Catalan phrasebook

Sourced from Wikivoyage. Text is available under the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.
Jlmoncada
Catalan (català) is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia (where it is called Valencià), the Balearic Islands (where it is sometimes called Mallorquí, Menorquí, or Eivissenc in each of the islands), Andorra, where it is the only official language, the Pyrénées-Orientales department in the extreme south of France (north Catalonia) and the Sardinia city of Alghero. Spoken by about 7 million people, it is the 8th most spoken language in the European Union. It is, like Spanish, French and Italian, a Romance language, and people who hear it for the first time typically get the impression that it is a mix between them. However, it is a separate language, as old as any of the other Romance languages, and you will be very welcome if you try to say some words while you are in a Catalan-speaking region.
Like other Romance languages, Catalan nouns have genders. Every noun is either masculine, like home ("man") or feminine, like dona ("woman"). The gender of things doesn't usually follow from the meaning of the word; why a house (casa) is feminine but a car (cotxe) is masculine is just one of the vagaries of the language. Fortunately, the gender of a noun is often indicated by the last letter of the word; -a and -ó usually indicate feminine nouns (but not always), while masculine words have no common ending.
Adjectives also have gender and number. Like nouns, -a usually indicates the feminine form. Plural forms add -s and usually change some other part of the spelling and/or pronunciation (for instance, the feminine a changes to e). Adjectives need to match the noun they describe in both gender and number. For example, borratxo "drunk", when modifying les dones ("the women"), makes les dones borratxes.
In this guide, where genders of nouns or adjectives come up, the "/a" form is used to differentiate. It should be clear from the context when to use the feminine form and when to use the masculine form.

Pronunciation Guide

Phrase list

Other Resources