Democratic Policies for Language Revitalisation: The Case of Catalan

Democratic Policies for Language Revitalisation: The Case of Catalan
Author: M. Strubell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2011-06-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0230302424

A collection of studies offering an up-to-date analysis of official policies to promote Catalan in a democratic framework in each of the main Spanish regions where it is spoken: Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

Complete Catalan Beginner to Intermediate Course

Complete Catalan Beginner to Intermediate Course
Author: Alan Yates
Publisher: Teach Yourself
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2012-02-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1444133837

Are you looking for a complete course in Catalan which takes you effortlessly from beginner to confident speaker? Whether you are starting from scratch, or are just out of practice, Complete Catalan will guarantee success! Fully updated to make your language learning experience fun and interactive, with complete online audio support. You can still rely on the benefits of a top language teacher and our years of teaching experience, but now with added learning features within the course. The course is structured in thematic units and the emphasis is placed on communication, so that you effortlessly progress from introducing yourself and dealing with everyday situations, to using the phone and talking about work. By the end of this course, you will approach at Level B2 of the Common European Framework for Languages: Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features: NOT GOT MUCH TIME? One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. AUTHOR INSIGHTS Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience. GRAMMAR TIPS Easy-to-follow building blocks to give you a clear understanding. USEFUL VOCABULARY Easy to find and learn, to build a solid foundation for speaking. DIALOGUES Read and listen to everyday dialogues to help you speak and understand fast. PRONUNCIATION Don't sound like a tourist! Perfect your pronunciation before you go. TEST YOURSELF Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. AUDIO Access the audio for this course for free by downloading it to the Teach Yourself Library app or streaming it on library.teachyourself.com. TRY THIS Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it. Rely on Teach Yourself, trusted by language learners for over 85 years.

The Pragmatics of Catalan

The Pragmatics of Catalan
Author: Lluís Payrató
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2011-11-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110238691

This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.

Universal Design

Universal Design
Author: Mr Francesc Aragall
Publisher: Gower Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-09-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1409459322

As a customer, have you ever felt dissatisfied with a product or service? Is it possible that customers may be similarly unhappy with your company? Being aware of and exploring your consumers' diversity constitutes the best source of information available if you are to lead the way in design innovation, marketing orientation and service provision. Universal Design: The HUMBLES Method for User-Centred Business offers every type of organization a clear understanding of the role and value of Design for All/Universal Design (the intervention in environments, products and services to enable everyone, regardless of age, gender, capabilities or cultural background, to enjoy them on an equal basis). The seven phase model integrates the users' point of view, enabling you to assess your current business strategy and design practices, and make your product or service appealing to all your potential customers, thus creating a better, more consumer-oriented experience. This book is a must-read for organisations who wish to consider their products and services from the customer point of view and so gain an advantage over their competitors.

Lonely Planet Madrid

Lonely Planet Madrid
Author: Lonely Planet
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 178868169X

Lonely Planet: The world’s number one travel guide publisher* Lonely Planet’s Madrid is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. View the marvellous frescoes at Plaza Mayor, enjoy tapas in La Latina and take a stroll with the locals in the Parque del Buen Retiro – all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Madrid and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet’s Madrid: Colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sightseeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights provide a richer, more rewarding travel experience - covering history, people, music, religion, cuisine, politics Covers Salamanca, Plaza Mayor, Royal Madrid, La Latina, Lavapiés, Malasaña, Chueca, Parque del Oeste, Sol, Santa Ana, Huertas, El Retiro, and more The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet’s Madrid is our most comprehensive guide to Madrid, and is perfect for discovering both popular and offbeat experiences. Looking for just the highlights? Check out Pocket Madrid, our handy-sized guide featuring the best sights and experiences for a short visit or weekend away. About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world’s number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You’ll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, nine international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more. ‘Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.’ – New York Times ‘Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.’ – Fairfax Media (Australia) *Source: Nielsen BookScan: Australia, UK, USA, 5/2016-4/2017 Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

Catalonia's Human Towers

Catalonia's Human Towers
Author: Mariann Vaczi
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253067170

The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of effort and overcoming, tension and release. Catalonia's Human Towers is an ethnographic look at the thriving castells practice--a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive leisure activity, Mariann Vaczi reveals how this unique sport also provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence movement. Highlighting the intersection of folklore, performance, and sport, Catalonia's Human Towers captures the subtle processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology becomes embodied, with all the desires, risks and precarities of collective constructions.

The Architect of Modern Catalan

The Architect of Modern Catalan
Author: Pompeu Fabra
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2009-10-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027289247

Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948) is renowned as the person who reformed and codified modern Catalan, giving it the condition of a normativised language of culture that proved fit to meet all the challenges of the twentieth century. The context in which he worked was defined by the ideology and momentum of a dynamic Catalan nationalism emerging out of the nineteenth-century cultural revival movement, energies which have continued to affect politics in the Spanish state through to the present. The imposing corpus of Fabra’s writings —newspaper articles, lectures and papers, various grammars and the redaction of the official dictionary of Catalan— covered all aspects of the normativisation and the social normalisation of a rejuvenated national language. His work was, moreover, abreast of the most advanced developments in the newly emerging discipline of modern linguistics.The present volume was conceived in response to expressions of disappointment that the figure and the intellectual contributions of Pompeu Fabra have remained virtually unrecognised internationally. Some rectification of this situation is offered by this first ever translation into English of a representative selection of his writings, accompanied by the first substantial study on him in that language. In this way his work should be made much more accessible to the international community of linguists and of specialists in various branches of the social sciences, for whom Fabra’s exclusive dedication to Catalan retains great relevance.

Fire in the Placa

Fire in the Placa
Author: Dorothy Noyes
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812202996

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Fire in the Plaça is the first full-length study in English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to Berga, Catalonia, Spain, celebrated annually since the seventeenth century. Participants in the festival are transformed through drink, sleep deprivation, crowding, constant motion, and the smoke and sparks of close-range firecrackers into passionate members of a precarious body politic. Combining richly layered symbolism with intense bodily expression, the Patum has long served as a grassroots equivalent of grand social theory; it moves from a representation of social divisions to a forcible communion among them. The Patum's dancing effigies—giants, dwarves, Turks and Christian knights, devils and angels, a crowned eagle, and two flaming mule-dragons—have provided local allegories for a long series of political conflicts, but the festival obscures its own messages in smoke and motion to enable a temporary merging of opposites. Activists in the 1970s transition to democracy in Spain took the Patum as a model of how old adversaries might collaborate: it helped to shape the mix of assertiveness in performance and compromise in practice that is typical of contemporary Catalan nationalism. The Patum became a focus of resistance to the Franco regime and drew visitors from all over Catalonia, serving as a rehearsal for the mass protests in Barcelona. Later, it provided the newly autonomous region with a vehicle for integrating immigrants and a vocabulary of belonging, culminating in the Patum-derived devils of the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic games. Today, as mines and factories have closed in Berga, the Patum serves as an arena in which provincial Catalans model their relationship to Barcelona, Europe, and the world, and reflects their ambivalence about the choices open to them. Seeking a third way between tourism and terrorism, provincial towns like Berga show us the future of all local communities under globalization. In collective performances such as the Patum, tensions between cultural and political representation are made visible, and the gap between aspiration and possibility is both bridged and acknowledged. In this exceptionally rich ethnographic study, Dorothy Noyes explores the predicament of provincial communities striving to overcome internal conflict and participate in a wider world.

Manual of Catalan Linguistics

Manual of Catalan Linguistics
Author: Joan A. Argenter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 848
Release: 2020-04-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110448319

This manual is intended to fill a gap in the area of Romance studies. There is no introduction available so far that broadly covers the field of Catalan linguistics, neither in Catalan nor in any other language. The work deals with the language spoken in Catalonia and Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the region of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and the town of l'Alguer in Sardinia. Besides introducing the ideologies of language and nation and the history of Catalan linguistics, the manual is divided into separate parts embracing the description – grammar, lexicon, variation and varieties – and the history of the language since the early medieval period to the present day. It also covers its current social and political situation in the new local and global contexts. The main emphasis is placed on modern Catalan. The manual is designed as a companion for students of Catalan, while also introducing specialists of other languages into this field, in particular scholars of Romance languages.