Distribution

Spanish: SPAIN, including the Canaries; the whole of SOUTH AMERICA except Brazil and the Guianas; CENTRAL AMERICA; MEXICO; CUBA; PUERTO RICO and THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC; Western Sahara; some urban centres in north Morocco; Equatorial Guinea; some parts of the USA.

Catalan: CATALONIA, ANDORRA, the BALEARIC ISLANDS, parts of Valencia and Alicante, France (eastern Pyrenees). Nowadays there are very few people who speak Catalan exclusively; most Catalan speakers also speak Spanish or French (depending on where they live).

Introduction

Spanish and Catalan are Romance languages, closely related to Italian and Portuguese; they belong to the Indo-European family. Variations in Spanish are noticeable within Spain itself, and also between metropolitan Spain and the varieties spoken in the Americas. However, these differences are largely confined to pronunciation and vocabulary, morphology and syntax being fairly standard everywhere. With a little experience, all varieties are mutually intelligible.

Despite its limited geographical spread, Catalan varies appreciably from one area to another, though the variations are largely within pronunciation and vocabulary. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility, though the variety spoken in the Balearics is significantly different from mainland Catalan.

Phonology

General

While the Spanish and English consonant systems show many similarities, the vowel systems and sentence stress are very different, and these can cause great difficulty for Spanish-speaking learners of English. European Spanish speakers, in particular, find English pronunciation harder than speakers of most other European languages.