Posted by wallflower 9/13/2025
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Notably, the constitution of Spain uses this phrasing in its article 3:
1. El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla.
2. Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus Estatutos.
3. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.
In English:
1. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the state. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
2. The other Spanish languages are also official in their respective Autonomous Communities, in accordance with their Statutes.
3. The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be accorded particular respect and protection.
I've heard a minority of (seemingly highly educated) people prefer to say "Castellano" instead of "Español", maybe as a deliberate reference to this concept.
I would expect castellano in Spain, and español in the Americas. Does this align with your experience?
The step after is to start talking about Provencal as if it were a dialect or French. Or Sicilian or Napolitano as a dialect of Italian.
What will the world come to!
That being said, both terms "Castilian Spanish" and "Catalan Spanish" sound weird to me. Source: I'm both a Catalan and Spanish speaker. In my languages, they're both referred as "Castellano" o "Catalan".
I'd appreciate that people referred to these languages either as Catalan or Spanish, no need for unnecessary qualifiers. (Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.)
There are literally 10 words in my comment and you couldn't even read all of them?
So you'd say there are no distinctions worth noting between the Spanish spoken in any Spanish-speaking Latin American country and the Spanish spoken in Spain?
Why would any one feel it's important to say they went to Sydney and spoke to the peoples of Australia in Australian English?
From experience, learning one is not the same as the other.
So there are definitely contexts where these differences matter.
Isn't Catalan the official language of Andorra?
"Catalan Spanish" makes as much sense as "Basque Spanish". It sounds like an English translation of "catañol".
Something that not even the most stubborn separatists want to do, while enjoying the special treatment of "I feel oppressed under the weight of all this Spanish fiscal benefits that other Spaniards don't have".
Until that war happens, saying I'm not Spanish, I'm from Catalonia, is like an American native from Oklahoma saying "I don't feel like an USA citizen, so I will not pay taxes but I will keep all the benefits, freedom of movement, etc that they have". Yes you are and US citizen. Feelings are irrelevant from a legal point of view. Stop acting like a child. After 20 years repeating the same dumb lie, is frankly annoying for the rest of us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
So it's surprising that OP thought Catalan was a version of Spanish, because it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish as a second language (like myself) - not sure about native speakers. I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
This is wild. The languages share a lot of vocabulary and grammar.
> I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
This is also wild. I can see there are some words like "passeig" and "plaça" which aren't immediately familiar, but they're not far from the Spanish equivalents. And you could have a good shot at pronouncing many other streets like "Gran Via" and "Diagonal".
But what do you do when someone tells you an address on a street like Passatge di'Alió ("pasa je dia lio??"). You're not remembering that on the first try, you won't write it down correctly and later when you try to tell the taxista where to go they'll look at you like you're crazy. (This is from personal experience.)
Top thread on HN riffs on Catalan independence. To be fair, Scotland and Catalonia both cite each other as exemplars.
For me, I'm fighting for Wessex's independence from England and hence Britain oh and the UK. Eventually I'll fight for Somerset, then Yeovil and finally Brunswick Street. Not sure how it will all work.
Nominative tribalism can be a force for good or bad but rarely makes a useful contribution to an article about a daft mistake that has a heart warming finale.