Spanish vs Catalan (How Similar Are They?)

Can Spanish speakers understand Catalan? In this episode we test the degree of mutual intelligibility between Catalan and Spanish, with Spanish speakers who have had no prior exposure to Catalan.

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Catalan (català) is a Western Romance language which has official status in Andorra, Valencia, where it is called Valencian (valencià), Catalonia and the Balearic Islands of Spain, as well as the Italian comune of Alghero. Catalan is also spoken in Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia. The Catalan language evolved from Vulgar Latin. Diverging away from Old Occitan, Old Catalan had many common features with Gallo-Romance.

Spanish is a Western Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain which has expanded to become the world's second-most spoken native language group of languages. Most of modern Spanish comes from Latin, with ancient Greek and Arabic also having an impact on the language. It has also been influenced by Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, Visigothic, French, Italian, Occitan, Catalan and Sardinian, as well as from Nahuatl, Quechua, and other indigenous languages of the Americas. The Spanish language evolved from Vulgar Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War, beginning in 210 BC. Previously, several pre-Roman languages, unrelated to Latin, and some of them unrelated even to Indo-European, were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. These languages included Basque (still spoken today), Iberian, Celtiberian and Gallaecian. Today, Spanish is the official language of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.