Language code: ca

Technical information about ISO 639 language code ca

The table below provides technical details for the Catalan language, designated by the ca code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

ca

Name

Official

Catalan

Native

Català

Family
Romance
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Central CatalanNorthern CatalanBalearicNorthwestern CatalanValencianAlguerese
Related languages
OccitanSpanishAragoneseFrench
Key facts
Developed from Vulgar Latin alongside Occitan during the early Middle AgesStandard literary Catalan was first codified in the 1913–1918 Pompeu Fabra grammar and dictionary reformsThe language preserves the original Latin three-way deictic pronoun distinction (aquest, aqueix, aquell)It has two regulatory academies: Institut d’Estudis Catalans and Acadèmia Valenciana de la LlenguaThe first known printed book in Catalan appeared in 1474
Sample phrase

Hola, com estàs?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Catalan belongs to the Indo-European language family, more precisely to the Romance subgroup. It is the official language of Andorra, and it is also spoken in parts of Italy (specifically Alghero, Sardinia) and Spain (including Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Valencian Community). It is written using the Latin script (Catalan alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 9 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

7.5M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Catalan speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

ca-AD Catalan (Andorra)

ca-ES Catalan (Spain)

ca-FR Catalan (France)

ca-IT Catalan (Italy)

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