La Franja - Origin of The Names That Refer To La Franja

Origin of The Names That Refer To La Franja

The use of a term to refer to the eastern area of Aragon bordering Catalonia as based on linguistic criteria is recent. It was in 1929 —when he christened these as Marques de Ponent, "Western Marches"— that Catalan geographer Pau Vila used for the first time a term designating jointly the Aragonese area where Catalan is spoken.

This term was maintained in the second half of the 20th century by Catalan linguists such as Joan Coromines, along with other terms such as Marques d'Aragó (in Spanish, Marcas de Aragón, "Marches of Aragon"), Catalunya aragonesa (in Spanish, Cataluña aragonesa, "Aragonese Catalonia") or la ratlla d'Aragó (in Spanish, la raya de Aragón, "the Aragonese Strip").

Whichever term is used, they all refer to the eastern Catalan-speaking area of Aragon, which borders Catalonia to the west. These terms all originated in Catalonia but later became popular in La Franja itself. They are therefore Catalonia-centered and hence the Ponent ("Western") reference in the term La Franja del Ponent, because these area lies to the west of Catalonia.

The term Franja de Ponent itself first appeared in the second half of the 1970s, during the Spanish transition to democracy:

the name in question is the collective creation of a group of Catalan-speaking Aragonese and Catalans from the Principality (Catalonia), interested in the fact that a part of Aragon is Catalan-speaking, who used to met some Saturday evenings at the Centro Comarcal Leridano (CCL) premises in Barcelona during the first years of the transition, and, simultaneously, it was also the creation of some original and small local groups –which were often joined by those CCL members– which emerged in La Litera in defense of the cultural-linguistic identity of the comarca.

At the Second International Congress of the Catalan Language (Segon Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana) held in 1985, the normative authority on the Catalan language, known as Institut d'Estudis Catalans, adopted Franja d'Aragó ("Aragonese Strip") as the denomination for the Catalan-speaking territories of Aragon for academic and linguistic purposes, while the denomination Franja de Ponent ("Western Strip") is used mainly in the political arena by some associations, groups and political parties associated with pancatalanism.

Later on, alternative denominations such as Aragón Oriental (in Catalan, Aragó Oriental), Franja Oriental or Franja de Levante (in Catalan, Franja de Llevant), all meaning roughly Eastern Aragon or Eastern Strip were created in Aragon.