Who needs articles?

Have you ever stopped to think about how often we say 'el', 'la', 'uno', 'sa', and 'se'? Or how natural it feels to place them before almost any noun, without thinking? Articles are part of the everyday landscape of the Catalan language, whether we speak or write. Now, what if I told you that there are many languages that don't have any and yet are equally precise and expressive?

In Catalan, articles have a clear function: they help us understand whether we're talking about a familiar or new, generic or specific referent. They're like signposts that mark the way in a conversation. If someone says "I saw a cusa at the entrance," they're presenting new information. But if they then add "es la cosa de los vecinos," we already know who they're talking about. This type of mechanism is common in Romance languages such as Catalan, Spanish, French, and Italian, and that's why it may seem like a universal characteristic. Now, it isn't.

Different strategies

Many languages around the world lack articles. And no, they are not less precise or simpler. They simply use other strategies to express the same ideas. The tool changes, but the function is the same. Let's take Czech, a Slavic language, as an example. This language doesn't have articles, but it can distinguish whether a noun is familiar or novel through word order, the communicative situation, or morphology. When someone says "weight je tady" (literally, 'ca is here'), it is understood that it refers to a known dog. But if it says "mam psa" ('I have a dog'), the form 'psa' –in the accusative– indicates that the speaker is introducing a new entity. The Czech case system, which changes the form of nouns and adjectives according to the syntactic function they perform, allows us to identify the grammatical functions of each word and fills the need for articles.

Another language without articles is Japanese. This language has a particle system that indicates the informative role of each element. If a person says "neko ga kita" (literally, 'moix has come'), the particle 'ga' marks the subject as new information. However, if you then continue with "neko wa kawaii" (meaning 'the cat is adorable'), the particle 'wa' tells us that the cat has already been introduced and is therefore known information. Thus, the distinction between nine and known is maintained, despite the lack of articles.

Mandarin Chinese also functions without articles. There is no word that exactly corresponds to our 'it' and 'one', but the linguistic system allows the same distinction to be made by other means. For example, one can say "wǒ kánjián yī zhī gǒu" ('I saw a dog'), in which 'yī' means 'one' and 'zhī' is a classifier for certain nouns, such as animals. If you later want to refer to the same dog, you can say "ná zhī gǒu" ('this/that dog'), in which 'nothing' acts as a demonstrative. It is not an article, but it fulfills a similar function in that context.

In Europe, we also find alternative systems. Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish have definite articles, but they do not come before the noun as they do in Catalan: they are added at the end. In Norwegian, for example, 'katt' means 'moix', and 'katten', 'the cat'. The suffix 'in' It does the job of the definite article, but attached to the noun. This shows that the function of identifying whether a noun is definite or indefinite can be accomplished in many ways: with separate words, with particles, with affixes, or with context.

Looking Back

To understand why Catalan has articles, it's necessary to look back. Classical Latin, from which Catalan is derived, didn't have one. So how is it that we can't live without it now? The process is well documented: over time, certain Latin demonstrative pronouns—such as 'Island' ('that') and 'Ipso' ('same') – began to be used to indicate known referents. With use, they lost their original meaning and became grammaticalized, that is, they became purely grammatical elements.Island', while the salty forms ('se', 'sa') derive from 'Ipso'. This phenomenon, called grammaticalization, is common to many languages and shows how linguistic systems evolve to adapt to the communicative needs of speakers.

Now, the fact that some languages have developed articles and others have not does not imply that some are more evolved or more precise than others. All human languages, without exception, can express the same concepts and nuances. No language is inferior or superior. The difference lies only in the tools that each linguistic system uses to do the same job.

Perhaps, if we are used to putting articles before everything, it may surprise us to learn that they are not essential in all languages. However, this may be useful to look at our own language from a broader, more relativizing perspective. Sometimes, something that seems as natural to us as saying "the house," "a book," or "the children" is just one of the many possible ways of organizing the world through language. But what's most important to remember is that none of them are better or worse than the others.