Abstract
The Catalans were amongst the first to use the Internet to promote their unique language, culture and national identity, starting in 1993. Since early 2006, the availability of the .cat suffix for URLs has provided a highly visible focus for the Catalan presence on the Internet. An estimated 70 million webpages of Catalan language content are now available with .cat addresses. Despite Catalan’s status as a relatively small world language, it is now ranked as the 36th in usage on the Internet by web presence, with Catalan-language webpages accounting for 0.1% of the World Wide Web.
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It is significant that Ciudadanos was originally founded within Catalonia, in 2006, to protest the dominant use of the Catalan language in Catalonia’s public schools.
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Gerrand, P. (2019). Catalan’s Presence on the Internet (1993–2018). In: Casanovas, P., Corretger, M., Salvador, V. (eds) The Rise of Catalan Identity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18144-4_17
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