Catalans
Catalans are a Romance-speaking ethnic group native to Catalonia, who speak Catalan. The current official category of "Catalans" is that of the citizens of Catalonia, a nationality and autonomous community in Spain and the inhabitants of the Roussillon historical region in Southern France, today the Pyrénées Orientales department, also called Northern Catalonia and Pays Catalan in French.
Some authors also extend the word "Catalans" to include all people from all the areas where Catalan is spoken, namely those from Andorra, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, eastern Aragon, and the city of Alghero in Sardinia.
The Catalan government regularly surveys its population regarding its "sentiment of belonging". As of July 2024, results point out that 41.1% of Catalans and other people living in Catalonia identify as only Catalans or more Catalan than Spanish, 44.1% feel both Catalan and Spanish, and 11.6% see themselves as only Spanish or more Spanish than Catalan.
Historical background
In 1500 BCE the area that is now known primarily as Catalonia was, along with the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, inhabited by Proto-Celtic Urnfield people who brought with them the rite of burning the dead. Much of the Pyrenees mountains was inhabited at the time by peoples related to modern Basques, and today many town names in the western Catalan Pyrenees can be linked to Basque etymologies. These groups came under the rule of various invading groups starting with the Greeks that founded Empúries and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who set up colonies along the coast, including Barcino. Following the Punic Wars, the Romans replaced the Carthaginians as the dominant power in the Iberian eastern coast, including parts of Catalonia, by 206 BCE. Rome established Latin as the official language and imparted a distinctly Roman culture upon the local population, which merged with Roman colonists from the Italian peninsula. An early precursor to the Catalan language began to develop from a local form of popular Latin before and during the collapse of the Roman Empire. Various Germanic tribes arrived following nearly six centuries of Roman rule, which had completely transformed the area into the Roman province of Tarraconensis. The German Visigoths established themselves in the fifth century, making their first capital in the Iberian peninsula Barcelona, and they later would move to Toledo.This continued until 718 when Muslim Arabs took control of the region in order to pass through the Pyrenees into French territory. The Franks on the other side of the Pyrenees held back the main Muslim raiding army which had penetrated virtually unchallenged as far as central France at the Battle of Tours in 732. Frankish suzerainty was then extended over much of present-day northern half of Catalonia. With the help of the Franks, a land border was created commonly known nowadays as Old Catalonia which faced Muslim raids but resisted any kind of settlement from them. The southern New Catalonia was under Arab/Muslim rule for about 4-5 centuries. As the border between Muslim and Frankish realms stabilized, Barcelona would become an important center for Christian forces in the Iberian Peninsula. In the 10th century, the County of Barcelona and the other neighboring counties became independent from West Francia.
File:Batalla del Puig por Marzal de Sas.jpg|upright|thumb|left|Battle of the Puig by Andreu Marçal de Sax, depicting the Christian victory with the aid of Saint George
In 1137, the County of Barcelona entered a dynastic union with the Kingdom of Aragon to form what modern historians call the Crown of Aragon in the so-called "Reconquista". This allowed the conquest of Muslim-dominated lands, eventually establishing the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca. From the late 12th century onwards, the territory of the County of Barcelona and the other Catalan counties progressively began to be identified as a single political entity and, from the mid-14th century, that state began to be known as the Principality of Catalonia. The crisis of the late Middle Ages, the loss of hegemony within the Crown, as well as urban and feudal internal conflicts led to the Catalan Civil War in 1462. In the last quarter of the 15th century, the marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon led to the dynastic union of the Crown of Aragon with the Crown of Castille, in which each of the constitutive realm kept its own laws, policies, power structures, borders and monetary systems.
Continuous unrest led to conflicts on the states of the Crown of Aragon, such as the Revolt of the Germanies in Valencia and Majorca, and the 1640 revolt in Catalonia known as the Reapers' War. This latter conflict embroiled Spain in a larger war with France as the Catalan institutions allied themselves with Louis XIII. The war continued until 1659 and ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which effectively partitioned the Principality of Catalonia as its northern strip came under French rule, while the rest remained under Spanish Crown. The Catalan government took sides with the Habsburg pretender against the Bourbon one during the War of the Spanish Succession that started in 1705 and ended in 1714. The Catalan failure to defend the continuation of Habsburg rule in Spain despite unilaterally prolonging the war against the Bourbons culminated in the capitulation of Barcelona on 11 September 1714 which came to be commemorated as Catalonia's National Day. The surrender led to the imposition of absolutism and the abolition of Catalan political institutions and legal system, thus ending the status of Catalonia as a separate state within a personal union.
File:Eroberung von Barcelona 1714.jpg|thumb|After the Catalan defeat during the War of Spanish Succession, Philip V of Spain ordered the burning of all the Catalan flags and banners.
During the Napoleonic Wars, much of Catalonia was seized by French forces by 1808, as France ruled the entire country of Spain briefly until Napoleon's surrender to Allied Armies. In France, strong assimilationist policies integrated many Catalans into French society, while in Spain a Catalan identity was increasingly suppressed in favor of a Spanish national identity. The Catalans regained autonomy during the Spanish Second Republic from 1932 until Francisco Franco's nationalist forces occupied Catalonia by 1939. It was not until 1975 and the death of Franco that the Catalans as well as other Spaniards began to regain their right to cultural expression, which was restarted by the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Since this period, a balance between a sense of Catalan national identity versus the broader Spanish one has emerged as the dominant political force in Catalonia. The former tends to advocate for even greater autonomy, national recognition and, part of it, independence; the latter tends to argue for maintaining either a status quo or removal of autonomy and cultural identity, depending on the leanings of the current government. As a result, there tends to be much fluctuation depending on regional and national politics during a given election cycle. Given the stronger centralist tendencies in France, however, French Catalans display a much less dynamic sense of uniqueness, having been integrated more consistently into the unitary French national identity.
Geography
The vast majority of Catalans reside in the autonomous community of Catalonia, in the northeast part of Spain. At least 100,000 Catalan speakers live in the Pays Catalan in France. An indeterminate number of Catalans emigrated to the Americas during the Spanish colonial period and to France in the years following the Spanish Civil War.Culture and society
Described by author Walter Starkie in The Road to Santiago as a subtle people, he sums up their national character with a local term seny meaning "common sense" or a pragmatic attitude toward life. The counterpart of Catalan "seny" is "rauxa" or madness, epitomized by "crazy", eccentric and creative Catalan artists like Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró or Antoni Tàpies. The masia or mas is a defining characteristic of the Catalan countryside and includes a large house, land, cattle, and an extended family, but this tradition is in decline as the nuclear family has largely replaced the extended family, as in the rest of western Europe. Catalonia in Spain is officially recognised as a "nationality" and enjoy a high degree of political autonomy, which has led to reinforcement of a Catalan identity.Language
The Catalan language is a Romance language. It is the language closest to Occitan, and it also shares many features with other Romance languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Aragonese, and Italian. There are a number of linguistic varieties that are considered dialects of Catalan, among them, the dialect group with the most speakers, Central Catalan.The total number of Catalan speakers is over 9.8 million, with 5.9 million residing in Catalonia. More than half of them speak Catalan as a second language, with native speakers being about 4.4 million of those. Very few Catalan monoglots exist; basically, virtually all of the Catalan speakers in Spain are bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, with a sizable population of Spanish-only speakers of immigrant origin existing in the major Catalan urban areas as well. In Roussillon, only a minority of French Catalans speak Catalan nowadays, with French being the majority language for the inhabitants after a continued process of language shift. According to a 2019 survey by the Catalan government, 31.5% of the inhabitants of Catalonia have Catalan as first language at home whereas 52.7% have Spanish, 2.8% both Catalan and Spanish and 10.8% other languages.
The inhabitants of the Aran valley count Aranese–an Occitan dialect–rather than Catalan as their own language. These Catalans are also bilingual in Spanish.
In September 2005, the.cat TLD, the first Internet language-based top-level domain, was approved for all web pages intending to serve the needs of the Catalan linguistic and cultural community on the Internet. This community is made up of those who use the Catalan language for their online communication or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online.