File talk:Romance languages and Romanian.png

Catalan

Catalan is misplaced in the chart. Catalan and Occitan are (very) closely related to each other. So much so that for a long time historically they were seen as varieties of the same language and Catalan was commonly referred to as "llemosí" or "llengua llemosina", which means "Limousin language" (i.e., the name of an Occitan dialect, in particular the name of the first Occitan dialect that was written down, was used to refer generically to the whole of the Catalan-Occitan linguistic system, similarly to how the term "Provençal" later came to be used to refer to Occitan in general). Even today some may argue that they are still part of essentially the same linguistic system (because their differences are not much greater than those between, say, Ladino and Modern Spanish, or between Galician and Portuguese, while at the same time neither Occitan nor Catalan are monolithic units but feature notable dialectal diversity, especially between Gascon and the other Occitan dialects, and between the Western Catalan/Valencian dialects and the Eastern Catalan/Balearic dialects; and for example in some ways the non-Gascon Occitan dialects are closer to the Catalan varieties than to Gascon). Also, it is quite clear that Catalan and Occitan share a common origin (just like Galician and Portuguese), which is easily explainable by just looking at the history of the Catalan region (which after the Muslim conquest was reconquered by the kingdom of the Franks, creating the Marca Hispanica, which was repopulated with people coming from what today is Southern France; i.e., with people from Occitania). Catalan is grammatically and lexically part of Gallo-Romance, not of Ibero-Romance, and this is quite easily noticed by anyone learning the language who is already familiar with both Spanish and French, as it soon becomes apparent that Catalan has a lot of things in common with French (and of course with Occitan) that it does not share with the Ibero-Romance languages (which encompass the Galician-Portuguese varieties, the Astur-Leonese varieties, and the Castilian/Spanish varieties, while the Navarro-Aragonese varieties may be seen as transitional between Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance). 62.83.159.55 00:48, 11 April 2017 (UTC)