The Castilian variant used in the Catalan language area

In our diploma dissertation we tried to verify the hypothesis which declares the existence of a specific variant of Castilian in the areas of Spain where Catalan is spoken and to analyse this variant. We consider the phenomena of the language contact the central point in our analysis. We assumed the best approach was to study that language contact as a whole and not as specific isolated phenomena. Beside comparing the structures of Catalan and Castilian, we were interested in the social- political aspects which, in our opinion, have a very important role in the language contact too. That is why we began our dissertation by exposing the history of Catalan-Castilian coexistence since they split off as different languages from the iberoromance base till nowadays, when the immigration from Castilian spoken areas represents the main linguistic influence in Catalan and in the Catalan variant of Castilian. Next, we characterized the Catalan bilingualism and the language contact phenomenas which lead to changes in the language-receptor code: code-switching, interference and integration. We found the question of when an interference should be treated as an integrated feature in a meta-language system a debatable one . We think that a lot of elements used in the Castilian in Catalan areas for years could be finally..