Language
Majorca's own language is Mallorcan, the local variety of Catalan language. The two official languages of Majorca are Mallorcan and Spanish. The local dialect is Mallorquí, even though the dialects are slightly different in most villages. Mandatorily, Majorcan students are bilingual in Catalan and Spanish, with some knowledge of English. A significant number of the tourist population speaks German as a native language, so much so that in Germany, Majorca is jokingly referred to as the 17th Federal State. In 2012 the governing party announced its intention to end preferential treatment for Catalan in the schools to bring parity to the actual two languages of the island.
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
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