Manuel Milà i Fontanals i la lingüística catalana

Abstract

Although Manuel Milà i Fontanals was mainly a literary scholar, his two main lines of research (troubadour lyrical poetry and popular verse) also led him to become interested in linguistic issues that were closely linked: the origins of the Romance languages, the historical relations between Catalan and Occitan, and the systematization of the main features of the oral varieties of Catalan. In this sense, he was the first philologist to use the methods of the then emerging Romance philology in the scientific description of the Catalan language, for which he can be considered to be the founder of Catalan linguistics. This article aims to consider all the works of Milà devoted to the Catalan language and take stock of their contribution in order to assess the importance of these studies for the history of Catalan philology.