity and create animosity between the Catalans and the rest of the people in the Iberian Peninsula. Nevertheless the Catalans have managed to keep their language and traditions alive and we, the Catalans, continue to claim the sovereignty that was ours but was taken from us by armed force.
This is a map of Catalonia and Catalan Countries.
CATALONIA/CATALAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES:
THE HISTORICAL REASONS BEHIND
A POLITICAL PROJECT
Communities, like people, share many characteristics:they resemble each other in many aspects. But it is precisely their difference wich identifies each one and personalizes it, the singularity of its biography, its history. And biographies, like the histories of peoples, weigh up the experiences undergone, not forgetting the hopes and plans which have emerged. These hopes and plans, old and new, are, in the last resort and in every era, the basic stimulus for social action, for political action.
Institutional crisis, permanence of the people
Since the late XVth century, the Catalan community -Catalonia and Catalan-speaking countries- has suffered the effects of the increasing desnationalization (in terms of politics, language and culture) of its ruling classes, faced with the projection of the Hispanic empire.As a result, there has been a marked decline of their own institutions, wich were abolished at the start of the XVIIIth century. The danger of Catalan dissolution in the face of the plans of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy to create uniformity was plain. In fact, several traditional European cultures started to disappear, swallowed up in nascent nation-States expansion plans.
Nevertheless, a new series of historical factors wich became apparent in the XIXth century, up-dated and encouraged the possibility of a new cultural structuring and a new crystallization of the community.
Specific cultural and linguistic tradition among the people of the country was still going strong when migration from countryside to the towns began as a result of population growth, industrialization, the economic specialitzation of many zones in the territiry and the resultant increase in internal exchange. The loss of elements of political unity was compensated for by the new economic cohesion and, above all, by the new cultural cohesion: migration from the countryside to the town took place within Catalonia at this time. Moreover, they were concentrated particulary in Barcelona wich,during the XIXth century,was to become a power-ful industrial and commercial city, as it had been at its peak in the middle ages.
A long rebirth:between tradition and modernity
In the midst of major movements of the population (change of residence, work, social group, lifestyle, progressive education, adaptation to the urban industrial envoirenment), the phenomenon of the Renaixença, or rebirth, came about, the resurgence of Catalan awareness of social cohesion and community identity. At the peak of the Romantic period, the dissemination among the people of mythical versions about the origins of the nation and its glorious medieval past contributed to fuelling a certain collective pride and the reevaluation of its own traditons. In these conditions, the combination of tradition and modernity wich is the inheritance of Modernisme, or Art Nouveau,comes as no surprise, likewise the Catalan political proposals of a nationalist character in the face of the Spanish monarchy.
Tradition and modernity. This tension has presided over Catalan development in the XXth century. Pro-European conservative bourgeoise, radical-republican middle-class workers, anarchosyndicalist proletariate...up until the thirties, all came together in economic progress, mechanization, electrification. What is the ideal of modern Catalonia? Political autonomy, electrification, mass democracy. For the people moreover, personal freedom and justice. This was why, in the thirties, against the background of a Europe which was contributing to the growth of fascism, republican Barcelona was to become the privileged setting for some of the most advance experiments of the cultural avantgarde and social revolution.
Coming through Franco's ethnocide,to find itself again in mass culture
The fascist military victory of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) saw the start of a veritable ethnocide. The entire generation of cultural and political background of the Republic was subjact to bloody repression or had to flee into the exile. The Catalan language and its heritage were forbidden and erased from public life. The whole of civil society -political groups, cultural entities, schools and universities, the media...- was destroyed and replaced by the new, totalitarian organitzation of Franco's Spanish state.
Starting in the fifties, amidst the full brutality of Franco's regime, a series of phenomena was set off wich was the subsequent fate of the Catalan community and culture:
1-Waves of migration from the Spanish south and inland to industrialized areas of Catalonia, this saw the recompozition of the Catalan working class in such a way that Catalan was denied by the state.
2-Deployment by the state of Francoist, fundamentalist culture ("Spain,the unity of destiny amidst the universal"/"Spain,the spiritual reserve of the western world")exploiting the homogeneizing potential of the new mass media.
3-The slow, spontaneous reconstruction of a democratic culture, bringing together the social demands of the workers and the defence of the national identity of the community.
4-Connection with new cultural, intellectual movements of the young people of Europe, from the sixties on.
Looking to the future with hope and confidence.
After the establishment of the monarchy (1975) and the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, the Catalan community has become one of the leading stateless European nations in the struggle for political and cultural sovereignty.
This group attitude has been characterized by its widereaching social aspect; by the active participation of many immigrants; by the pacific, radically democratic character of the strategies proposed; by the strict respect for individual options in a climate of greate social freedom; and the clear desear to became part of Europe, on the terms of our own heritage and the characteristic personality of our community.
We are confident that Europe and the world will recognize our right as a people to self-determination and offer the conditions of respect and democracy wich will allow us to exercise this right in the near future,because this is the desire of the majority of Catalan citizens.
The Catalan Countries
Country occupying the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, east of a north-south longitude approximately 0° 30' east to 1° 30' west as the coast line runs north-northeast-south-southwest. In latitude, they extend south of the Corberes range and the Central Pyrenees, from about 43° north to 38°north, beyond the Segura river. Therefore, it has three sides: the Spanish side, which includes the eastern third of the Ebre River basin, the coast of the Iberian System with the lower basin of the Xúquer river, and the lowest sector of the Segura, separated by the Betic system; the European side, which separates Catalonia from Languedoc, and leaves Catalonia the eastern Pyrenees; and the Mediterranean side, centred on the Catalan sea, that separates the Country of Valencia and Catalonia, west of Mare Nostrum, from the Balearic Islands, which barely reach 40° 30´ east. These three sides correspond to the basic ingredients, Hispania, continental Europe and the Mediterranean, which make up the triple Catalan Country. The Catalan Countries are divided into three states: the Spanish state (93.41% of the territory and 96.64% of the population), the French state (5.92% and 3.16%) and Andorra (0,67% and 0,20%). The concept of country that joined the Catalan nation; that is, the lands that shared the Catalan language, differentiated from Latin centuries ago, appeared at least in the 12th century. The territorial expansion of the following centuries (towards the continental south-west and the maritime south-east), especially the 12th, that would incorporate the Catalan population of the Balearic Islands and that had become the Country of Valencia, gave the Catalan language around 1300 the territory it covers today with slight modifications in the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries (repopulation of lands abandoned by the Moors and lands that were depopulated as a result of wars: the Guerra dels Segadors and the Spanish War of Succession). The unity of the lands where Catalan is spoken has been constant in spite of changes in the administrative and political borders of. However, the duality of the name of Catalonia to designate the national territory and as the name of the Principality, already in the 14th century and abroad in the 16th, led people to search for another name for the country especially since, after the Nova Planta decree (and definitively with the end of the old regime), the Catalan-Aragonese crown (or corona d'Aragó ceased to exist and this name had up to then partly covered this need. In the 19th century, names like Catalan Lands, Catalan-speaking land, Catalan Fatherland, etc. were used. In 1886, however, the form, Catalan Countries appeared in an article by Joseph Narcís Roca i Farreras, in the magazine "L'Arc de Sant Martí"; later (1900) in the magazine "Catalònia", edited by J. Massó i Gully, and in 1903 in the magazine "Catalunya", edited by J. Carner. To specify a political project, this name was used in the thirties in some party platforms (like the Unió Democràtica de Catalunya) or by some writers (like J. Carbonell i Gener). The project had generally been called Catalunya Gran since the Renaixença. In the years of refocusing Catalan political and cultural action after 1950, some writers like Alexandre Cirici and, especially, John Fuster, disseminated this form in magazines and books, which was even awarded a prize in the contest set up by L'Obra del Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear. It must be mentioned that the concept of territory that it was applied to has changed. If, for the first authors, it coincided with Catalan-speaking lands occupied 59,671 sq km, with a population in 1981 of 10,290,248, later, after the decade of 1960, it came to denominate a more compact geohistorical reality. Alghero, as a distant and isolated case in Sardinia, has not been included, and the Occitan-speaking lands of Pyrenean Catalonia and the Spanish-Aragonese-speaking parts of the Country of Valencia, historically linked to the continuous Catalan-speaking territorial block have been included. Taken thus, the Catalan Countries occupy a surface of 69,823 sq km, with a population of 10,711 081 people in 1981. The absolute population situates the Catalan Countries in an important position among European states (thirteenth out of 32) and among Mediterranean states (ninth out of 18). The resulting relative population (153.4 per sq km) situates the Catalan Countries in eleventh place in Europe, only surpassed among the large states by the two Germanies, the United Kingdom and Italy and fifth in the Mediterranean
Catalan(Our language,is spoken in the Catalan Countries)
Romance language belonging to the group of the Western Romance languages. It has features common to the Iberian-Romance languages, as the morphology (especially the nominal and verbal flexions), and to the Gallo-Romance languages (the phonetics and, partly, the lexicon), very linked to Occitan; characteristic of Els Països Catalans (all the regions where Catalan is spoken)
Catalan is spoken throughout an area which covers 68,730 km2, is divided between four European states (Spain, France, Andorra and Italy), and has a population of over 11 million people. The inevitable question is, how may of these people understand Catalan? Or, to be more precise, how many people speak it?
The usage of Catalan is not uniform in all the areas in which it is present. On the one hand we have Catalonia, Andorra and the Franja de Ponent or "Western Marches" (part of Aragon bordering on Catalonia), and on the other, the city of Alguer (on Sardinia) and so-called North Catalonia (in the French department of the Eastern Pyrenees). In Catalonia and the Franja de Ponent, Catalan is almost universally understood and the percentage of Catalan speakers is over 75. In Alguer and North Catalonia, on the other hand, only half understand Catalan, and it is spoken by under 50%. In between we have the other two areas in which Catalan is spoken: the Balearic Islands and the Autonomous Community of Valencia. Overall, we can say that of the 11 million people who live in these Catalan speaking territories, the language is spoken by over 7 million and is understood by almost 10 million.
It is obviously important to consider these figures with relation to the age of the speakers. In Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Autonomous Community of Valencia, it is the younger age group which best understands Catalan and is best equipped to speak it. In Catalonia, for example, the percentage of Catalan speakers, 75% of the total population, totals 90% in the case of 15-29 year-olds. Nowadays it is not easy to meet young people who cannot speak Catalan.
It is clear from these figures that Catalan is no obscure, minority language, spoken only by the elderly, a language doomed to disappear because it is no longer passed on from parents to children. Except for the Franja de Ponent and Alguer, Catalan is an official language in the areas in which it is present, a presence which permeates every sphere of society. Catalan, for example, is taught in all schools, and many children, especially in Catalonia, receive almost all their teaching in the language. In Catalonia, over 70% of pupils sit their university entrance exams in Catalan, and Catalan is the language used in teaching in between 60 and 100% of Catalan universities. Many students from outside Catalonia are therefore likely to find themselves studying a subject in Catalan; no insuperable effort if they already know Spanish, as the two languages have many similarities. Experience tells us that a Spanish-speaker will be able to understand spoken Catalan in under a fortnight. And with a little more effort, he or she will be able to speak it within a few weeks, increasing their cultural diversity almost without realising it.
The vitality of the Catalan language is also apparent in cultural statistics. Almost 6,000 books are published in Catalan every year in Spain, making up 12% of the total published in Spain. In Catalonia, 30% of the daily press is in Catalan, and the most popular television channel, TV3, broadcasts all its programmes in Catalan. The leading radio station by number of listeners, Catalunya Ràdio, also broadcasts entirely in Catalan. In the city of Barcelona, a true home to the theatre, most plays are performed in Catalan. Perhaps Catalan's weak point is the world of cinema, where the percentage of Catalan films is not as might be expected from a language so widely used in other fields of culture.
Catalan, however, is not just a language for education and culture, but also for commerce and business. It is unusual not to be attended to in Catalan in a bank or shop in Catalonia; not only that, many establishments are obliged to have all the documentation they offer their clients available in Catalan. Banks must provide chequebooks in Catalan; travel agencies, the contracts; hotels, the hotel bill, etc... In fact, everybody is in daily contact with the language. In Catalonia, there are four documents which are regularly sent to all homes in Catalan: the electricity, telephone, water and gas bills. In many cases, there is also the pay sheet, surely a more welcome document than the bills... Catalan does meet some resistance in certain areas (the courts and the police force), but these are gradually being overcome. It will not be long before Catalan will be classed as a normal language, alongside other European languages with similar demographics such as Danish, Finnish, Greek or Swedish.
BEGINNING OF CANTICLE IN THE TEMPLE (Salvador Espriu 1913-1985)
from Les cançons d'Ariadna (Literal translation by Magda Bogin)
Now say: "The broom tree blooms,
everywhere the fields are red with poppies.
With new scythes we'll thresh
the ripened wheat and weeds."
Ah, young lips parting after dark,
if you only knew how dawn
delayed us, how long we had to wait
for light to rise in the gloom!
But we have lived to save your words,
to return you the name of every thing,
so that you'd stay on the straight path
that leads to the mastery of earth.
We looked beyond the desert,
plumbed the depth of our dreams,
turned dry cisterns into peaks
scaled by the long steps of time.
Now say: "We hear the voices
of the wind on the high sea of crested grain."
Now say: "We shall be ever faithful
to the people of this land."
I COME FROM A SILENCE (Raimon) (Translation by Angela Buxton)
I come from a silence
that's old and very long,
of people who keep standing up
from the bottom of the centuries,
of people they call
the subordinate classes;
I come from a silence
that's old and very long.
I come from the squares
and the streets full
of children playing
and old people waiting,
while men and women
are working
in the little workshops,
at home or in the fields.
I come from a silence
that is not resigned,
of where the garden starts
and the dry land ends;
of effort and blasphemy
because all goes wrong;
who loses his origins
loses identity.
I come from a silence
that's old and very long,
of people with no mystics
or captains,
who live and die
in anonymity,
who have never believed
in solemn phrases.
I come from a struggle
that is deaf and constant,
I come from a silence
that will be broken by people
who now want to be free
and love life,
who demand the things
they have been denied.
I come from a silence
that's old and very long,
I come from a silence
that is not resigned,
I come from a silence
that the people will break,
I come from a silence
that is deaf and constant
JUST ONE THING LEFT,IF YOU COME TO VISIT US YOU WILL BE MORE THAN WELCOME
Our Human Castles or "Castellers" in catalan.
This picture is in Beechmount Avenue, Falls, Belfast, Northern Ireland (IRELAND), where you can read:
SINCE 1714 THE CATALAN NATION IS MILITARY OCCUPIED FOR THE SPANISH AND FRENCH STATES.
CATALONIA HAS THEIR OWN CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND HISTORY. OUR COUNTRY HAVE MORE THAN 1000 YEARS OF HISTORY AS A NATION. THE CATALAN FLAG IS THE FIRST EUROPEAN FLAG.
OUR FIGHT FLAG IS THE “ESTELADA”. THE WHITE STAR MEANS THE FREEDOM, AND THE BLUE TRIANGLE STANDS FOR THE SKY OF HUMANITY.
FREE CATALONIA! UNITED IRELAND!
EL NOSTRE DIA ARRIBARÀ!11/8/1997(written in gaelic in Belfast, here in Catalan,and it means: Our day will arrive)
IF YOU WANT TO GET MORE INFORMATION JUST HAVE A LOOK AT :
www.freecatalonia.com This is one of the best sites about our people made in english, where you can get full information.
This is an initiative without entailment with any official organism or political group. Document of free distribution. Their authors yield the copy rights to Catalan community and decline any responsibility by an illegal use.
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Our Human Castles or "Castellers" in catalan.
Click here to see the site of the day of the Catalonian Nation (9/11), to know more about our national day
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