Mallorquín According to Robert Graves:
“Mallorcans speak
Mallorquín, a language as old as English and purer than Catalan or Provençal, its nearest relatives”. Nevertheless, the origins of the language are a source of passionate debate, in which philological and historical questions intertwine with political preferences and issues of identity. Even the name itself is controversial. Although officially known as Catalan, many believe it should be called Mallorquín or Balear. Some people claim that after James I of Aragon conquered Mallorcan from the Arabs in 1229, the island was repopulated with people from Catalonia (later there was another wave of Catalan settlers) and the language they brought with them evolved, becoming a dialect of Catalan with marked differences to the Catalan language spoken on the mainland. Other experts say the complete opposite, stating that Mallorquín comes from the language the islanders spoke before James I arrived, a language that had evolved from Vulgar Latin with influences brought by Italian seafarers, arguing that it is impossible for Mallorquín to have descended from Catalan as the latter is a much younger language. There are also those who claim that its origin lies in a mixture of the language spoken by the Christians who lived alongside the Arabs on the island and Occitan, a language from the south of France that reached Mallorca with James I.
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