When I found work as a teacher and decided to stay for a while, I began to study the language and by January I was confident that I had made some progress. One evening I was invited for supper to a small flat in the Gothic quarter. My fellow guests were natives of the city. As the conversation went on I realized that I couldn’t understand a single word they said. All the nights spent poring over the niceties and oddities of Spanish grammar had been in vain. It was only when someone apologized to me for speaking in Catalan, and thus excluding me, that I understood the problem.

They and their family and friends, they explained, all spoke Catalan as a first language, although they were fluent in Spanish as well. Most of them couldn’t write the language, however, and few of them had ever read a book in Catalan. It wasn’t merely spoken, they explained, in villages and remote places. It was the language of the prosperous classes in Barcelona. Franco had banned the public use of the language in 1939.

Catalan, I discovered, isn’t a dialect of Spanish, nor of Prov-enc¸al, although it has close connections with both. Some words (casa for ‘house’, for example) are the same as in Spanish; other words (mangar for ‘eat’) are close to French or Italian. Most of the words for fruit, vegetables and spices are completely dierent from the Spanish words. The way of forming the past simple is like no other language; the way of forming the past continuous is more or less the same as in Spanish; the way of forming the past subjunctive is the same as in Italian.

Catalan is a pure Latin language. There are no Arabic sounds. Thus the pronunciation of the word ‘Barcelona’ does not have the ‘th’ sound as used in the series Fawlty Towers. Catalan sounds are harsh and guttural. The language is full of short, sharp nouns such as cap for ‘head’, fill for ‘son’ and clau for ‘key’; and similar-sounding verbs: crec for ‘I believe’, vaig for ‘I go’ and vull for ‘I want’.

By the time I began to learn Catalan in 1976 I didn’t just need