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Catalan language resources
The Library and the Language Service have joined forces to select a series of resources for Catalan. This guide includes reference works and tools to help resolve doubts on spelling, grammar or vocabulary. You can also find resources to help with pronunciation or to keep up-to-date with the news and new developments in the use of Catalan.
The Language Service
This site, produced and maintained by staff at the UOC Language Service, provides specific guidelines for anyone using Catalan in the scope of the university’s activities. It offers language resources for use by all parts of the UOC community. Also, explanations regarding our house style are provided to help anyone working on UOC-related texts – authors, editors, proofreaders or translators – achieve linguistic and stylistic consistency.
The UOC Language Service tweets in Catalan, Spanish and English, sharing useful information relating to language and language resources.
This resource will help you discover the extensive support on offer in the three sister sites of the UOC Language Service. To introduce you to the different types of content there are challenges to solve as well as general guidelines.
Dictionaries
This section has a selection of lexicographic reference works.
Prescriptive dictionary of the Catalan language published by the Institute of Catalan Studies. It allows basic searches showing a list of entries that meet the selected search condition, as well as advanced searches in which filters are applied. The results offer direct links to four other resources: the Diccionari descriptiu de la llengua catalana, the Diccionari català-valencià-balear, the Diccionari de sinònims and the Science and Technology Terminology portal.
Latest version of the catalan encyclopedia.
The portal from Larousse Editorial, publisher of the Larousse and Vox imprints, it lets users consult a number of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, including Catalan. We would highlight the dictionary of synonyms.
The electronic version of the Diccionari català-valencià-balear (Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary, DCVB) by A. M. Alcover and F. de B. Moll which includes different Catalan dialects.
Developed by the University Institute of Applied Linguistics at Pompeu Fabra University, this portal offers a variety of linguistic information about the words searched, such as verb conjugations or number inflections for nouns. It gives access to five dictionaries that are extremely useful, each focused on specific aspects of the language. Of particular note is the dictionary of deverbal nouns, which gives the nominal forms of verbs, and the syllable division dictionary, which is especially handy for words with diphthongs, hiatuses or affixes.
This dictionary connects concepts with idioms and expressions. It offers 5,500 concept entries and 15,500 idioms and expressions. Each entry provides a range of grammatical and linguistic information, often with details on dialectal use and other entries considered synonymous or antonymous. It also includes newly coined expressions, which are marked with the ■ symbol. You can search by concept, by expression (options to search by 'starting with', 'containing' or 'ending with') or by an alphabetical list of concepts.
Abbreviations dictionary providing the definitions of acronyms, initialisms and other shortened forms. It provides over a million definitions, as well as 850,000 postal codes from Canada and the United States. This resource offers a range of filters for different subject areas, allowing you to hone your searches to fields such as IT, military & government, business & finance or science & medicine.
Diccionario de sinónimos en catalán que elabora una lista de resultados a partir de la palabra entrada. Subagrupa los sinónimos según su significado principal.
Online thesaurus for synonyms in Catalan, including a search function. Results are subclassified according to their main meanings.
Pronunciation
This section offers tools to find out how to pronounce words in different languages.
The largest pronunciation guide in the world, the place where you can find millions of words pronounced in their original language. Registered users can add their own new words.
A website with a selection of terms designed to help correctly pronounce the Catalan dialects: Mallorcan, Central Catalan, North-Western and Central Valencian. The website is set to expand its contents to cover more Catalan dialects and to add exercises for pronunciation, phonetics and phonology.
This audio learning resource, provided online by the Vives Network of Universities, gives over 18,000 pronunciation examples for some 3,000 words, covering each of the Catalan dialects (Central, Balearic, Northern/Rossellonese, Northwestern, Valencian, and Alguerese). It provides the recommended pronunciation for each dialect as well as other notes, and is useful for teachers, self-learners and anyone who requires accuracy in their use of the Catalan language.
Verbs
These resources can help resolve any possible doubts relating to the conjunction of verbs.
Latest version of the catalan encyclopedia.
A service for language queries that includes a search engine to help resolve doubts about the Catalan language. It also offers verb conjugations.
Tools
This section offers a range of resources dealing with matters such as correct wordings, machine translation systems, and guidelines for social media.
The language website produced by the Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation). It is designed to offer clear and concise answers to common doubts regarding language use in the media. The examples are taken from the day-to-day experiences of broadcasting at TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio.
Softcatalà's online corrector offers an initial spelling and grammar check of texts written in Catalan. Based on the open-source programme LanguageTool, it allows priority to be given to general, Valencian or Balearic variants of Catalan. In addition to spelling, grammar and typographical errors, it also detects fragments that need a style review and suggests improvements. However, as with other online correctors, the results are only tentative and should be reviewed and checked before being considered valid.
A website from the Government of Catalonia with information on online machine translation systems.
The basic aim of the Sofcatalà association's website is to promote use of Catalan in computing, the web and new technologies. Softcatalà develops its activities throughout the Catalan-speaking territories.
A website from the Institute of Catalan Studies that lists tools for translating and correcting text. The resources are grouped by categories, among which the sections on criteria, publications and educational activities are especially noteworthy. Particularly recommended are the criteria for writing and correcting websites, as well as the extensive compilation of reference works for translation and correction in both online and printed format.
With the Diccionari invers de la llengua catalana's number writing application you can transcribe any number written in digits between zero and one trillion into its alphabetical format. The home page contains a reminder of the D-U-C rule, which is fundamental for writing numbers in Catalan: according to this rule there is always a hyphen between tens and units and between units and hundreds.
This resource, produced by the language services in the Vives Network of Universities, offers criteria and guidelines relating to the language used in universities' social media accounts (chiefly Facebook, Twitter or Instagram). It has seven sections: tone and register, writing style, the languages in which posts are published, how to address the public, grammar and spelling, punctuation, and typographical resources.
Terminology
Resources on specific terminology and specialist language.
The TERMCAT terminology centre website has helpful information to resolve doubts relating to Catalan terminology. It includes the Cercaterm online terminology query service and an online library.
A search engine for works on science and technology with terminology and the contexts for the search terms. The archive lets users consult documents on science and technology online.
Definitions of legal and administrative terms and translations from Spanish-to-Catalan and Catalan-to-Spanish, legal and administrative terms of a more general nature, and common expressions.
A university administration nomenclature dictionary produced by the Vives Network of Universities' Language Committee in collaboration with TERMCAT Terminology Centre. It provides terms in Catalan, Spanish and English, and is regularly brought up-to-date with new entries. From the tab titled “Consulta de termes” (Consult Terms), you can access the entries via the alphabetical lists of all the terms for each language, via the categories in the Catalan/English thematic list (for example, “Formació i estudis / Education and studies”), or through simple or advanced searches entered directly into the “Text de la consulta” search box in any of the three languages included in the dictionary.
Grammar and spelling
This is the complete and unabridged Ortografia catalana, from the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC); the text is that ratified in the plenary meeting of the IEC on 24 October 2016. It is the updated and revised version of the materials that set the current rules. The content, following an introductory note, is organized into three main sections: “The Letters”, “The Accents and the Diaeresis”, and “The Spelling of Words”. There are numerous sub-sections giving details on the rules and illustrating them with examples that cover common words, place names and specialist vocabulary.
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans offers this shortened version of its Gramàtica de la llengua catalana. It is for the general public, offering clear answers to their grammar-related doubts without lengthy explanations about the underlying principles. The chapters are grouped into three blocks: phonetics and phonology, morphology, and syntax. Furthermore, it includes a search tool, notes on the grammar rules, summary tables, diagrams, a glossary and a conjugations tool.
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans has also produced Gramàtica essencial de la llengua catalana, an abridged version of the Gramàtica de la llengua catalana that provides the public with more detailed information than the Gramàtica bàsica i d'ús de la llengua catalana. The chapters are grouped in the same blocks as in the GBU. Likewise, it has a search tool, tables and a glossary.
This is the Institut d’Estudis Catalans' complete and unabridged Catalan normative grammar, from which the Gramàtica bàsica i d’ús de la llengua catalana and the Gramàtica essencial de la llengua catalana are derived. It is for readers who are specialists in linguistics and are familiar with the corresponding terminology. It covers regional, social and functional variations that exist in Catalan. The approach is both descriptive (explaining language uses and their grammatical premises) and prescriptive (indicating correct and incorrect usage). Its 35 chapters have the same structure as the GBU and the GEIEC, and the site offers similar functions. It also has an extensive bibliography with references relating both to Catalan and to other languages.
Grammar questions and doubts
This section has resources to resolve all kinds of doubts about language and grammar.
A service for language queries that includes a search engine to help resolve doubts about the Catalan language. It also offers verb conjugations.
Keeping up-to-date
This section has a selection of websites and blogs with news and new developments from the world of languages.
A blog that accompanies the content produced by the Optimot language query service. The aim of the blog is to tackle common language problems in Catalan, highlight the service’s new features and show how the search engine works.
A blog highlighting, from all the content available on www.termcat.cat, items linking terminology with current affairs.
The blog from the Language Advisory and Terminology unit at the University of Barcelona's Language Services. It offers useful tips and tools for editing, writing, translating and proofreading documents and texts.
A daily newsletter for anyone who wishes to subscribe. It has a word or expression in Catalan and provides its etymological meaning and a passage to illustrate its use. All the words ever sent can be found in the website's archive.
Toponymy
A website on Catalan place names, it covers criteria and publications on Catalan toponymy.
Corpora
This section has databases with large numbers of words and the contexts in which they appear.
A corpus of over 52 million words written in Catalan between 1833 and 1988.