Northern Catalan ( ca, català septentrional), also known as Roussillonese (''rossellonès''), is a

Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

mostly spoken in Northern Catalonia (roughly corresponding with the region of Roussillon), but also extending in the northeast part of

Southern Catalonia Catalonia (; ca, Catalunya ; Aranese Occitan: ''Catalonha'' ; es, Cataluña ) is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a ''nationality'' by its Statute of Autonomy. Most of the territory (except the Val d'Aran) lies on the north ...

in a transition zone with

Central Catalan Central Catalan ( ca, català central) is an Eastern Catalan dialect spoken in the whole province of Barcelona, the eastern half of the province of Tarragona and most of the province of Girona, except for its northern part, where a transition to ...

Phonetics

Phonetic features of Northern Catalan include: *It has only five stressed vowels, the smallest number of any Catalan dialect: . In some local varieties can also be found. **Like other Eastern Catalan dialects, unstressed and are realized as schwa , and substitutes unstressed . *There are some instances of historic stressed that has changed to : ''Canigó'' > ''Canigú''. *As in the

Balearic dialect Balearic ( ca, balear) is the collective name for the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands: in Mallorca, in Ibiza and in Menorca. At the last census, 746,792 people in the Balearic Islands claimed to be able to speak Catalan, th ...

s, final ''a'' 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 Occitan may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain. * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France. * Occitan language, spoken in parts o ...

. 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.

''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').

Notes

References

Catalan dialects Linguistic rights Pyrénées-Orientales {{Catalonia-stub