Catalan North Carolina

What if North Carolina has many Occitan and Catalan speakers that North Carolina becomes a 'New Catalonia', what are the consequences of this?
 
I like the idea of populating Florida with Catalans as that territory was virtually ignored by the Spanish outside of its value as a bastion for the rest of Spanish America.
 
I like the idea of populating Florida with Catalans as that territory was virtually ignored by the Spanish outside of its value as a bastion for the rest of Spanish America.


In order to have a massive population of catalans somewhere, you need to create a transatlantic port in Catalonia or other of the catalan speaking Spain regions (Valencia and Balearics) It seems unlikely for obvious geophracial reasons. The first port directly tied with the americas was Cadiz, latter Sevlle. That's why most of the early colonizers were, in this order, sevillians, other andalusians, and extremenians and manchegos In the early 18th century a postal port was creared in (L)a Coruña, though Galicians and othr northern spaniarads started to make the main cultural background of the american colonization. It's in the late 19th century when catalans start to travel to the americas, specially to the Catibbean (sepecially to the curretn Republic of Cuba, Dominican Republic and Venezuela, but also the kingdom of Guantemala, the future USCA (you can spot several catalan surnames in their presidents if you know it) For a most commobly known evidencem Bacardí, the rum, is a catalan surname. Durin ghe Seven Years War and the british blocade to the sapanish America, Gerona sufffered a hunger. Some of the currently most important banks in Spain are the product of the catalan investiments in the americas,, specially after the capitals scape during the Seven Years War in Cuba ( Banco Sabadell, Banco Atlántico (nowadays united) or Banco Hispano Americano (nowadays part of the Banco Santander) also some of the currently most prominent cartln families made their fortunes in the Caribbean (gess how) , like the Vidal Qadras or the Goytisolo's amongst others (the first for the bad and the latter for the good) but I disgress.

On the other hand, you need a motivation to make those catalans in south Carolina (why?) to teach catalan instead of castilian to their sons and daughters. First ofall, not all your catalan are going to sepeak catalan as primary language, thougjh most of the first generation eill be probably bilingual. Most of them would have spent a relatively long time in Barcelona (we assume the port linking with the Americas is in Barcelona). Primary language in bilingual Barcelona is Castilian long time ago. , probablyy since late 17th century, if not earlier. On the other hand, they will arrive in a territory of a larger empire which primary language is castiñiamn. Why are them goin to keep the catalan. They can keep it as a "at home language" nut it will be still challenged by their geo-political reality. As a matter ofcomàration, the basques, galicians or any pther linguistically different spanish people which repopulated southern spanish territories in the Middle Ages adopted castilian. For examplwe, you can easily limit a territory of basque repopulation in some parts of the current province of Guadalajara or in some parts of the provonce of Cáceres (as far as I know (marilenian with extremenian origins here, probably there are other areas with similar traits), but those populations, despite the basque toponyms and anthroponims, have adopted castilian as their language, most of them before the american colonization. Only Galaico-Portuguese variants have survived in the extremenian frontier (mirandés, olivenzino etc) for several reasons, mainly the geo-political proximitiy of Portugal and the backwaterned nature of the territory, as you can guess. All the odds are for them adppting castilian as primary language for practial reasons, as it hapened inCcentral America despite the massive immigration (in relative terms and considering always the racist structure of the society) of catalans in the 18th and 19th centuries

So, oyur POD have to be relatively quite complex to make your proposal possible. I hope my point is clear, otherwise I'm opn to questons.

Cheers.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that for your average catalan (or velencian, or balearic) at the time it was easier and more productive to try fortune in Italy than in the Americas. It's not by chance that the catalan-speaking presence boost in the Americas is correlated to the spanish decay/fall in Italy )
 
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Why North Carolina.... somewhere nice and rocky.... maybe a couple islands off of Canada currently owned by france... Oh wait.
North Carolina has an Occitano-romance speaking minority but what if many people from S.France and Catalonia flocked to North Carolina.
 
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