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Languages of Andorra

Languages of Andorra
Official languages Catalan
Main foreign languages Spanish, French and Portuguese
Sign languages French Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language

The following languages are spoken in the Principality of Andorra.

Catalan is the only official language of Andorra. It is also the historical and traditional language of the country used by government, television, radio, and other national media and is the main language of all the people living in the territory of Andorran nationality, who constitute 33% of the total population.

It is also the main language of about 25% of Spanish immigrants (who constitute 43% of Andorra's population), usually those who immigrated since 1985 from nearby Catalonia or Valencia.

Recently the Government of Andorra is enforcing the learning and use of the language within the immigrant labor force as a means to fully apply the constitution and overcome the issue of people living in a country without knowing its only native language. Despite vast incoming tourism from Spanish-speakers from Spain, both public and private signage in Andorra is mostly monolingual in Catalan.

Andorra is the only country in which Catalan is the sole official language and the only country in which Catalan has official status in all of its territory.

Spanish is the main language of about 70% of Spanish national immigrants (the remaining 5% speak Galician). Most came to the country between 1955 and 1995 from the traditionally less developed southern, western and central regions of the Iberian Peninsula (Andalusia, Extremadura, Castile-La Mancha, Murcia, Galicia etc.) and from those next to the Bay of Biscay (Asturias, Cantabria etc.).

The low degree of development of Andorra, the limited education in the immigrants' homelands, and the fear of an invasion by Spain during the Franco regime made it more difficult for the immigrants to integrate fully until 1993, when the constitution of the country was approved. Since then, Spanish has become the second most used language of the population living in the country, and moreover is the dominant language of communication amongst people of different linguistic backgrounds — "the language of the street", thus triggering recent government efforts to promote more general and universal use of Catalan.


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