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Originally Posted by Targan
OT question from someone who has never visited Spain - how different is Catalan to Spanish?
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I suppose that you're talking about the language, Targan. If not, please correct me. Catalan is just another romanic language that evolves from the common Latin in parallel to the French, the Castilian (Spanish) or the Italian, among others. The distance between Spanish and Catalan could be equivalent to the distance that exists between Italian and Spanish, or between Portuguese and Spanish. Basically, and open-minded spanish, can easily understand a conversation in Catalan in one month. And of course, he or she can try to speak in Catalan with the same ease. Catalan coexists with the Spanish as official language in Catalonia. It's a common fact (and a dangerous fact for the survival of my language) that the catalan switch from one language to the other without realizing it, in function of the language used by the other speaker. So, a lot of immigrants from the rest of Spain, though understanding the Catalan,choose not to speak it.
Ah! Finally, we do not use the spanish ñ, but we do use ` ¨ ç