It seems that we live a second wave of really decent Catalan music and this makes me happy. Today I'll share with you what I consider one of the best songs ever written in our language by the latest music revolution here, a group from Barcelona called Manel. One of the most intriguing features is that not a single verse is repeated through the song ( Read more... )

This is borderline with a commercial advertisement but I was glad to read this morning that there is a Spanish company that publishes bilingual slang dictionaries ( Read more... )

When Catalan became an almost legal language to speak, learn and such (you can't still live 100% in Catalan), a new term was created: Normalització lingüística (Linguistic normalization), meaning "reaching the point where the language is normal."

One of the things a Catalan teacher of mine said was that we couldn't consider ourself a "normal" ( Read more... )

Spain has 4 official languages. Well, thanks to some weird politics, there are 5 official languages.

Today I Youtubed a little bit with fao and we found the intro of one of our favorite anime series, Dragon Ball in the 5 legally official languages spoken in Spain. At then, there's a plus the Mexican Spanish, the British English and the original ( Read more... )

Well

I'm very proud of being Catalan. Even the institution that preserves our language and updates our dictionary, called Institut d'Estudis Catalans has decided to update the definition of "marriage" (matrimoni, in Catalan) to make it sex-independent. Therefore, the new definition goes from
"unió legítima entre un home i una dona" (legitimate union ( Read more... )

Why is Google obsessed with setting all my stuff into Spanish/Spain options? I want Catalan language and international content. I need no absurd news about how Spain is performing in the Olympics, nor the latest stupid anti-catalan flaming wars. I'd rather read about the Georgia problems from quite a number of sources. That's what Google news is ( Read more... )

Besides the book I found at the train station, I've finished to read "Mil cretins" (A thousand idiots) by my favourite writer Quim Monzó. I have a bittersweet sensation. It's a book of short stories. The first 5 ones are just some of the best he's ever written. But the second part looks like the discarded stories from previous books. Not that they' ( Read more... )

One of the cool things Spanish keyboards have is that they are adapted for Catalan as well. This opens the door to being able to write in Italian, Portuguese and French effortless since we have all the signs available. Something I like is that accentuated letters don't have special keys, but you need to strike first the accent and then the letter. ( Read more... )

This weekend, someone I once met died of old age. His name was Salvador Escamilla. For everybody reading this, he's an unknown person. But for Catalan people, he's someone who really fought for Catalan culture. Back in 1964, when Catalan was forbidden and if you taught it you ended up in prison, he started a program called Radioscope in Radio ( Read more... )

Qui no té feina, el gat pentina

(literally, it means "those who doen't have work to do, comb the hair of their cat")

Catalan speakers have our own internet domain, called ".cat", which, believe, could be used for pet-food companies (but they haven't) -

However, the definition says "in September 2005 the .cat TLD was approved for all webpages, etc., ( Read more... )