Valencian dialect

According the Diccionari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, Valencian is the name of the Catalan language which is spoken in the Autonomous Community of Valencia, Spain. It is thus the official name for one of two co-official languages declared in the Valencian Statute of Autonomy: Valencian (Catalan) and Castilian (Spanish).

The word is also used to refer to dialect of this territory to differentiate it from Catalan as a whole, or from the Catalan of Barcelona. In this sense it can be considered a sub-dialect of the Western Catalan variety, which also includes the varieties of the Aragonese Fringe, Lleida province and most of Tarragona province.

History and status of Valencian

Catalan was brought to the territories that became the Kingdom of Valencia during the Reconquista. Whilst Castile moved south conquering New Castile and Andalusia, the Aragonese and Catalan settlers from the Crown of Aragon came and conquered Valencia. Most of these settlers came from South-West Catalonia, and to this day Valencian is almost indistinguishable from the dialect of these people.

Since Valencian is the same language as Catalan, both names can be used almost interchangeably, with "Catalan" emphasising the pan-Catalan nature of the language, and "Valencian" emphasising local features. The choice to use one name or the other is more a matter of politics than anything else. Maria Josep Cuenca, lecturer at the Department of Catalan Language Studies (note the name) of the University of Valencia, in her book El valencià és una llengua diferent? (ISBN 84-8131-452-8), notes that the number of people identifying with their Autonomous Community rather than with Spain is actually greater in Castile-La Mancha than in the Valencian Community. This is perhaps surprising in a region that is supposed to be one of the països catalans or Catalan countries. There is obviously a complicated mixture of feelings of belonging due to various historical events, and the result is that Catalan in Valencia is normally called "Valencian" and is often held to be a separate language, whereas in the Balearic Islands, Aragonese Fringe, Alghero and Roussillon the local dialects are at least as different from the speech of Barcelona as Valencian is, and yet it does not occur to these speakers to call their language anything but Catalan.

There is no mention of Valencian or Catalan or any language other than Spanish in the Spanish Constitution of 1978. The refers to the vernacular language as valencià, a name used traditionally since the fifteenth century. There is a private institution called that campaigns for Valencian as a separate language with a different written norm and has firmly supported the motivated attempts of a minority of Valencian sectors (often related to right-wing political parties) to split Valencian and Catalan norms apart. However, their theories are not supported by Universities or Romance-language experts. Officially, the rules for Valencian are decided by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, which follows the same rules as for the rest of the Catalan language, set by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.

Catalan/Valencian is not spoken as much in Valencia as it is in Catalonia. Spanish is the everyday language of most people, and the one used if the language of the other person is not known.

Valencian was the home language of the Borgia family.

Features of Valencian

• A system of 7 stressed vowels /a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u/, reduced to 5 in unstressed position (/e, ɛ/ > [e], /o, ɔ/ > [o]) (a feature shared with North-Western Catalan and Ribagorçan)
• In general, use of modern forms of the determinate article (el, els) and the 3rd person unstressed object pronouns (el, els), though some sub-dialects have lo, los as in Lleida. For the other unstressed object pronouns, etymological old forms (me, te, se, ne, mos, vos...) can be found, depending on places, in conjunction with the more modern ones (em, et, es, en)
• Valencian has preserved mediaeval prepalatal afficates [dʒ],[tʃ] in contexts where other modern dialects have developed fricatives [ʒ] or [jʒ] (feature shared with modern Ribagorçan)
• Valencian preserves the final stop in the groups [mp, nt, ŋk, lt] (feature shared with modern Balearic)
• Valencian is the only modern Catalan variant that articulates etymological final [r] in all contexts, although this cannot be generalized since there are valencian sub-dialects which do not articulate the final [r]
• Valencian preserves the mediaeval system of demonstratives with three different levels of demonstrative precision (este or aquest/açò/ací, eixe or aqueix/això/aquí, aquell/allò/allí or allà) (feature shared with modern Ribagorçan)
• Valencian has -i- as theme vowel for incoative verbs of the 3rd conjugation este servix (this one serves) (like North-Western Catalan), although, again, this cannot be generalized since there are valencian sub-dialects which pronnounce an -ie- (aquest serveix)
• An exclusive feature of Valencian is the subjunctive imperfect morpheme /ra/: que ell vinguera (that he might come), as in Castilian.
• Nosatros, vosatros for nosaltres, vosaltres. An even less standard form is mosatros.
• Numbers: Huit, deneu, xixantahuit, doscentes, millo, quint, sext, vigesim for vuit, dinou, seixanta-vuit, dues-centes, milio, cinqué, sisé, vinté.
• En for amb.
• Meua, teua, seua for meva, teva, seva.
• Lack of impersonal pronoun hom. Replaced by impersonal es or se.
• -isar for itzar from Latin -IZARE
• -cul for -cle from Latin -CVLVS
• Hui for avui
• Use of de after molt and tant.
• Lack of definite article before people's names.
• Use of "clear L" /l/ as in Spanish, rather than the "dark L" /ł/ characteristic of Central Catalan.

Sub-varieties of Valencian

• Northern: spoken in most of the province of Castellón, and the area of Matarranya in the province of Teruel. Northern Valencian is very similar to the Catalan of the Tortosa area, in the province of Tarragona.
• Central or apitxat, spoken in Valencia city and its area, and taken as a standard for Valencian by the local Valencian public television channel Ribagorçan)
  • It preserves the strong simple past, which has been substituted by a analytic past with VADERE + infinitive in the rest of modern Catalan variants (the simple past is still preserved incomplete in Ibiza).
• Southern: spoken in most of the province of Alicante, and the area of Carxe in the province of Murcia