I've had most of the following information up on my sidebar (over there, to the right -->) all year. Because I'm moving 2 weeks from today, I'm sprucing up my blog for summer. In the sidebar, you'll now see how I'm getting along with my summer goal of reading 50 (and beyond) books.
If you didn't get a chance to read these factoids about my current home before, here they are, along with a few new videos:
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SIDEBAR info:
Mallorca, also spelled Majorca by German and sometimes English speakers (pronounced, please, "mah-YOR-kah"), is a Mediterranean island off the east coast of Spain. The mother tongue on the island is mallorquí, a dialect of català (Catalan, which is spoken in the Spanish provinces of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, the French province Pyrénées-Orientales, the country of Andorra, and the Italian city of Alghero on the island of Sardinia). The vast majority of people on Mallorca also speak castellà (Castellano; Castilian or "regular" Spanish).
Along with Mallorca, there are three other inhabited islands in the Balearic archipelago: Menorca, Ibiza (known as Eivissa in Catalan), and Formentera. Some bright buy on the island of Ibiza thought of mixing disco music with psychedelic drugs, and presto! out came the rave. According to Lonely Planet (ever my planning guru), over 22 million tourists come to every year, mostly for the glorious beaches, the party scene, and the chance to find lots of other pasty white people in a balmy locale. This site gives information about the plethora of tourist activities available.
The total resident population of Mallorca is somewhere around 800,000, with more than half living in Palma de Mallorca, the capital city of the province. The foreign-born population is around 150,000, with another 200,000 recent immigrants from mainland Spain.
I currently work as an "auxiliar de conversación" or teaching assistant in the towns of Santanyí and S'Alqueria Blanca, in the southeast corner of Mallorca; there are 170 auxiliares de conversación teaching English, French, and German in the Balearic Islands for the 2010-2011 academic year. We work in special language schools (extracurricular classes for all ages), the state-sponsored elementary and preschools (ages 3-11) and secondary schools. Here is the Spanish Ministry of Education's website; peruse away.
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WHERE IN THE WORLD? maps:
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MALLORQUÍ videos:
In case you didn't believe me when I kept saying that "Mallorquí REALLY IS a different language... no, Catalan is NOT a dialect of Spanish; Catalan is its own Romance language, and Mallorquí is a dialect of Catalan..." check out these videos:
Knowledge of the land:
(a typical older person speaking a "from the pueblos" version of Mallorquí)
Politics:
(a politician from Palma speaking in Mallorquí, and another politician from Valencia who doesn't speak Catalan--so, therefore, doesn't speak Mallorquí--but who has a rather strong Mallorcan accent when he speaks in Castilian Spanish)
Sports news:
(IB3 caters to all 4 inhabited Balearic Islands. Because each island has their own version of Catalan, the reporters from iB3 try to adjust the differences between the various dialects and they "normalize" their language to sound more like the Catalan of Catalonia. Their Catalan ends up sounding forced, though, because they basically speak Mallorquí with a few "Catalanized" words. Rafa Nadal is speaking in Mallorquí.)
Sports-related ads:
(I added this video not necessarily to listen to the language, but to laugh at the spectacle of those watching Rafa Nadal film an ad.)
Sports spoofs:
http://www.youtube.com/user/canbuuum?blend=6&ob=5#p/u
(All sorts of hilarity here. Overblown Mallorcan accents, overblown Mallorcans-speaking-in-Spanish accents, overblown Spanish-woman-impersonating-a-foreigner's-accent accents... great.)
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