Talk:Valencian language

@Arctic Circle System: you're confusing the name with the thing. Since Valencian is not really a different language from Catalan, you could say that Valencian is spoken in Tortosa, in Barcelona or in Menorca. However the point of this page is that Valencians nearly always call their language Valencian rather than Catalan, and a few even go beyond that and claim that they're different languages. It's a socio-political question, not a linguistic one. The central point is the name, not the thing. On the other hand, if you went to some town in southern Catalonia and proclaimed that the local language there is Valencian, you could run into serious personal security issues (I happen to know the area well). As for the dialect area that you apparently present as evidence, it's again about the name, not the thing. There is indeed a pretty homogeneous dialectal area encompassing southern Catalonia and the northern Valencian Community. The dialects in this area were sometimes informally called Tortosí, after the city in southern Catalonia, and perhaps to compensate for this and acknowledge that the area is partly Valencian, someone came up with the name transitional Valencian, but that doesn't mean that they speak the Valencian language, because again Valencian is a name, a label, not a language in the the full sense; a label needed in order to match the Valencian political and historical identity, an identity that stops dead exactly at the administrative border. Jotamar (talk) 21:17, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

All I did was summarize information that was already in the article in the infobox. Valencian also refers to a dialect group within the broader Catalan language, compared to Moldovan language which just refers to any Romanian dialects spoken in Moldova (and are no more closely related to each other than to other Romanian dialects, while there is a set of Valencian dialects that are more closely related to each other than to other Catalan dialects). There is also the matter of Carche which you have ignored but isn't part of Valencia either. In any case, if you would like to dispute or change this information, please dispute it in the body of the article as well rather than only removing the summary, and discuss this with whoever added this information to the article. Also, for the record, you will need to refer to RSes and not "I happen to know the area well". Arctic Circle System (talk) 07:28, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

I disagree about Valencian being a dialect group, or at least it could easily not include the Tortosí dialects, which are closer to the northwestern Catalan dialects than to the central and southern Valencian dialects in many aspects. I don't see in the body of the page anything suggesting the opposite, that is, that Tortosí is closer to Valencian than to the other western dialects; for instance, currently the page says "The Valencian language is traditionally spoken (...) from Vinaròs (northernmost point of the extension of Valencian on the coast of the Valencian Community) to Guardamar", i.e., it acknowledges that there is no Valencian north of the administrative border; if some part of the page hints otherwise, I'd be grateful if you could point to it. And of course, as I tried to explain above, we cannot jump to conclusions because of one misleading moniker transitional Valencian. --Jotamar (talk) 20:40, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

You mean aside from the part I specifically pointed out? And again, you will need to refer to RS, which thus far you have not. Arctic Circle System (talk) 22:24, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

Though looking at it again, that dialect section isn't very well-referenced at all for parts of it. So we would have to look further into that and whether the Tortosan dialects are more closely related to the Valencian dialects than other Western Catalan dialect groups. But at the very least Glottolog supports the existence of a Valencian dialect group, of which the Carche dialects appear to be part of Southern Valencian, though more investigation would be needed for establishing the relationship between Tortosan, Valencian, and the rest of Western Catalan. Arctic Circle System (talk) 22:29, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

Looking at Northern Valencian, it does appear that claim originates from this.^[1] Now to figure out how to read it. Arctic Circle System (talk) 22:32, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

Okay, so that source does not classify Tortosan as part of the Valencian dialect group but instead as part of the NW Catalan dialect group. Though I cannot find information there about the dialects of Matarranya. Arctic Circle System (talk) 23:00, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

@Arctic Circle System: can we see this discussion as closed, at least for the moment? --Jotamar (talk) 16:19, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

As for the Carche, it's obvious that they call their language Valencian since they're quite far away from the rest of Catalan-speaking areas. In addition, it is known that the language is spoken there because of a migration from the Valencian Community in the 19th century. --Jotamar (talk) 20:40, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

By the way, I'd like to know who invented the moniker transitional Valencian, because I'm beginning to suspect that it was a cunning WP editor rather than a serious scholar. --Jotamar (talk) 21:26, 21 October 2025 (UTC)