World Language Map

Where is Catalan spoken?

Catalan (català) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Spain, France, Andorra and Italy. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Catalan is spoken

Catalan is spoken in 4 countries: Spain, France, Andorra and Italy. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Spain17%8,037,668
France0.2%116,237
Andorra51%43,539
ItalyNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Catalan is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Catalan.

How many people speak Catalan?

Wikidata gives about 4.9 million first-language speakers (llengua.gencat.cat, 2021). It also lists about 5.1 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Catalan sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Catalan as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Southwestern Shifted Romance
  12. Catalan

More about Catalan

Codes: ISO 639-3 cat, Glottolog stan1289. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Catalan is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Catalan

Where is Catalan spoken?

Catalan is spoken in Spain, France, Andorra and Italy. Unicode CLDR puts it at 17% of the population of Spain, which is about 8,037,668 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Catalan?

Wikidata gives about 4.9 million first-language speakers (llengua.gencat.cat, 2021). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 5.1 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012).

Which language family is Catalan in?

Glottolog places Catalan in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance and Southwestern Shifted Romance.

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