7 Interesting Facts about Catalan

6. Arabic has not had much of an influence on Catalan

While Spanish has adopted a number of features from Arabic, due to the Moorish invasion and subsequent conquest of Spain in the 8th century, the Catalan language, by and large, avoided such influences. For example, Spanish has a long list of loanwords from Arabic and has adopted the prefix al- in a number of words, al being the definitive article in Arabic (much like the English the).