Northern Catalan

Northern Catalan (Roussillonese)
català septentrional rossellonès
Street sign in Formiguera.
Native to	France
Region	Northern Catalonia
Ethnicity	Catalans
Language family	Indo-European languages Italic Romance Western Romance Gallo-Romance Occitano-Romance Northern Catalan (Roussillonese)
Early form	Old Catalan
Writing system	Catalan alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	ca-FR
The areas of French Oriental Pyrenees where Catalan is spoken in ■ orange.

Northern Catalan (Catalan: català septentrional), also known as Roussillonese (rossellonès), is a Catalan dialect mostly spoken in Northern Catalonia (roughly corresponding with the region of Roussillon), but also extending in the northeast part of Southern Catalonia in a transition zone with Central Catalan.

Phonetics

Phonetic features of Northern Catalan include:

• It has only five stressed vowels, the smallest number of any Catalan dialect: /i, e, a, o, u/. In some local varieties /y, ø/ can also be found.
  • Like other Eastern Catalan dialects, unstressed /a/ and /e/ are realized as schwa [ə], and [ʊ] substitutes unstressed /o/.

• There are some instances of historic stressed /o/ that has changed to /u/: Canigó > Canigú.

• As in the Balearic dialects, final a [ə] is not pronounced in words ending with ia if the stress is before the penultimate syllable.

Morphology

Some subdialects keep the singular masculine definite article lo, as in North-Western Catalan and many varieties of Occitan.

Northern Catalan has a large body of words imported from French and Occitan. It also features some grammatical forms and structures that are typical of Occitan, such as the use of a lone post-verbal pas, rather than a lone preverbal no to express basic negation (Northern Catalan canti pas vs. Central Catalan no canto, 'I don't sing' or 'I'm not singing'); pas is also used in some other Catalan dialects for emphasis but always with no before the verb (Central Catalan no canto pas, 'I do not sing' or 'I am not singing').