Multilingualism – a threat or an opportunity?

The lack of technical vocabulary can cause a language to be left out in the development of IT products. Such languages will thus be hardly found on the internet, which is often seen as a determining factor for anything’s existence. The Catalan terminology center Termcat has been established for the purpose of developing scientific and technical terms and promoting the use of the language.

Text by Marta Grané

Inhaltsübersicht

Multilingualism – a threat or an opportunity?

The situation of Catalan today

Compared to the 20 official languages of the European Union in 2006, Catalan is the eighth most spoken, coming in ahead of Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian, among others. The Catalan language is currently spoken in four states: Spain (with the majority of speakers), Andorra, France and Italy. The total number of people speaking Catalan is about 7.5 million and roughly ten million can understand it. Despite these facts, Catalan itself is not included in the EU list of official languages. Evidently Catalan has some minority language characteristics: there are no monolingual speakers, the territories where it is spoken are part of larger states where the major language is different, and in certain social sectors it is only used scarcely. However, Catalan cannot be considered a minority language because of its legal status as an official language in ...
Back: Intelligent Information

About the author