prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Who gives out the award named after the person who argued that colonies were redundant?

The following are given passages.
Context 1: Passage 1:
Tycho Brahe Prize
The Tycho Brahe Prize is awarded by the European Astronomical Society  Inaugurated in 2008, the prize is awarded annually in recognition of the pioneering development or exploitation of European astronomical instrumentation, or major discoveries based largely on such instruments 

Tycho Brahe Prize laureates
The following persons have received the Tycho Brahe Prize:

See also
List of astronomy awards
Prizes named after people
Passage 2:
Booktrust Teenage Prize
The Booktrust Teenage Prize was an annual award given to young adult literature published in the UK  The prize was administered by Book Trust, an independent charity which promotes books and reading  The Booktrust Teenage Prize was last awarded in 2010 and is no longer running 

Honorees
Passage 3:
Adam Smith Prize
The Adam Smith Prizes are prizes currently awarded for the best overall examination performance and best dissertation in Part IIB of the Economics Tripos (the graduation examination for economics undergraduates) at the University of Cambridge  The prize - named after Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith - was originally established in 1891 and awarded triennially for the best submitted essay on a subject of the writer's choice 

List of past recipients
1894 Arthur Lyon Bowley
1897 Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, 1st Baron Pethick-Lawrence
1900 Sydney Chapman
1903 Arthur Cecil Pigou
1906 Ernest Alfred Benians
1909 John Maynard Keynes
1929 R  F  Kahn
1930 Ruth Cohen
1932 K  S  Isles
1933 B  P  Adarkar
1935 W  B  Reddaway
1936 D  G  Champernowne
1954 Amartya Sen
1956 Manmohan Singh
1974 Martin Osborne
1987 Richard J  Parkin
2000 Saugato Datta and Richard Fearon
2004 James Benford
2006 Mark Shields
2007 Stefanie Stantcheva
2008 Thomas Mckendrick and Shivam Patel
2009 Praneet Shah
2011 Ossie Akushie and Shafi Anwar
2013 Inna Grinis and Ivan Kuznetsov
2014 James Walker
2015 Ben Andrews and Jonathon Hazell
2016 Isar Bhattacharjee and Toni Oki
2017 Joel Flynn and Joseph Lee
2018 Tireni Ajilore, George Nikolakoudis, Laurence O’Brien and Sajan Shah
2019 Vlastimil Rasocha and Kuishuai Yi
2020 Neal Patel, David Lee, Liam Grant, Andrew Koh and Michael Bennett
2021 Valerie Chuang, Matthew Chen and Jack Golden

See also
List of economics awards
Passage 4:
Berwick Prize
The Berwick Prize and Senior Berwick Prize are two prizes of the London Mathematical Society awarded in alternating years in memory of William Edward Hodgson Berwick, a previous Vice-President of the LMS  Berwick left some money to be given to the society to establish two prizes  His widow Daisy May Berwick gave the society the money and the society established the prizes, with the first Senior Berwick Prize being presented in 1946 and the first Junior Berwick Prize the following year  The prizes are awarded "in recognition of an outstanding piece of mathematical research     published by the Society" in the eight years before the year of the award The Berwick Prize was known as the Junior Berwick Prize up to 1999, and was given its current name for the 2001 award 

Senior Berwick Prize winners
Source:

Berwick Prize winners
Source:

See also
Whitehead Prize
Senior Whitehead Prize
Shephard Prize
Fröhlich Prize
Naylor Prize and Lectureship
Pólya Prize (LMS)
De Morgan Medal
List of mathematics awards 
Passage 5:
Lilienfeld Prize
The Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, to remember Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, has been awarded annually, since 1989  (It was not awarded in 2002)  The purpose of the Prize is to recognize outstanding contributions to physics 

Recipients
Source: American Physical Society

External links
J  E  Lilienfeld Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics APS

See also
List of physics awards
Passage 6:
List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Swedish: Nobelpriset i kemi) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry  It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896   These prizes are awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine  As dictated by Nobel's will, the award is administered by the Nobel Foundation and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences  The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, of the Netherlands  Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award prize that has varied throughout the years  In 1901, van 't Hoff received 150,782 SEK, which is equal to 7,731,004 SEK in December 2007   The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death At least 25 laureates have received the Nobel Prize for contributions in the field of organic chemistry, more than any other field of chemistry  Two Nobel Prize laureates in Chemistry, Germans Richard Kuhn (1938) and Adolf Butenandt (1939), were not allowed by their government to accept the prize  They would later receive a medal and diploma, but not the money  Frederick Sanger is one out of three laureates to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice in the same subject, in 1958 and 1980  John Bardeen, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and 1972, and Karl Barry Sharpless, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001 and 2022, are the others  Two others have won Nobel Prizes twice, one in chemistry and one in another subject: Maria Skłodowska-Curie (physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911) and Linus Pauling (chemistry in 1954, peace in 1962)  As of 2022, the prize has been awarded to 189 individuals, including eight women (Maria Skłodowska-Curie being the first to be awarded in 1911) There have been eight years for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was not awarded (1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940–42)  There were also nine years for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was delayed for one year  The Prize was not awarded in 1914, as the Nobel Committee for Chemistry  decided that none of that year's nominations met the necessary criteria, but was awarded to Theodore William Richards in 1915 and counted as the 1914 prize  This precedent was followed for the 1918 prize awarded to Fritz Haber in 1919, the 1920 prize awarded to Walther Nernst in 1921, the 1921 prize awarded to Frederick Soddy in 1922, the 1925 prize awarded to Richard Zsigmondy in 1926, the 1927 prize awarded to Heinrich Otto Wieland in 1928, the 1938 prize awarded to Richard Kuhn in 1939, the 1943 prize awarded to George de Hevesy in 1944, and the 1944 prize awarded to Otto Hahn in 1945 In 2020, Ioannidis et al  reported that half of the Nobel Prizes for science awarded between 1995 and 2017 were clustered in just a few disciplines within their broader fields  Atomic physics, particle physics, cell biology, and neuroscience dominated the two subjects outside chemistry, while molecular chemistry was the chief prize-winning discipline in its domain  Molecular chemists won 5 3% of all science Nobel Prizes during this period 

Laureates
See also
Timeline of chemistry
Passage 7:
Karl Jaspers Prize
The Karl Jaspers Prize or Karl-Jaspers-Preis is a German philosophy award named after Karl Jaspers and awarded by the city of Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg  It was first awarded in 1983 "for a scientific work of international significance supported by philosophical spirit"  The Karl Jaspers Prize was initially endowed with 5,000 euros, though since 2013 this has increased to €25,000  Next to the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize it is one of the highest awards in Germany awarded exclusively for philosophical achievements 

Award winners
Passage 8:
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states  It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries  
At its height in the 19th and early 20th century, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power  By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23 per cent of the world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35 5 million km2 (13 7 million sq mi), 24 per cent of the Earth's total land area  As a result, its constitutional, legal, linguistic, and cultural legacy is widespread  At the peak of its power, it was described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", as the Sun was always shining on at least one of its territories  Today, numerous nations across the world trace their contemporary statehood to the end of British rule, including the United States, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Israel 
During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires  Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England, France, and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia  A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England (Britain, following the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) the dominant colonial power in North America  Britain became the dominant power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 
The American War of Independence resulted in Britain losing some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America by 1783  British attention then turned towards Asia, Africa, and the Pacific  After the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Britain emerged as the principal naval and imperial power of the 19th century and expanded its imperial holdings  It pursued trade concessions in China and Japan, and territory in Southeast Asia   The  "Scramble for Africa" and "Great Game" also ensued  The period of relative peace (1815–1914) during which the British Empire became the global hegemon was later described as Pax Britannica (Latin for "British Peace")  Alongside the formal control that Britain exerted over its colonies, its dominance of much of world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America  Increasing degrees of autonomy were granted to its white settler colonies, some of which were formally reclassified as Dominions in the 1920s  By the start of the 20th century, Germany and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead  Military and economic tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied heavily on its empire  The conflict placed enormous strain on its military, financial, and manpower resources  Although the empire achieved its largest territorial extent immediately after the First World War, Britain was no longer the world's preeminent industrial or military power 
In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East Asia and Southeast Asia were occupied by the Empire of Japan  Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige helped accelerate the decline of the empire  India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence in 1947 as part of a larger decolonisation movement, in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire  The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain's decline as a global power, and the transfer of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolised for many the end of the British Empire, though fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under British sovereignty  After independence, many former British colonies, along with most of the dominions, joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states  Fifteen of these, including the United Kingdom, retain a common monarch, currently King Charles III 

Origins (1497–1583)
The foundations of the British Empire were laid when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms  In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead an expedition to discover a northwest passage to Asia via the North Atlantic  Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, and made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland  He believed he had reached Asia, and there was no attempt to found a colony  Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but did not return; it is unknown what happened to his ships No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century  In the meantime, Henry VIII's 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals had declared "that this realm of England is an Empire"  The Protestant Reformation turned England and Catholic Spain into implacable enemies  In 1562, Elizabeth I encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa with the aim of establishing an Atlantic slave trade  This effort was rebuffed and later, as the Anglo-Spanish Wars intensified, Elizabeth I gave her blessing to further privateering raids against Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic, laden with treasure from the New World  At the same time, influential writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use the term "British Empire") were beginning to press for the establishment of England's own empire  By this time, Spain had become the dominant power in the Americas and was exploring the Pacific Ocean, Portugal had established trading posts and forts from the coasts of Africa and Brazil to China, and France had begun to settle the Saint Lawrence River area, later to become New France Although England tended to trail behind Portugal, Spain, and France in establishing overseas colonies, it carried out its first modern colonisation, referred to as the Ulster Plantation, in 16th century Ireland by settling English Protestants in Ulster  England had already colonised part of the country following the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169  Several people who helped establish the Ulster Plantations later played a part in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country Men 

English overseas possessions (1583–1707)
In 1578, Elizabeth I granted a patent to Humphrey Gilbert for discovery and overseas exploration  That year, Gilbert sailed for the Caribbean with the intention of engaging in piracy and establishing a colony in North America, but the expedition was aborted before it had crossed the Atlantic  In 1583, he embarked on a second attempt  On this occasion, he formally claimed the harbour of the island of Newfoundland, although no settlers were left behind  Gilbert did not survive the return journey to England and was succeeded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who was granted his own patent by Elizabeth in 1584  Later that year, Raleigh founded the Roanoke Colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina, but lack of supplies caused the colony to fail In 1603, James VI of Scotland ascended (as James I) to the English throne and in 1604 negotiated the Treaty of London, ending hostilities with Spain  Now at peace with its main rival, English attention shifted from preying on other nations' colonial infrastructures to the business of establishing its own overseas colonies  The British Empire began to take shape during the early 17th century, with the English settlement of North America and the smaller islands of the Caribbean, and the establishment of joint-stock companies, most notably the East India Company, to administer colonies and overseas trade  This period, until the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after the American War of Independence towards the end of the 18th century, has been referred to by some historians as the "First British Empire" 

Americas, Africa and the slave trade
England's early efforts at colonisation in the Americas met with mixed success  An attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits  Colonies on the Caribbean islands of St Lucia (1605) and Grenada (1609) rapidly folded  The first permanent English settlement in the Americas was founded in 1607 in Jamestown by Captain John Smith, and managed by the Virginia Company; the Crown took direct control of the venture in 1624, thereby founding the Colony of Virginia  Bermuda was settled and claimed by England as a result of the 1609 shipwreck of the Virginia Company's flagship, while attempts to settle Newfoundland were largely unsuccessful  In 1620, Plymouth was founded as a haven by Puritan religious separatists, later known as the Pilgrims  Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive for many English would-be colonists to risk the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage: Maryland was established by English Roman Catholics (1634), Rhode Island (1636) as a colony tolerant of all religions and Connecticut (1639) for Congregationalists  England's North American holdings were further expanded by the annexation of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664, following the capture of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York  Although less financially successful than colonies in the Caribbean, these territories had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far greater numbers of English emigrants, who preferred their temperate climates The British West Indies initially provided England's most important and lucrative colonies  Settlements were successfully established in St  Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628), but struggled until the "Sugar Revolution" transformed the Caribbean economy in the mid-17th century  Large sugarcane plantations were first established in the 1640s on Barbados, with assistance from Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews fleeing Portuguese Brazil  At first, sugar was grown primarily using white indentured labour, but rising costs soon led English traders to embrace the use of imported African slaves  The enormous wealth generated by slave-produced sugar made Barbados the most successful colony in the Americas, and one of the most densely populated places in the world  This boom led to the spread of sugar cultivation across the Caribbean, financed the development of non-plantation colonies in North America, and accelerated the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, particularly the triangular trade of slaves, sugar and provisions between Africa, the West Indies and Europe To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of colonial trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies  This led to hostilities with the United Dutch Provinces—a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars—which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at the expense of the Dutch  In 1655, England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas 
In 1670, Charles II incorporated by royal charter the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), granting it a monopoly on the fur trade in the area known as Rupert's Land, which would later form a large proportion of the Dominion of Canada  Forts and trading posts established by the HBC were frequently the subject of attacks by the French, who had established their own fur trading colony in adjacent New France Two years later, the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly on the supply of slaves to the British colonies in the Caribbean  The company would transport more slaves across the Atlantic than any other, and significantly grew England's share of the trade, from 33 per cent in 1673 to 74 per cent in 1683  The removal of this monopoly between 1688 and 1712 allowed independent British slave traders to thrive, leading to a rapid escalation in the number of slaves transported  British ships carried a third of all slaves shipped across the Atlantic—approximately 3 5 million Africans—until the abolition of the trade by Parliament in 1807 (see § Abolition of slavery)  To facilitate the shipment of slaves, forts were established on the coast of West Africa, such as James Island, Accra and Bunce Island  In the British Caribbean, the percentage of the population of African descent rose from 25 per cent in 1650 to around 80 per cent in 1780, and in the Thirteen Colonies from 10 per cent to 40 per cent over the same period (the majority in the southern colonies)  The transatlantic slave trade played a pervasive role in British economic life, and became a major economic mainstay for western port cities  Ships registered in Bristol, Liverpool and London were responsible for the bulk of British slave trading  For the transported, harsh and unhygienic conditions on the slaving ships and poor diets meant that the average mortality rate during the Middle Passage was one in seven 

Rivalry with other European empires
At the end of the 16th century, England and the Dutch Empire began to challenge the Portuguese Empire's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages—the English, later British, East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively  The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative spice trade, an effort focused mainly on two regions: the East Indies archipelago, and an important hub in the trade network, India  There, they competed for trade supremacy with Portugal and with each other  Although England eclipsed the Netherlands as a colonial power, in the short term the Netherlands' more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia  Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between the Dutch Republic and England  A deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the East Indies archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability Peace between England and the Netherlands in 1688 meant the two countries entered the Nine Years' War as allies, but the conflict—waged in Europe and overseas between France, Spain and the Anglo-Dutch alliance—left the English a stronger colonial power than the Dutch, who were forced to devote a larger proportion of their military budget to the costly land war in Europe  The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its colonial empire to Philip V of Spain, a grandson of the King of France, raised the prospect of the unification of France, Spain and their respective colonies, an unacceptable state of affairs for England and the other powers of Europe  In 1701, England, Portugal and the Netherlands sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted for thirteen years 

Scottish attempt to expand overseas
In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland granted a charter to the Company of Scotland, which established a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama  Besieged by neighbouring Spanish colonists of New Granada, and affected by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later  The Darien scheme was a financial disaster for Scotland: a quarter of Scottish capital was lost in the enterprise  The episode had major political consequences, helping to persuade the government of the Kingdom of Scotland of the merits of turning the personal union with England into a political and economic one under the Kingdom of Great Britain established by the Acts of Union 1707 

"First" British Empire (1707–1783)
The 18th century saw the newly united Great Britain rise to be the world's dominant colonial power, with France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage  Great Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire continued the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted until 1714 and was concluded by the Treaty of Utrecht  Philip V of Spain renounced his and his descendants' claim to the French throne, and Spain lost its empire in Europe  The British Empire was territorially enlarged: from France, Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia, and from Spain Gibraltar and Menorca  Gibraltar became a critical naval base and allowed Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean  Spain ceded the rights to the lucrative asiento (permission to sell African slaves in Spanish America) to Britain  With the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739, Spanish privateers attacked British merchant shipping along the Triangle Trade routes  In 1746, the Spanish and British began peace talks, with the King of Spain agreeing to stop all attacks on British shipping; however, in the 1750 Treaty of Madrid Britain lost its slave-trading rights in Latin America In the East Indies, British and Dutch merchants continued to compete in spices and textiles  With textiles becoming the larger trade, by 1720, in terms of sales, the British company had overtaken the Dutch  During the middle decades of the 18th century, there were several outbreaks of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, as the English East India Company and its French counterpart, struggled alongside local rulers to fill the vacuum that had been left by the decline of the Mughal Empire  The Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which the British defeated the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, left the British East India Company in control of Bengal and as the major military and political power in India  France was left control of its enclaves but with military restrictions and an obligation to support British client states, ending French hopes of controlling India  In the following decades the British East India Company gradually increased the size of the territories under its control, either ruling directly or via local rulers under the threat of force from the Presidency Armies, the vast majority of which was composed of Indian sepoys, led by British officers  The British and French struggles in India became but one theatre of the global Seven Years' War (1756–1763) involving France, Britain, and the other major European powers The signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had important consequences for the future of the British Empire  In North America, France's future as a colonial power effectively ended with the recognition of British claims to Rupert's Land, and the ceding of New France to Britain (leaving a sizeable French-speaking population under British control) and Louisiana to Spain  Spain ceded Florida to Britain  Along with its victory over France in India, the Seven Years' War therefore left Britain as the world's most powerful maritime power 

Loss of the Thirteen American Colonies
During the 1760s and early 1770s, relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain became increasingly strained, primarily because of resentment of the British Parliament's attempts to govern and tax American colonists without their consent  This was summarised at the time by the colonists' slogan "No taxation without representation", a perceived violation of the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen  The American Revolution began with a rejection of Parliamentary authority and moves towards self-government  In response, Britain sent troops to reimpose direct rule, leading to the outbreak of war in 1775  The following year, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the colonies' sovereignty from the British Empire as the new United States of America  The entry of French and Spanish forces into the war tipped the military balance in the Americans' favour and after a decisive defeat at Yorktown in 1781, Britain began negotiating peace terms  American independence was acknowledged at the Peace of Paris in 1783 The loss of such a large portion of British America, at the time Britain's most populous overseas possession, is seen by some historians as the event defining the transition between the "first" and "second" empires, in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa  Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had argued that colonies were redundant, and that free trade should replace the old mercantilist policies that had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, dating back to the protectionism of Spain and Portugal  The growth of trade between the newly independent United States and Britain after 1783 seemed to confirm Smith's view that political control was not necessary for economic success The war to the south influenced British policy in Canada, where between 40,000 and 100,000 defeated Loyalists had migrated from the new United States following independence  The 14,000 Loyalists who went to the Saint John and Saint Croix river valleys, then part of Nova Scotia, felt too far removed from the provincial government in Halifax, so London split off New Brunswick as a separate colony in 1784  The Constitutional Act of 1791 created the provinces of Upper Canada (mainly English speaking) and Lower Canada (mainly French-speaking) to defuse tensions between the French and British communities, and implemented governmental systems similar to those employed in Britain, with the intention of asserting imperial authority and not allowing the sort of popular control of government that was perceived to have led to the American Revolution Tensions between Britain and the United States escalated again during the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain tried to cut off American trade with France and boarded American ships to impress men into the Royal Navy  The United States Congress declared war, the War of 1812, and invaded Canadian territory  In response, Britain invaded the US, but the pre-war boundaries were reaffirmed by the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, ensuring Canada's future would be separate from that of the United States 

Rise of the "Second" British Empire (1783–1815)
Exploration of the Pacific
Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year  Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government turned to Australia  The coast of Australia had been discovered for Europeans by the Dutch in 1606, but there was no attempt to colonise it  In 1770 James Cook charted the eastern coast while on a scientific voyage, claimed the continent for Britain, and named it New South Wales  In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788  Unusually, Australia was claimed through proclamation  Indigenous Australians were considered too uncivilised to require treaties, and colonisation brought disease and violence that together with the deliberate dispossession of land and culture were devastating to these peoples  Britain continued to transport convicts to New South Wales until 1840, to Tasmania until 1853 and to Western Australia until 1868  The Australian colonies became profitable exporters of wool and gold, mainly because of the Victorian gold rush, making its capital Melbourne for a time the richest city in the world During his voyage, Cook visited New Zealand, known to Europeans due to the 1642 voyage of the Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman  Cook claimed both the North and the South islands for the British crown in 1769 and 1770 respectively  Initially, interaction between the indigenous Maori population and European settlers was limited to the trading of goods  European settlement increased through the early decades of the 19th century, with many trading stations being established, especially in the North  In 1839, the New Zealand Company announced plans to buy large tracts of land and establish colonies in New Zealand  On 6 February 1840, Captain William Hobson and around 40 Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi which is considered to be New Zealand's founding document, despite differing interpretations of the Maori and English versions of the text being the cause of ongoing dispute The British also expanded their mercantile interests in the North Pacific  Spain and Britain had become rivals in the area, culminating in the Nootka Crisis in 1789  Both sides mobilised for war, but when France refused to support Spain it was forced to back down, leading to the Nootka Convention  The outcome was a humiliation for Spain, which practically renounced all sovereignty on the North Pacific coast  This opened the way to British expansion in the area, and a number of expeditions took place; firstly a naval expedition led by George Vancouver which explored the inlets around the Pacific North West, particularly around Vancouver Island  On land, expeditions sought to discover a river route to the Pacific for the extension of the North American fur trade  Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company led the first, starting out in 1792, and a year a later he became the first European to reach the Pacific overland north of the Rio Grande, reaching the ocean near present-day Bella Coola  This preceded the Lewis and Clark Expedition by twelve years  Shortly thereafter, Mackenzie's companion, John Finlay, founded the first permanent European settlement in British Columbia, Fort St  John  The North West Company sought further exploration and backed expeditions by David Thompson, starting in 1797, and later by Simon Fraser  These pushed into the wilderness territories of the Rocky Mountains and Interior Plateau to the Strait of Georgia on the Pacific Coast, expanding British North America westward 

Wars with France
Britain was challenged again by France under Napoleon, in a struggle that, unlike previous wars, represented a contest of ideologies between the two nations  It was not only Britain's position on the world stage that was at risk: Napoleon threatened to invade Britain itself, just as his armies had overrun many countries of continental Europe The Napoleonic Wars were therefore ones in which Britain invested large amounts of capital and resources to win  French ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy, which won a decisive victory over a French Imperial Navy-Spanish Navy fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805  Overseas colonies were attacked and occupied, including those of the Netherlands, which was annexed by Napoleon in 1810  France was finally defeated by a coalition of European armies in 1815  Britain was again the beneficiary of peace treaties: France ceded the Ionian Islands, Malta (which it had occupied in 1798), Mauritius, St Lucia, the Seychelles, and Tobago; Spain ceded Trinidad; the Netherlands ceded Guyana, Ceylon and the Cape Colony, while the Danish ceded Heligoland  Britain returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion to France; Menorca to Spain; Danish West Indies to Denmark and Java and Suriname to the Netherlands 

Abolition of slavery
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, goods produced by slavery became less important to the British economy  Added to this was the cost of suppressing regular slave rebellions  With support from the British abolitionist movement, Parliament enacted the Slave Trade Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the empire  In 1808, Sierra Leone Colony was designated an official British colony for freed slaves  Parliamentary reform in 1832 saw the influence of the West India Committee decline  The Slavery Abolition Act, passed the following year, abolished slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834, finally bringing the empire into line with the law in the UK (with the exception of the territories administered by the East India Company and Ceylon, where slavery was ended in 1844)  Under the Act, slaves were granted full emancipation after a period of four to six years of "apprenticeship"  Facing further opposition from abolitionists, the apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838  The British government compensated slave-owners 

Britain's imperial century (1815–1914)
Between 1815 and 1914, a period referred to as Britain's "imperial century" by some historians, around 10 million sq mi (26 million km2) of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire  Victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in Central Asia  Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica, and a foreign policy of "splendid isolation"  Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain's dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been described by some historians as an "Informal Empire" 

British imperial strength was underpinned by the steamship and the telegraph, new technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the empire  By 1902, the British Empire was linked together by a network of telegraph cables, called the All Red Line 

East India Company rule and the British Raj in India
The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia  The company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to co-operate in arenas outside India: the eviction of the French from Egypt (1799), the capture of Java from the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Penang Island (1786), Singapore (1819) and Malacca (1824), and the defeat of Burma (1826) From its base in India, the company had been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to Qing China since the 1730s  This trade, illegal since it was outlawed by China in 1729, helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China  In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack China in the First Opium War, and resulted in the seizure by Britain of Hong Kong Island, at that time a minor settlement, and other Treaty Ports including Shanghai During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British Crown began to assume an increasingly large role in the affairs of the company  A series of Acts of Parliament were passed, including the Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt's India Act of 1784 and the Charter Act of 1813 which regulated the company's affairs and established the sovereignty of the Crown over the territories that it had acquired  The company's eventual end was precipitated by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict that had begun with the mutiny of sepoys, Indian troops under British officers and discipline  The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides  The following year the British government dissolved the company and assumed direct control over India through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor-general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India  India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength A series of serious crop failures in the late 19th century led to widespread famines on the subcontinent in which it is estimated that over 15 million people died  The East India Company had failed to implement any coordinated policy to deal with the famines during its period of rule  Later, under direct British rule, commissions were set up after each famine to investigate the causes and implement new policies, which took until the early 1900s to have an effect 

Rivalry with Russia
During the 19th century, Britain and the Russian Empire vied to fill the power vacuums that had been left by the declining Ottoman Empire, Qajar dynasty and Qing dynasty  This rivalry in Central Asia came to be known as the "Great Game"  As far as Britain was concerned, defeats inflicted by Russia on Persia and Turkey demonstrated its imperial ambitions and capabilities and stoked fears in Britain of an overland invasion of India  In 1839, Britain moved to pre-empt this by invading Afghanistan, but the First Anglo-Afghan War was a disaster for Britain When Russia invaded the Ottoman Balkans in 1853, fears of Russian dominance in the Mediterranean and the Middle East led Britain and France to enter the war in support of the Ottoman Empire and invade the Crimean Peninsula to destroy Russian naval capabilities  The ensuing Crimean War (1854–1856), which involved new techniques of modern warfare, was the only global war fought between Britain and another imperial power during the Pax Britannica and was a resounding defeat for Russia  The situation remained unresolved in Central Asia for two more decades, with Britain annexing Baluchistan in 1876 and Russia annexing Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan  For a while, it appeared that another war would be inevitable, but the two countries reached an agreement on their respective spheres of influence in the region in 1878 and on all outstanding matters in 1907 with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente  The destruction of the Imperial Russian Navy by the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 limited its threat to the British 

Cape to Cairo
The Dutch East India Company had founded the Dutch Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 as a way station for its ships travelling to and from its colonies in the East Indies  Britain formally acquired the colony, and its large Afrikaner (or Boer) population in 1806, having occupied it in 1795 to prevent its falling into French hands during the Flanders Campaign  British immigration to the Cape Colony began to rise after 1820, and pushed thousands of Boers, resentful of British rule, northwards to found their own—mostly short-lived—independent republics, during the Great Trek of the late 1830s and early 1840s  In the process the Voortrekkers clashed repeatedly with the British, who had their own agenda with regard to colonial expansion in South Africa and to the various native African polities, including those of the Sotho people and the Zulu Kingdom  Eventually, the Boers established two republics that had a longer lifespan: the South African Republic or Transvaal Republic (1852–1877; 1881–1902) and the Orange Free State (1854–1902)  In 1902 Britain occupied both republics, concluding a treaty with the two Boer Republics following the Second Boer War (1899–1902) In 1869 the Suez Canal opened under Napoleon III, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean  Initially the Canal was opposed by the British; but once opened, its strategic value was quickly recognised and became the "jugular vein of the Empire"  In 1875, the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Isma'il Pasha's 44 per cent shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million (equivalent to £400 million in 2021)  Although this did not grant outright control of the strategic waterway, it did give Britain leverage  Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882   Although Britain controlled the Khedivate of Egypt into the 20th century, it was officially a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire and not part of the British Empire   The French were still majority shareholders and attempted to weaken the British position, but a compromise was reached with the 1888 Convention of Constantinople, which made the Canal officially neutral territory With competitive French, Belgian and Portuguese activity in the lower Congo River region undermining orderly colonisation of tropical Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 was held to regulate the competition between the European powers in what was called the "Scramble for Africa" by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of territorial claims  The scramble continued into the 1890s, and caused Britain to reconsider its decision in 1885 to withdraw from Sudan  A joint force of British and Egyptian troops defeated the Mahdist Army in 1896 and rebuffed an attempted French invasion at Fashoda in 1898  Sudan was nominally made an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, but a British colony in reality British gains in Southern and East Africa prompted Cecil Rhodes, pioneer of British expansion in Southern Africa, to urge a "Cape to Cairo" railway linking the strategically important Suez Canal to the mineral-rich south of the continent  During the 1880s and 1890s, Rhodes, with his privately owned British South Africa Company, occupied and annexed territories named after him, Rhodesia 

Changing status of the white colonies
The path to independence for the white colonies of the British Empire began with the 1839 Durham Report, which proposed unification and self-government for Upper and Lower Canada, as a solution to political unrest which had erupted in armed rebellions in 1837  This began with the passing of the Act of Union in 1840, which created the Province of Canada  Responsible government was first granted to Nova Scotia in 1848, and was soon extended to the other British North American colonies  With the passage of the British North America Act, 1867 by the British Parliament, the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were formed into Canada, a confederation enjoying full self-government with the exception of international relations  Australia and New Zealand achieved similar levels of self-government after 1900, with the Australian colonies federating in 1901  The term "dominion status" was officially introduced at the 1907 Imperial Conference The last decades of the 19th century saw concerted political campaigns for Irish home rule  Ireland had been united with Britain into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with the Act of Union 1800 after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and had suffered a severe famine between 1845 and 1852  Home rule was supported by the British Prime minister, William Gladstone, who hoped that Ireland might follow in Canada's footsteps as a Dominion within the empire, but his 1886 Home Rule bill was defeated in Parliament  Although the bill, if passed, would have granted Ireland less autonomy within the UK than the Canadian provinces had within their own federation, many MPs feared that a partially independent Ireland might pose a security threat to Great Britain or mark the beginning of the break-up of the empire  A second Home Rule bill was defeated for similar reasons  A third bill was passed by Parliament in 1914, but not implemented because of the outbreak of the First World War leading to the 1916 Easter Rising 

World wars (1914–1945)
By the turn of the 20th century, fears had begun to grow in Britain that it would no longer be able to defend the metropole and the entirety of the empire while at the same time maintaining the policy of "splendid isolation"  Germany was rapidly rising as a military and industrial power and was now seen as the most likely opponent in any future war  Recognising that it was overstretched in the Pacific and threatened at home by the Imperial German Navy, Britain formed an alliance with Japan in 1902 and with its old enemies France and Russia in 1904 and 1907, respectively 

First World War
Britain's fears of war with Germany were realised in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War  Britain quickly invaded and occupied most of Germany's overseas colonies in Africa  In the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand occupied German New Guinea and German Samoa respectively  Plans for a post-war division of the Ottoman Empire, which had joined the war on Germany's side, were secretly drawn up by Britain and France under the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement  This agreement was not divulged to the Sharif of Mecca, who the British had been encouraging to launch an Arab revolt against their Ottoman rulers, giving the impression that Britain was supporting the creation of an independent Arab state The British declaration of war on Germany and its allies committed the colonies and Dominions, which provided invaluable military, financial and material support  Over 2 5 million men served in the armies of the Dominions, as well as many thousands of volunteers from the Crown colonies  The contributions of Australian and New Zealand troops during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on the national consciousness at home and marked a watershed in the transition of Australia and New Zealand from colonies to nations in their own right  The countries continue to commemorate this occasion on Anzac Day  Canadians viewed the Battle of Vimy Ridge in a similar light  The important contribution of the Dominions to the war effort was recognised in 1917 by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he invited each of the Dominion Prime Ministers to join an Imperial War Cabinet to co-ordinate imperial policy Under the terms of the concluding Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, the empire reached its greatest extent with the addition of 1 8 million sq mi (4 7 million km2) and 13 million new subjects  The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were distributed to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates  Britain gained control of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togoland, and Tanganyika  The Dominions themselves acquired mandates of their own: the Union of South Africa gained South West Africa (modern-day Namibia), Australia gained New Guinea, and New Zealand Western Samoa  Nauru was made a combined mandate of Britain and the two Pacific Dominions 

Inter-war period
The changing world order that the war had brought about, in particular the growth of the United States and Japan as naval powers, and the rise of independence movements in India and Ireland, caused a major reassessment of British imperial policy  Forced to choose between alignment with the United States or Japan, Britain opted not to renew its Anglo-Japanese Alliance and instead signed the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, where Britain accepted naval parity with the United States  This decision was the source of much debate in Britain during the 1930s as militaristic governments took hold in Germany and Japan helped in part by the Great Depression, for it was feared that the empire could not survive a simultaneous attack by both nations  The issue of the empire's security was a serious concern in Britain, as it was vital to the British economy In 1919, the frustrations caused by delays to Irish home rule led the MPs of Sinn Féin, a pro-independence party that had won a majority of the Irish seats in the 1918 British general election, to establish an independent parliament in Dublin, at which Irish independence was declared  The Irish Republican Army simultaneously began a guerrilla war against the British administration  The Irish War of Independence ended in 1921 with a stalemate and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating the Irish Free State, a Dominion within the British Empire, with effective internal independence but still constitutionally linked with the British Crown  Northern Ireland, consisting of six of the 32 Irish counties which had been established as a devolved region under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, immediately exercised its option under the treaty to retain its existing status within the United Kingdom 

A similar struggle began in India when the Government of India Act 1919 failed to satisfy the demand for independence  Concerns over communist and foreign plots following the Ghadar conspiracy ensured that war-time strictures were renewed by the Rowlatt Acts  This led to tension, particularly in the Punjab region, where repressive measures culminated in the Amritsar Massacre  In Britain, public opinion was divided over the morality of the massacre, between those who saw it as having saved India from anarchy, and those who viewed it with revulsion  The non-cooperation movement was called off in March 1922 following the Chauri Chaura incident, and discontent continued to simmer for the next 25 years In 1922, Egypt, which had been declared a British protectorate at the outbreak of the First World War, was granted formal independence, though it continued to be a British client state until 1954  British troops remained stationed in Egypt until the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936, under which it was agreed that the troops would withdraw but continue to occupy and defend the Suez Canal zone  In return, Egypt was assisted in joining the League of Nations  Iraq, a British mandate since 1920, gained membership of the League in its own right after achieving independence from Britain in 1932  In Palestine, Britain was presented with the problem of mediating between the Arabs and increasing numbers of Jews  The Balfour Declaration, which had been incorporated into the terms of the mandate, stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in Palestine, and Jewish immigration allowed up to a limit that would be determined by the mandatory power  This led to increasing conflict with the Arab population, who openly revolted in 1936  As the threat of war with Germany increased during the 1930s, Britain judged the support of Arabs as more important than the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and shifted to a pro-Arab stance, limiting Jewish immigration and in turn triggering a Jewish insurgency The right of the Dominions to set their own foreign policy, independent of Britain, was recognised at the 1923 Imperial Conference  Britain's request for military assistance from the Dominions at the outbreak of the Chanak Crisis the previous year had been turned down by Canada and South Africa, and Canada had refused to be bound by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne  After pressure from the Irish Free State and South Africa, the 1926 Imperial Conference issued the Balfour Declaration of 1926, declaring the Dominions to be "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another" within a "British Commonwealth of Nations"  This declaration was given legal substance under the 1931 Statute of Westminster  The parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland were now independent of British legislative control, they could nullify British laws and Britain could no longer pass laws for them without their consent  Newfoundland reverted to colonial status in 1933, suffering from financial difficulties during the Great Depression  In 1937 the Irish Free State introduced a republican constitution renaming itself Ireland 

Second World War
Britain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939 included the Crown colonies and India but did not automatically commit the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa  All soon declared war on Germany  While Britain continued to regard Ireland as still within the British Commonwealth, Ireland chose to remain legally neutral throughout the war After the Fall of France in June 1940, Britain and the empire stood alone against Germany, until the German invasion of Greece on 7 April 1941  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill successfully lobbied President Franklin D  Roosevelt for military aid from the United States, but Roosevelt was not yet ready to ask Congress to commit the country to war  In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt met and signed the Atlantic Charter, which included the statement that "the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live" should be respected  This wording was ambiguous as to whether it referred to European countries invaded by Germany and Italy, or the peoples colonised by European nations, and would later be interpreted differently by the British, Americans, and nationalist movements For Churchill, the entry of the United States into the war was the "greatest joy"  He felt that Britain was now assured of victory, but failed to recognise that the "many disasters, immeasurable costs and tribulations [which he knew] lay ahead" in December 1941 would have permanent consequences for the future of the empire  The manner in which British forces were rapidly defeated in the Far East irreversibly harmed Britain's standing and prestige as an imperial power, including, particularly, the Fall of Singapore, which had previously been hailed as an impregnable fortress and the eastern equivalent of Gibraltar  The realisation that Britain could not defend its entire empire pushed Australia and New Zealand, which now appeared threatened by Japanese forces, into closer ties with the United States and, ultimately, the 1951 ANZUS Pact  The war weakened the empire in other ways: undermining Britain's control of politics in India, inflicting long-term economic damage, and irrevocably changing geopolitics by pushing the Soviet Union and the United States to the centre of the global stage 

Decolonisation and decline (1945–1997)
Though Britain and the empire emerged victorious from the Second World War, the effects of the conflict were profound, both at home and abroad  Much of Europe, a continent that had dominated the world for several centuries, was in ruins, and host to the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union, who now held the balance of global power  Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a US$4 33 billion loan from the United States, the last installment of which was repaid in 2006  At the same time, anti-colonial movements were on the rise in the colonies of European nations  The situation was complicated further by the increasing Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union  In principle, both nations were opposed to European colonialism  In practice, American anti-communism prevailed over anti-imperialism, and therefore the United States supported the continued existence of the British Empire to keep Communist expansion in check  At first, British politicians believed it would be possible to maintain Britain's role as a world power at the head of a re-imagined Commonwealth, but by 1960 they were forced to recognise that there was an irresistible "wind of change" blowing  Their priorities changed to maintaining an extensive zone of British influence and ensuring that stable, non-Communist governments were established in former colonies  In this context, while other European powers such as France and Portugal waged costly and unsuccessful wars to keep their empires intact, Britain generally adopted a policy of peaceful disengagement from its colonies, although violence occurred in Malaya, Kenya and Palestine  Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK itself fell from 700 million to 5 million, 3 million of whom were in Hong Kong 

Initial disengagement
The pro-decolonisation Labour government, elected at the 1945 general election and led by Clement Attlee, moved quickly to tackle the most pressing issue facing the empire: Indian independence  India's two major political parties—the Indian National Congress (led by Mahatma Gandhi) and the Muslim League (led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah)—had been campaigning for independence for decades, but disagreed as to how it should be implemented  Congress favoured a unified secular Indian state, whereas the League, fearing domination by the Hindu majority, desired a separate Islamic state for Muslim-majority regions  Increasing civil unrest and the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy during 1946 led Attlee to promise independence no later than 30 June 1948  When the urgency of the situation and risk of civil war became apparent, the newly appointed (and last) Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, hastily brought forward the date to 15 August 1947  The borders drawn by the British to broadly partition India into Hindu and Muslim areas left tens of millions as minorities in the newly independent states of India and Pakistan  Millions of Muslims crossed from India to Pakistan and Hindus vice versa, and violence between the two communities cost hundreds of thousands of lives  Burma, which had been administered as part of British India until 1937, and Sri Lanka gained their independence the following year in 1948  India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka became members of the Commonwealth, while Burma chose not to join The British Mandate in Palestine, where an Arab majority lived alongside a Jewish minority, presented the British with a similar problem to that of India  The matter was complicated by large numbers of Jewish refugees seeking to be admitted to Palestine following the Holocaust, while Arabs were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state  Frustrated by the intractability of the problem, attacks by Jewish paramilitary organisations and the increasing cost of maintaining its military presence, Britain announced in 1947 that it would withdraw in 1948 and leave the matter to the United Nations to solve  The UN General Assembly subsequently voted for a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state  It was immediately followed by the outbreak of a civil war between the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, and British forces withdrew amid the fighting  The British Mandate for Palestine officially terminated at midnight on 15 May 1948 as the State of Israel declared independence and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, during which the territory of the former Mandate was partitioned between Israel and the surrounding Arab states  Amid the fighting, British forces continued to withdraw from Israel, with the last British troops departing from Haifa on 30 June 1948 Following the surrender of Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Malaya turned their attention towards the British, who had moved to quickly retake control of the colony, valuing it as a source of rubber and tin  The fact that the guerrillas were primarily Malaysian Chinese Communists meant that the British attempt to quell the uprising was supported by the Muslim Malay majority, on the understanding that once the insurgency had been quelled, independence would be granted  The Malayan Emergency, as it was called, began in 1948 and lasted until 1960, but by 1957, Britain felt confident enough to grant independence to the Federation of Malaya within the Commonwealth  In 1963, the 11 states of the federation together with Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo joined to form Malaysia, but in 1965 Chinese-majority Singapore was expelled from the union following tensions between the Malay and Chinese populations and became an independent city-state  Brunei, which had been a British protectorate since 1888, declined to join the union 

Suez and its aftermath
In the 1951 general election, the Conservative Party returned to power in Britain under the leadership of Winston Churchill  Churchill and the Conservatives believed that Britain's position as a world power relied on the continued existence of the empire, with the base at the Suez Canal allowing Britain to maintain its pre-eminent position in the Middle East in spite of the loss of India  Churchill could not ignore Gamal Abdul Nasser's new revolutionary government of Egypt that had taken power in 1952, and the following year it was agreed that British troops would withdraw from the Suez Canal zone and that Sudan would be granted self-determination by 1955, with independence to follow  Sudan was granted independence on 1 January 1956 In July 1956, Nasser unilaterally nationalised the Suez Canal  The response of Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, was to collude with France to engineer an Israeli attack on Egypt that would give Britain and France an excuse to intervene militarily and retake the canal  Eden infuriated US President Dwight D  Eisenhower by his lack of consultation, and Eisenhower refused to back the invasion  Another of Eisenhower's concerns was the possibility of a wider war with the Soviet Union after it threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side  Eisenhower applied financial leverage by threatening to sell US reserves of the British pound and thereby precipitate a collapse of the British currency  Though the invasion force was militarily successful in its objectives, UN intervention and US pressure forced Britain into a humiliating withdrawal of its forces, and Eden resigned The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain's limitations to the world and confirmed Britain's decline on the world stage and its end as a first-rate power, demonstrating that henceforth it could no longer act without at least the acquiescence, if not the full support, of the United States  The events at Suez wounded British national pride, leading one Member of Parliament (MP) to describe it as "Britain's Waterloo" and another to suggest that the country had become an "American satellite"  Margaret Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen Britain's political leaders after Suez where they "went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing", from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982 While the Suez Crisis caused British power in the Middle East to weaken, it did not collapse  Britain again deployed its armed forces to the region, intervening in Oman (1957), Jordan (1958) and Kuwait (1961), though on these occasions with American approval, as the new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's foreign policy was to remain firmly aligned with the United States  Although Britain granted Kuwait independence in 1961, it continued to maintain a military presence in the Middle East for another decade  On 16 January 1968, a few weeks after the devaluation of the pound, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Defence Secretary Denis Healey announced that British Armed Forces troops would be withdrawn from major military bases East of Suez, which included the ones in the Middle East, and primarily from Malaysia and Singapore by the end of 1971, instead of 1975 as earlier planned  By that time over 50,000 British military personnel were still stationed in the Far East, including 30,000 in Singapore  The British granted independence to the Maldives in 1965 but continued to station a garrison there until 1976, withdrew from Aden in 1967, and granted independence to Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in 1971 

Wind of change
Macmillan gave a speech in Cape Town, South Africa in February 1960 where he spoke of "the wind of change blowing through this continent"  Macmillan wished to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria, and under his premiership decolonisation proceeded rapidly  To the three colonies that had been granted independence in the 1950s—Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya—were added nearly ten times that number during the 1960s  Owing to the rapid pace of decolonisation during this period, the cabinet post of Secretary of State for the Colonies was abolished in 1966, along with the Colonial Office, which merged with the Commonwealth Relations Office to form the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) in October 1968 Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for self-governing Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968  British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process  Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight-year Mau Mau uprising, in which tens of thousands of suspected rebels were interned by the colonial government in detention camps  Throughout the 1960s, the British government took a "No independence until majority rule" policy towards decolonising the empire, leading the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia to enact the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, resulting in a civil war that lasted until the British-mediated Lancaster House Agreement of 1979  The agreement saw the British Empire temporarily re-establish the Colony of Southern Rhodesia from 1979 to 1980 as a transitionary government to a majority-rule Republic of Zimbabwe  This was the last British possession in Africa  
In Cyprus, a guerrilla war waged by the Greek Cypriot organisation EOKA against British rule, was ended in 1959 by the London and Zürich Agreements, which resulted in Cyprus being granted independence in 1960  The UK retained the military bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia as sovereign base areas  The Mediterranean colony of Malta was amicably granted independence from the UK in 1964 and became the country of Malta, though the idea had been raised in 1955 of integration with Britain Most of the UK's Caribbean territories achieved independence after the departure in 1961 and 1962 of Jamaica and Trinidad from the West Indies Federation, established in 1958 in an attempt to unite the British Caribbean colonies under one government, but which collapsed following the loss of its two largest members  Jamaica attained independence in 1962, as did Trinidad and Tobago  Barbados achieved independence in 1966 and the remainder of the eastern Caribbean islands, including the Bahamas, in the 1970s and 1980s, but Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands opted to revert to British rule after they had already started on the path to independence  The British Virgin Islands, The Cayman Islands and Montserrat opted to retain ties with Britain, while Guyana achieved independence in 1966  Britain's last colony on the American mainland, British Honduras, became a self-governing colony in 1964 and was renamed Belize in 1973, achieving full independence in 1981  A dispute with Guatemala over claims to Belize was left unresolved British Overseas Territories in the Pacific acquired independence in the 1970s beginning with Fiji in 1970 and ending with Vanuatu in 1980  Vanuatu's independence was delayed because of political conflict between English and French-speaking communities, as the islands had been jointly administered as a condominium with France  Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu became Commonwealth realms 

End of empire
By 1981, aside from a scattering of islands and outposts, the process of decolonisation that had begun after the Second World War was largely complete  In 1982, Britain's resolve in defending its remaining overseas territories was tested when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, acting on a long-standing claim that dated back to the Spanish Empire  Britain's successful military response to retake the Falkland Islands during the ensuing Falklands War contributed to reversing the downward trend in Britain's status as a world power The 1980s saw Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sever their final constitutional links with Britain  Although granted legislative independence by the Statute of Westminster 1931, vestigial constitutional links had remained in place  The British Parliament retained the power to amend key Canadian constitutional statutes, meaning that effectively an act of the British Parliament was required to make certain changes to the Canadian Constitution  The British Parliament had the power to pass laws extending to Canada at Canadian request  Although no longer able to pass any laws that would apply as Australian Commonwealth law, the British Parliament retained the power to legislate for the individual Australian states  With regard to New Zealand, the British Parliament retained the power to pass legislation applying to New Zealand with the New Zealand Parliament's consent  In 1982, the last legal link between Canada and Britain was severed by the Canada Act 1982, which was passed by the British parliament, formally patriating the Canadian Constitution  The act ended the need for British involvement in changes to the Canadian constitution  Similarly, the Australia Act 1986 (effective 3 March 1986) severed the constitutional link between Britain and the Australian states, while New Zealand's Constitution Act 1986 (effective 1 January 1987) reformed the constitution of New Zealand to sever its constitutional link with Britain On 1 January 1984, Brunei, Britain's last remaining Asian protectorate, was granted independence  Independence had been delayed due to the opposition of the Sultan, who had preferred British protection In September 1982 the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, travelled to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese Communist government, on the future of Britain's last major and most populous overseas territory, Hong Kong  Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking and 1860 Convention of Peking, Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula had been respectively ceded to Britain in perpetuity, but the majority of the colony consisted of the New Territories, which had been acquired under a 99-year lease in 1898, due to expire in 1997  Thatcher, seeing parallels with the Falkland Islands, initially wished to hold Hong Kong and proposed British administration with Chinese sovereignty, though this was rejected by China  A deal was reached in 1984—under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong would become a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China  The handover ceremony in 1997 marked for many, including King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, who was in attendance, "the end of Empire", though many British territories that are remnants of the empire still remain 

Legacy
Britain retains sovereignty over 14 territories outside the British Isles  In 1983, the British Nationality Act 1981 renamed the existing Crown Colonies as "British Dependent Territories", and in 2002 they were renamed the British Overseas Territories  Most former British colonies and protectorates are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of equal members, comprising a population of around 2 2 billion people  The United Kingdom and 14 other countries, all collectively known as the Commonwealth realms, voluntarily continue to share the same person—King Charles III—as their respective head of state  These 15 nations are distinct and equal legal entities: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu Decades, and in some cases centuries, of British rule and emigration have left their mark on the independent nations that rose from the British Empire  The empire established the use of the English language in regions around the world  Today it is the primary language of up to 460 million people and is spoken by about 1 5 billion as a first, second or foreign language  Individual and team sports developed in Britain, particularly football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf were exported  British missionaries who travelled around the globe often in advance of soldiers and civil servants spread Protestantism (including Anglicanism) to all continents  The British Empire provided refuge for religiously persecuted continental Europeans for hundreds of years 

Political boundaries drawn by the British did not always reflect homogeneous ethnicities or religions, contributing to conflicts in formerly colonised areas  The British Empire was responsible for large migrations of peoples  Millions left the British Isles, with the founding settler colonist populations of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand coming mainly from Britain and Ireland  Tensions remain between the white settler populations of these countries and their indigenous minorities, and between white settler minorities and indigenous majorities in South Africa and Zimbabwe  Settlers in Ireland from Great Britain have left their mark in the form of divided nationalist and unionist communities in Northern Ireland  Millions of people moved to and from British colonies, with large numbers of Overseas Indian people emigrating to other parts of the empire, such as Malaysia and Fiji, and Overseas Chinese people to Malaysia, Singapore and the Caribbean  The demographics of the United Kingdom itself were changed after the Second World War owing to immigration to Britain from its former colonies In the 19th century, innovation in Britain led to revolutionary changes in manufacturing, the development of factory systems, and the growth of transportation by railway and steamship  British colonial architecture, such as in churches, railway stations and government buildings, can be seen in many cities that were once part of the British Empire  The British choice of system of measurement, the imperial system, continues to be used in some countries in various ways  The convention of driving on the left-hand side of the road has been retained in much of the former empire The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy has served as the template for the governments for many former colonies, and English common law for legal systems  International commercial contracts are often based on English common law  The British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council still serves as the highest court of appeal for twelve former colonies Historians' approaches to understanding the British Empire are diverse and evolving  Two key sites of debate over recent decades have been the impact of post-colonial studies, which seek to critically re-evaluate the history of imperialism, and the continued relevance of historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, whose work greatly influenced imperial historiography during the 1950s and 1960s  In addition, differing assessments of the empire's legacy remain relevant to debates over recent history and politics, such as the Anglo-American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Britain's role and identity in the contemporary world Historians such as Caroline Elkins have argued against perceptions of the British Empire as a primarily liberalising and modernising enterprise, criticising its widespread use of violence and emergency laws to maintain power  Common criticisms of the empire include the use of detention camps in its colonies, massacres of indigenous peoples, and famine-response policies  Some scholars, including Amartya Sen, assert that British policies worsened the famines in India that killed millions during British rule  Conversely, historians such as Niall Ferguson say that the economic and institutional development the British Empire brought resulted in a net benefit to its colonies  Other historians treat its legacy as varied and ambiguous  Public attitudes towards the empire within Britain remain somewhat positive 

See also
Notes
Context 3: Passage 1:
Hans Modrow
Hans Modrow (German pronunciation: [ˈhans ˈmoːdʁo]; 27 January 1928 – 10 February 2023) was a German politician best known as the last communist premier of East Germany 
Taking office in the middle of the Peaceful Revolution, he was the de facto leader of the country for much of the winter of 1989 and 1990  He was a transitional figure, paving the way to the first and only free elections in East Germany and including many opposition politicians in his cabinet  
After the end of Communist rule and reunification of Germany, he was convicted of electoral fraud and perjury by the Dresden District Court in 1995, on the basis that he had been the SED official nominally in charge of the electoral process  He was later convicted of the first charge and was given a nine-month suspended sentence  One of the few high-ranking former SED officials to not have been expelled, he was the honorary chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and was the president of the "council of elders" of the Left Party from 2007 

Early life and education
Modrow was born on 27 January 1928 in Jasenitz, Province of Pomerania, German Reich, now Jasienica, part of the town of Police in Poland  As a child he was a Hitler Youth leader and attended a Volksschule  He trained as a machinist from 1942 to 1945 when he was filled with intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom he deemed as subhumans, inferior to Germans physically and morally  For six months during the Allied bombing of Stettin he served as a volunteer firefighter  He later served briefly in the Volkssturm in January 1945, and was subsequently captured as a prisoner of war by the Soviet Red Army in Stralsund in May 1945  He and other German prisoners were sent to a farm in Hinterpommern to work  Upon arrival, his backpack was stolen, making him begin to rethink the Germans' so-called camaraderie  Days later, he was appointed a driver to a Soviet captain, who asked him about Heinrich Heine, a German poet  Modrow had never heard of him and felt embarrassed that the people he thought of as "subhumans" knew more about German culture than he  Transported to a POW camp near Moscow, he joined a National Committee for a Free Germany anti-fascist school run by future SED Politburo member Alfred Neumann for Wehrmacht members and received training in Marxism-Leninism, which he embraced  Upon release in 1949 he worked as a machinist for LEW Hennigsdorf  That same year he joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) From 1949 to 1961, Modrow worked in various functions for the Free German Youth (FDJ) in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Berlin and in 1952 and 1953 studied at the Komsomol college in Moscow  In 1953, he attended the state funeral of Joseph Stalin  After Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress condemning Stalin and beginning de-Stalinization, Modrow claimed to have complained to his former teacher Neumann "Comrade, this is unacceptable — you are accusing us of having learned Stalin off by heart, but I never had the inclination to do this myself, you asked us to!" From 1953 to 1961, he served as an FDJ functionary in East Berlin  From 1954 to 1957, he studied at the SED's Karl Marx school in Berlin, graduating as a social scientist  In 1959 to 1961 he studied at the University of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst and obtained the degree of graduate economist  He gained his doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1966  West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) kept Modrow under observation from 1958 to 2013 

Communist party career
Modrow had a long political career in East Germany, serving as a member of the Volkskammer from 1957 to 1990 and in the SED's Central Committee (ZK) from 1967 to 1989, having previously been a candidate for the ZK from 1958 to 1967  From 1961 to 1967 he was first secretary of the district administration of the SED in Berlin-Köpenick and secretary for agitation and propaganda from 1967 to 1971 in the SED's district leadership in Berlin  During this time he was involved in the formation of the Union Berlin football club, which is based in the Köpenick district  From 1971 to 1973 he worked as the head of the SED's department of agitation  In 1975 he was awarded the GDR's Patriotic Order of Merit in gold and received the award of the Order of Karl Marx in 1978 From 1973 onward, he was the SED's first secretary in Dresden, East Germany's third-largest city  He was prevented from rising any further than a local party boss, largely because he was one of the few SED leaders who dared to publicly criticise longtime SED chief Erich Honecker  He developed some important contacts with the Soviet Union, including eventual Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev  Modrow initially supported Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms  In early 1987, Gorbachev and the KGB explored the possibility of installing Modrow as Honecker's successor  From 1988 to 1989, the Stasi, under the orders of Honecker and Erich Mielke, conducted a massive surveillance operation against Modrow with the intention of gathering enough evidence to convict him of high treason 

Peaceful Revolution and premiership
During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, Modrow ordered thousands of Volkspolizei, Stasi, Combat Groups of the Working Class, and National People's Army troops to crush a demonstration at the Dresden Hauptbahnhof on 4–5 October  Some 1,300 people were arrested  In a top secret and encrypted telex to Honecker on 9 October, Modrow reported: "With the determined commitment of the comrades of the security organs, anti-state terrorist riots were suppressed" When Honecker was toppled on 18 October, Gorbachev hoped that Modrow would become the new leader of the SED  Egon Krenz was selected instead  He became premier following the resignation of Willi Stoph on 13 November, four days after the Berlin Wall fell  The SED formally abandoned power on 1 December  Krenz resigned two days later, on 3 December  Since the premiership was the highest state post in East Germany, Modrow became the de facto leader of the country To defeat the opposition's demand for the complete dissolution of the Stasi, it was renamed as the "Office for National Security" (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit – AfNS) on 17 November 1989  Modrow's attempt to re-brand it further as the "Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the GDR" (Verfassungsschutz der DDR) failed due to pressure from the public and the opposition parties and the AfNS was dissolved on 13 January 1990  The Modrow government gave orders to destroy incriminating Stasi files On 7 December 1989, Modrow accepted the proposal of the East German Round Table opposition groups to hold free elections within six months  Modrow and the Round Table agreed on 28 January to bring the elections forward to 18 March  By this time, the SED had added "Party of Democratic Socialism" to its name; the SED portion was dropped altogether in February  Some of the Round Table parties strove for a "third way" model of democratic socialism and therefore agreed with Modrow to slow down or block a reunification with capitalist West Germany  As the SED-PDS regime grew weaker, Modrow on 1 February 1990 proposed a slow, three-stage process that would create a neutral German confederation and continued to oppose "rapid" reunification  The collapse of the East German state and economy in early 1990 and the approaching East German free elections allowed Helmut Kohl's government in Bonn to disregard Modrow's demand for neutrality From 5 February 1990 on, Modrow included eight representatives of opposition parties and civil liberties groups as ministers without portfolio in his cabinet  On 13 February 1990, Modrow met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, asking for an accommodation loan of 15 billion DM, which was rejected by Kohl  Modrow remained premier until the 18 March 1990 elections  The PDS expelled Honecker, Krenz, and other Communist-era leaders in February 1990 

Criminal sentence
On 27 May 1993, the Dresden District Court found Modrow guilty of electoral fraud committed in the Dresden municipal elections in May 1989, specifically, understating the percentage of voters who refused to vote for the official slate  The judge declined to impose a prison sentence or a fine  The Dresden District Court revoked the decision in August 1995 and Modrow was sentenced to nine months on probation  Modrow did not directly deny the charges, but argued that the trial was politically motivated and that the court lacked jurisdiction for crimes committed in East Germany   "We were all members of a political system," he said, speaking to the court in Dresden   "Some perhaps had the good fortune not to come into contact with manipulation, while others could not or were not allowed to turn away "

Later life and death
After German reunification, Modrow served as a member of the Bundestag (1990–1994) and of the European Parliament (1999–2004)  After leaving office, he wrote a number of books on his political experiences, his continued Marxist political views, and his disappointment at the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc  Although a supporter of Gorbachev's reforms in the 1980s, after the fall of Communism he criticised them for weakening the Eastern Bloc's economy  In 2006, he suggested both West Germany and East Germany were responsible for the killings of East Germans by the communist regime at the Berlin Wall, and later defended the construction of the wall as a necessary measure to prevent a war over West Berlin  He also called East Germany an "effective democracy"  He was criticised for maintaining contacts with Neo-Stalinist groups  In 2018, he sued the Federal Intelligence Service for access to West German intelligence files on him from the Cold War  In 2019 he criticised the enlargement of NATO, which he also opposed reunified Germany's membership in  Modrow died on 10 February 2023, aged 95  He was buried at Dorotheenstadt Cemetery 

Citations
Passage 2:
Mátyás Szűrös
Mátyás Szűrös (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmaːcaːʃ ˈsyːrøʃ]; born 11 September 1933 in Püspökladány) is a Hungarian politician  He served as provisional president of the Republic from 23 October 1989 to 2 May 1990  His presidency occurred during Hungary's transition from Communism to democratic government 

Biography
Szűrös served as Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary from March 1989 to May 1990  In the fall of 1989, as part of an agreement between the Communists and the opposition to establish multiparty democracy, the 1949 Constitution was almost completely rewritten to remove its Communist character  The Presidential Council, the country's Communist-era collective presidency, was dissolved  Under the Constitution, Szűrös became provisional president until the election  Soon after taking office on 23 October he made the official proclamation that Hungary had removed the "People's Republic" from its constitutional name and was now the "Republic of Hungary "He remained in parliament until 2002 as a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party, often voting against the party consensus  He quit the party, in 2002, joined the newly established New Left Party and ran as their prime minister candidate at the parliamentary elections, but the party only got 0 1% of the popular vote  In 2003, he joined the Social Democratic Party and was later elected chairman of the party  He resigned his position in 2005 
Passage 3:
Friedrich Ebert Foundation
The Friedrich Ebert Foundation (German: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e V ; Abbreviation: FES) is a German political party foundation associated with, but independent from, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)  Established in 1925 as the political legacy of Friedrich Ebert, Germany's first democratically elected President, it is the largest and oldest of the German party-associated foundations  It is headquartered in Bonn and Berlin, and has offices and projects in over 100 countries  It is Germany's oldest organisation to promote democracy, political education, and promote students of outstanding intellectual abilities and personality 

History
The FES was named after Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), the Social Democratic President of Germany, 1919–1925  In his will, he specified that the proceeds from donations at his funeral should be used to create a foundation   The SPD chairman at the time, Konrad Ludwig, was given the responsibility of building this foundation, which he did a few days after Ebert's death in 1925  The main concern of the foundation was to work against discrimination of workers in the area of education: "The Friedrich Ebert Foundation pursues the goal of giving young, empowered proletarians government aid to fund an education at state-accredited institutions  As a basic principle, only those people who have a recommendation from the party organisation will receive funding " (SPD Yearbook 1926) By the end of 1931, 295 students had been funded with over 52,000 marks  At this point the funding of the foundation fell through, as a result of the Great Depression  The FES was a section of the Social Democratic Education and Culture Organisation, and was banned along with the party itself in 1933 by the Nazis 
In 1946, the FES was reinstituted at the founding assembly of the Socialist German Student Federation  In 1954, the FES was restructured into a charitable organisation "for the advancement of democratic education"  This established the FES as an independent, self-contained institute  In addition to education programmes, the FES has also worked in the area of development aid since the 1960s  In this effort, it has supported democracy and freedom movements, for instance in the African National Congress (ANC), and played an important role in overcoming dictatorial regimes in Greece, Spain, and Portugal   Thus it was not a coincidence that the Socialist Party of Portugal was formed in an FES school in the German town of Bad Münstereifel 
The German state did subsidize the work of the foundation with 170 Million Euros in 2018 

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Academic Foundation
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Academic Foundation (FES) is one of thirteen state-funded organizations for the promotion of young talents (Begabtenförderwerke) in Germany  Less than 1% of German students achieve a scholarship at one of the thirteen organizations (i e  FES, Studienstiftung, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Hanns Seidel Foundation, Heinrich Böll Foundation, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Cusanuswerk, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Fund)  It is financially funded and subsidized by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and supports students with outstanding academical and political achievements  Awards are granted after a multi-stage selection process and are based on grades, letters of recommendation, letters of motivation, political and social engagement as well as personality and character  Until today it has sponsored more than 12,000 grantees  Over 90% of those sponsored graduate with honours   In 2005, there were 1,731 students in the programme, of which 51% were women   
Beyond the financial support, grantees also receive so-called ideational support, which comes from opportunities to attend political seminars, conferences, and other activities, which can be important job qualifications  Students are assigned advisors who work with them for the length of their grants 
Each year, the grantees vote for a board during the nationwide conference at the Gustav Stresemann Institute in Bonn   This board serves for the next full year as the representation of grantees for dialog with the foundation   The FES maintains a website ([1] www fes-stip de) for networking among grantees, which includes a wide variety of mailing lists, services, and communications tools 
Since 1971, foreign students have also had the opportunity to receive grants through solidarity funds   Preference for these grants goes to people who are persecuted on political, racial or religious grounds   Funding for this program comes exclusively from donations from current and former grantees   The program have helped over 1,000 students  Currently there are 31 students who are in the solidarity programme  Two grantees from this programme are chosen every year at the conference in Bonn to work on the steering committee of the fund 

Further activities
Today, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's main goals are to promote political and societal education of people from all walks of life in the spirit of democracy and pluralism, to enable young people the opportunity to study and do research through grants, and to work toward international understanding and cooperation 
The foundation employs several hundred employees in their offices in Bonn and Berlin, as well as in 14 regional offices and an academy within Germany and in over 100 foreign agencies   It is financed mainly through grants from the federal budget and the budgets of the various Bundesländer 
The FES had its own conference center on the Venusberg in Bonn for these activities until its closure in 2009   
The historical research center of the foundation also contains the Archive of Social Democracy and its libraries in Bonn and at the Karl Marx House in Trier   This is one of the largest collections of documents on social history and the history of the workers movement 
Since 1982, the foundation has awarded a prize of 10,000 euro called Das politische Buch ("The Political Book") to promote noteworthy political books  The prize serves to remind people of the Nazi book burnings of May 10, 1933 

Controversy
In 2017, Friedrich Ebert Foundation was attacked by a group dubbed “Pawn Storm”, the same cyber spy group that targeted that year's campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron; the group used email phishing tricks and attempted to install malware at the foundation In 2022, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation was barred from working in Russia 

Leadership
1953–1970: Gerhard Weisser
1970–1983: Alfred Nau
1983–1987: Heinz Kühn
1987–2003: Holger Börner (chairman laureate from 2003 until his death in 2006)
2003–2010: Anke Fuchs
2010–2012: Peter Struck
2013–2020: Kurt Beck and Dieter Schulte (interim since Struck's death)
2020–present: Martin Schulz

See also
Konrad Adenauer Foundation (CDU)
Hanns Seidel Foundation (CSU)
Friedrich Naumann Foundation für die Freiheit (FDP)
Heinrich Böll Foundation (Grüne)
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Die Linke)
Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung (AfD)
Passage 4:
LSV Berlin
LSV Berlin was a short-lived German association football club from the city of Berlin  It served as the sports club for Luftwaffe (German air force) personnel in the city during World War II and disappeared with the end of the conflict 

History
The formation of military-based sports and football clubs was common under the Third Reich and they took part in the country's established football competition alongside traditional civilian clubs 
German football was re-organized under the Reich's politically motivated sports policies in 1933 into sixteen top-flight regional divisions  Luftwaffensportverein Berlin was a latecomer to the Gauliga Berlin-Brandenburg, joining the top-flight division for the 1943–44 season and earning a 2nd-place result As the tide of the war turned against Germany and Allied forces invaded the country, most military football sides were disbanded  LSV Berlin was lost in September 1944, before the start of the 1944–45 season, its place in the Oberliga being taken by SG OrPo Berlin 

Stadium
LSV played its home matches in Steitstaße Spandau or Mommsenstadion (capacity 37,570) 
Passage 5:
Gleiwitz incident
The Gleiwitz incident (German: Überfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz; Polish: Prowokacja gliwicka) was a false flag attack on the radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz (then Germany and now Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany on the night of 31 August 1939  Along with some two dozen similar incidents, the attack was manufactured by Germany as a casus belli to justify the invasion of Poland  Prior to the invasion, Adolf Hitler gave a radio address condemning the acts and announcing German plans to attack Poland, which began the next morning  Despite the German government using the attack as a justification to go to war with Poland, the Gleiwitz assailants were not Polish but were German SS officers wearing Polish uniforms  
During his declaration of war, Hitler did not mention the Gleiwitz incident but grouped all provocations staged by the SS as an alleged "Polish assault" on Germany  The Gleiwitz incident is the best-known action of Operation Himmler, a series of special operations undertaken by the Schutzstaffel (SS) to serve German propaganda at the outbreak of war  The operation was intended to create the appearance of a Polish aggression against Germany to justify the invasion of Poland  On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the European theatre of World War II had begun  Manufactured evidence for the Gleiwitz attack by the SS was provided by the German SS officer Alfred Naujocks in 1945 

Events at Gleiwitz
Much of what is known about the Gleiwitz incident comes from the affidavit of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials  In his testimony, he stated that he organised the incident under orders from Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo  On the night of 31 August, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message)   The operation was named "Grossmutter gestorben" (Grandmother died)  The operation was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of Polish anti-German saboteurs  The operation was planned and carried out from the Sławięcice Palace (Schloss Slawentzitz) To make the attack seem more convincing, the Gestapo executed Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried Upper Silesian Catholic farmer, known for sympathising with the Poles  He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo and dressed to look like a saboteur, then rendered unconscious by an injection of drugs, then killed by gunshot wounds  Honiok was left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station  His corpse was then presented to the police and press as proof of the attack  Several prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were drugged, shot dead on the site and their faces disfigured to make identification impossible  The Germans referred to them by the code phrase "Konserve" (canned goods)  Some sources incorrectly refer to the incident as Operation Canned Goods In an oral testimony at the trials, Erwin von Lahousen stated that his division of the Abwehr was one of two that were given the task of providing Polish Army uniforms, equipment and identification cards; he was later told by Wilhelm Canaris that people from concentration camps had been disguised in these uniforms and ordered to attack the radio stations Oskar Schindler, who is credited with later saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, played a role in supplying the Polish uniforms and weapons used in the operation as an agent for the Abwehr 

Context
The Gleiwitz incident was a part of a larger operation carried out by Abwehr and SS forces  Other orchestrated incidents were conducted along the Polish–German border at the same time as the Gleiwitz attack, such as a house burning in the Polish Corridor and spurious propaganda  The project was called Operation Himmler and comprised incidents intended to give the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany  German newspapers and politicians, including Adolf Hitler, had made accusations against Polish authorities for months before the 1939 invasion of organising or tolerating violent ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans living in Poland  On 1 September, the day following the Gleiwitz attack, Germany launched Fall Weiss (Case White), the strategic plan for the invasion of Poland, which precipitated World War II in Europe  Hitler cited the border incidents in a speech in the Reichstag on the same day, with three of them called very serious, as justification for his invasion of Poland  Hitler had told his generals on 22 August, "I will provide a propagandistic casus belli  Its credibility doesn't matter  The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth" 

International reactions
American correspondents were summoned to the scene the next day but no neutral parties were allowed to investigate the incident in detail and the international public was skeptical of the German version of the incident 

In popular culture
There have been several adaptations of the incident in cinema  Der Fall Gleiwitz (1961), directed by Gerhard Klein for DEFA studios (The Gleiwitz Case; English subtitles), is an East German film that reconstructs the events Operacja Himmler (1979) is a Polish film that covers the events Both Die Blechtrommel (1979), directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil (1985), directed by Jim Goddard, briefly include the incident It was also mentioned in a video game; Codename: Panzers (2004), which stirred up some controversy in Poland where the game was briefly discussed in Polish media as anti-Polish falsification of history, before the issue was cleared up as a case of poor reporting 

See also
1939 in Poland
1939 Tarnow rail station bomb attack
Jablunkov incident
Mukden Incident, a similar false flag operation that started the Japanese invasion of Manchuria
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
Operation Greif
Shelling of Mainila, a similar false flag operation that started the Soviet invasion of Finland
Passage 6:
1990 Polish presidential election
Presidential elections were held in Poland on 25 November 1990, with a second round on 9 December  They were the first direct presidential elections in the history of Poland, and the first free presidential elections since the May Coup of 1926  Before World War II, presidents were elected by the Sejm   From 1952 to 1989—the bulk of the Communist era—the presidency did not exist as a separate institution, and most of its functions were fulfilled by the State Council of Poland, whose chairman was considered the equivalent of a president 
The leader of the Solidarity movement, Lech Wałęsa, won the first round  However, he did not earn over 50% of the vote, which led to a runoff election  Wałęsa faced Polish-Canadian businessman Stanisław Tymiński in the second round, defeating him easily 

Background
Wałęsa was an electrician and union leader with the image of an emotional, shirtsleeves populist  The first non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was very popular and widely considered a front-runner   He appeared as a more respectable and intellectual leader than Wałęsa   but also as more of a compromiser



ground_truth: University of Cambridge

Cambridge

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: When did the country, whose co-official language was used by the director of Group Portrait with a Lady, first attend the Olympics as an independent team?

The following are given passages.
Context 2: Passage 1:
Group Portrait with a Lady
Group Portrait with a Lady (German: Gruppenbild mit Dame) is a 1977 German-French drama film directed by Aleksandar Petrović  It was entered into the 1977 Cannes Film Festival  It is based on the novel of the same name  by German Nobel-Prize winning novelist Heinrich Böll 

Cast
Passage 2:
List of territorial entities where German is an official language
The following is a list of the countries and territories where German is an official language (also known as the Germanosphere)  It includes countries that have German as (one of) their nationwide official language(s), as well as dependent territories with German as a co-official language 

German as an official language
German is the official language of six countries, all of which lie in central and western Europe  These countries (with the addition of South Tyrol of Italy) also form the Council for German Orthography and are referred to as the German Sprachraum (German language area)  Since 2004, Meetings of German-speaking countries have been held annually with six participants: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland:

Subdivisions of countries
While not official at the national level, German is a co-official language in subdivisions of the countries listed below  In each of these regions, German is an official language on the administrative level 

Other legal statuses
There are other political entities (countries as well as dependent entities) which acknowledge other legal statuses for the German language or one of its dialects  While these may cover minority rights, support of certain language facilities (schools, media, etc ), and the promotion of cultural protection/heritage, they do not encompass the establishment of German as an "official" language, i e , being required in public offices or administrative texts 
These countries include:

Brazil (German is a statewide cultural language in Espírito Santo and Rio Grande do Sul; Standard German official in 2 municipalities and non-standard German dialects official in 16 others)
Czech Republic (national minority language)
Denmark (minority language in Syddanmark, established with the Bonn-Copenhagen declarations, 1955)
Hungary (national minority language)
Namibia (national language; co-official language 1884–1990)
Poland (national minority language; also auxiliary language in 31 communes)
Romania (national minority language)
Russia (minority language in the Azovo German National District)
Slovakia (regional minority language)Although in France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as "regional languages" according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998, the French government has not yet ratified the treaty, and therefore those varieties have no official legal status Due to the German diaspora, other countries with sizable populations of (mostly bilingual) German L1 speakers include Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Paraguay, as well as the United States  However, in none of these countries does German or a German variety have any legal status 

International institutions
German is an official language of the following international institutions:

International sports associations:
European Handball Federation (EHF)
Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing (FIBT)
Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)
Fédération Internationale de Luge de Course (FIL)
Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS)
International Biathlon Union (IBU)
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)

Notes
See also
German language in the Basic Law
Passage 3:
Aleksandar Petrović (film director)
Aleksandar "Saša" Petrović (14 January 1929 – 20 August 1994) was a Serbian film director  He was one of the major figures of the Yugoslav Black Wave  Two of his films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: Three in 1966 and I Even Met Happy Gypsies (Feather Gatherers) in 1967  The latter (original title "Skupljaci perja") was the first movie that presented the existence of Gypsies in society and everyday life; it was also the first full-feature film where Gypsies spoke their own language, Roma  Most roles were interpreted by real Gypsies; this was their movie  "As a child, I observed them and saw in these people faith and irrationality," said Petrović I Even Met Happy Gypsies won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival; it also received a nomination for a Golden Globe  In 1967 Petrović was a member of the jury at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival One of his most famous films is It Rains in My Village  Petrović found inspiration for this film in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed  The film was nominated for a Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1969 Cannes Film FestivalIn 1973, Petrović was forced to leave his post at the Belgrade Film Academy after being accused of holding anti-communist views by the communist government of Yugoslavia  In late December 1989, he joined the founding committee of the Democratic Party in Serbia, the first opposition anti-communist party in Serbia  He died at age 65 in Paris, France 
Petrović published several hundreds of articles and several books, including Novi film I: 1960-1965 and Novi film II: Crni film (1965-1970) 

Filmography
Passage 4:
Yugoslavia at the Olympics
Teams from Yugoslavia first participated at the Olympic Games in 1920  Previously, several athletes from Croatia, Slovenia and northern Serbian province Vojvodina had competed for Austria or Hungary when those countries were part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary  A small team of two athletes had competed distinctly for Serbia at the 1912 Summer Olympics 
Yugoslavia has been the designation for Olympic teams from three distinct national entities:

Kingdom of Yugoslavia (officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929) from 1920 to 1936
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1948 to the 1992 Winter Olympics
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed as a joint state by only Montenegro and Serbia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, from 1992 to 2002 (due to UN ban allowed to compete as Independent Olympic Participants at the 1992 Summer Olympics and was not allowed to compete at 1994 Winter Olympics)Two of the successor nations (Croatia and Slovenia) began to compete as independent teams at the Olympics starting at the 1992 Winter Games and Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 1992 Summer Games and as of the 2008 Summer Olympics, all six successor nations, former socialist republics, have participated independently  Kosovo, a former autonomous province, made its Olympic debut as an independent national team at the 2016 Summer Olympics 

Timeline of participation
The Yugoslav Olympic Committee was established in Zagreb in 1919 (recognized by the IOC in 1920), before moving to Belgrade in 1927, and it took the place of the Serbian Olympic Committee in the Association of National Olympic Committees  During the dissolution of Yugoslavia, several new committees were formed in the break-away countries  The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Montenegro, participated at the Games since 1996  At the 1996 and 2000 Games, the nation was designated with the same code, Yugoslavia (YUG), as the defunct SFRY  It was rechartered as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 with there being no territorial changes  The Serbia and Montenegro (SCG) designation and code were used at the 2004 Games 

Hosted Games
Yugoslavia has hosted the Games on one occasion 

Medal tables
*Red border colour indicates the games were held on home soil 
*Yugoslavia hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina 

List of medalists
Summer Olympics
As Federal Republic of YugoslaviaAs Independent Olympic Participants

Winter Olympics
See also
List of flag bearers for Yugoslavia at the Olympics
Category:Olympic competitors for Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia at the Paralympics
List of Yugoslav Olympic medalists
Passage 5:
Catalan language
Catalan (; autonym: català, Eastern Catalan: [kətəˈla]), known in the Valencian Community and Carche as Valencian (autonym: valencià), is a Western Romance language  It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of two autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia and the Balearic Islands  It is also an official language in Valencia, where it is called Valencian  It has semi-official status in the Italian comune of Alghero, and it is spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia  The Catalan-speaking territories are often called the Països Catalans or "Catalan Countries" 
The language evolved from Vulgar Latin in the Middle Ages around the eastern Pyrenees  Nineteenth-century Spain saw a Catalan literary revival, culminating in the early 1900s 

Etymology and pronunciation
The word Catalan is derived from the territorial name of Catalonia, itself of disputed etymology  The main theory suggests that Catalunya (Latin Gathia Launia) derives from the name Gothia or Gauthia ("Land of the Goths"), since the origins of the Catalan counts, lords and people were found in the March of Gothia, whence Gothland > Gothlandia > Gothalania > Catalonia theoretically derived In English, the term referring to a person first appears in the mid 14th century as Catelaner, followed in the 15th century as Catellain (from French)  It is attested a language name since at least 1652  The word Catalan can be pronounced in English as ,  or  The endonym is pronounced [kətəˈla] in the Eastern Catalan dialects, and [kataˈla] in the Western dialects  In the Valencian Community and Carche, the term valencià [valensiˈa, ba-] is frequently used instead  Thus, the name "Valencian", although often employed for referring to the varieties specific to the Valencian Community and Carche, is also used by Valencians as a name for the language as a whole, synonymous with "Catalan"  Both uses of the term have their respective entries in the dictionaries by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans  See also status of Valencian below 

History
Middle Ages
By the 9th century, Catalan had evolved from Vulgar Latin on both sides of the eastern end of the Pyrenees, as well as the territories of the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis to the south  From the 8th century onwards the Catalan counts extended their territory southwards and westwards at the expense of the Muslims, bringing their language with them  This process was given definitive impetus with the separation of the County of Barcelona from the Carolingian Empire in 988 In the 11th century, documents written in macaronic Latin begin to show Catalan elements, with texts written almost completely in Romance appearing by 1080  Old Catalan shared many features with Gallo-Romance, diverging from Old Occitan between the 11th and 14th centuries During the 11th and 12th centuries the Catalan rulers expanded southward to the Ebro river, and in the 13th century they conquered the Land of Valencia and the Balearic Islands  The city of Alghero in Sardinia was repopulated with Catalan speakers in the 14th century  The language also reached Murcia, which became Spanish-speaking in the 15th century In the Low Middle Ages, Catalan went through a golden age, reaching a peak of maturity and cultural richness  Examples include the work of Majorcan polymath Ramon Llull (1232–1315), the Four Great Chronicles (13th–14th centuries), and the Valencian school of poetry culminating in Ausiàs March (1397–1459)  By the 15th century, the city of Valencia had become the sociocultural center of the Crown of Aragon, and Catalan was present all over the Mediterranean world  During this period, the Royal Chancery propagated a highly standardized language  Catalan was widely used as an official language in Sicily until the 15th century, and in Sardinia until the 17th  During this period, the language was what Costa Carreras terms "one of the 'great languages' of medieval Europe" Martorell's outstanding novel of chivalry Tirant lo Blanc (1490) shows a transition from Medieval to Renaissance values, something that can also be seen in Metge's work  The first book produced with movable type in the Iberian Peninsula was printed in Catalan 

Start of the modern era
Spain
With the union of the crowns of Castille and Aragon in 1479, the Spanish kings ruled over different kingdoms, each with its own cultural, linguistic and political particularities, and they had to swear by the Laws of each territory before the respective Parliaments  But after the War of the Spanish Succession, Spain became an Absolute monarchy under Philip V, which led to the assimilation of the Crown of Aragon by the Crown of Castile through the Nueva Planta decrees, as a first step in the creation of the Spanish nation-state; as in other contemporary European states, this meant the imposition of the political and cultural characteristics of the dominant groups  Since the political unification of 1714, Spanish assimilation policies towards national minorities have been a constant 

The process of assimilation began with secret instructions to the corregidores of the Catalan territory: they "will take the utmost care to introduce the Castilian language, for which purpose he will give the most temperate and disguised measures so that the effect is achieved, without the care being noticed " From there, actions in the service of assimilation, discreet or aggressive, were continued, and reached to the last detail, such as, in 1799, the Royal Certificate forbidding anyone to "represent, sing and dance pieces that were not in Spanish " Anyway, the use of Spanish gradually became more prestigious and marked the start of the decline of Catalan  Starting in the 16th century, Catalan literature came under the influence of Spanish, and the nobles, part of the urban and literary classes became bilingual 

France
With the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), Spain ceded the northern part of Catalonia to France, and soon thereafter the local Catalan varieties came under the influence of French, which in 1700 became the sole official language of the region Shortly after the French Revolution (1789), the French First Republic prohibited official use of, and enacted discriminating policies against, the regional languages of France, such as Catalan, Alsatian, Breton, Occitan, Flemish, and Basque 

France: 19th to 20th century
Following the French establishment of the colony of Algeria from 1830 onward, it received several waves of Catalan-speaking settlers  People from the Spanish Alicante province settled around Oran, whereas Algiers received immigration from Northern Catalonia and Menorca 
Their speech was known as patuet  By 1911, the number of Catalan speakers was around 100,000  After the declaration of independence of Algeria in 1962, almost all the Catalan speakers fled to Northern Catalonia (as Pieds-Noirs) or Alacant The government of France formally recognizes only French as an official language  Nevertheless, on 10 December 2007, the General Council of the Pyrénées-Orientales officially recognized Catalan as one of the languages of the department and seeks to further promote it in public life and education 

Spain: 18th to 20th century
In 1807, the Statistics Office of the French Ministry of the Interior asked the prefects for an official survey on the limits of the French language  The survey found that in Roussillon, almost only Catalan was spoken, and since Napoleon wanted to incorporate Catalonia into France, as happened in 1812, the consul in Barcelona was also asked  He declared that Catalan "is taught in schools, it is printed and spoken, not only among the lower class, but also among people of first quality, also in social gatherings, as in visits and congresses", indicating that it was spoken everywhere "with the exception of the royal courts"  He also indicated that Catalan was spoken "in the Kingdom of Valencia, in the islands of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Corsica and much of Sicily, in the Vall d "Aran and Cerdaña" The defeat of the pro-Habsburg coalition in the War of Spanish Succession (1714) initiated a series of laws which, among other centralizing measures, imposed the use of Spanish in legal documentation all over Spain  Because of this, use of the Catalan language declined into the 18th century 
However, the 19th century saw a Catalan literary revival (Renaixença), which has continued up to the present day  This period starts with Aribau's Ode to the Homeland (1833); followed in the second half of the 19th century, and the early 20th by the work of Verdaguer (poetry), Oller (realist novel), and Guimerà (drama)  In the 19th century, the region of Carche, in the province of Murcia was repopulated with Valencian speakers  Catalan spelling was standardized in 1913 and the language became official during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939)  The Second Spanish Republic saw a brief period of tolerance, with most restrictions against Catalan lifted The Catalan language and culture were frowned upon during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the subsequent decades in Francoist Catalonia  The Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975) imposed the use of Spanish in schools and in public administration in all of Spain  However, in 1944, it became mandatory by law for universities with Romance Philology to include the subject of Catalan Philology  Numerous and prestigious cultural contests were created to reward works produced in Catalan  In January 1944, the "Eugenio Nadal" award was created  In 1945, with the sponsorship and subsidy of the Government, the centenary of Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer was celebrated  In 1947 the Joan Martorell prize for novels in Catalan was awarded  In 1949, the Víctor Català award for short novels in Catalan and the Aedos awards for biographies, the Josep Ysart award for essays, and the Ossa Menor award, later renamed Carles Riba, were created  In 1951, a national prize was awarded to poetry in Catalan with the same financial amount as Spanish poetry  That same year, Selecta Editions was founded for works written in Catalan  And the Joanot Martorell is awarded to Josep Pla for his work El carrer estret  In subsequent years (50s, 60s and 70s) countless awards were born, such as the Lletra d'Or, Amadeu Oller for poetry, the Sant Jordi for novels (endowed with 150,000 pesetas), the Honor Award of Catalan Letters, the Verdaguer, the Josep Pla Prize, the Mercè Rodoreda Prize for short stories and narratives  The first Catalan-language TV show was broadcast during the Franco period, in 1964  The Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975) banned the use of Catalan in schools and in public administration  At the same time, oppression of the Catalan language and identity was carried out in schools, through governmental bodies, and in religious centers  Franco's desire for a homogenous Spanish population resonated with some Catalans in favor of his regime, primarily members of the upper class, who began to reject the use of Catalan  Despite all of these hardships, Catalan continued to be used privately within households, and it was able to survive Francisco Franco's dictatorship  Several prominent Catalan authors resisted the suppression through literature In addition to the loss of prestige for Catalan and its prohibition in schools, migration during the 1950s into Catalonia from other parts of Spain also contributed to the diminished use of the language  These migrants were often unaware of the existence of Catalan, and thus felt no need to learn or use it  Catalonia was the economic powerhouse of Spain, so these migrations continued to occur from all corners of the country  Employment opportunities were reduced for those who were not bilingual 

Present day
Since the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–1982), Catalan has been institutionalized as an official language, language of education, and language of mass media; all of which have contributed to its increased prestige  In Catalonia, there is an unparalleled large bilingual European non-state linguistic community  The teaching of Catalan is mandatory in all schools, but it is possible to use Spanish for studying in the public education system of Catalonia in two situations – if the teacher assigned to a class chooses to use Spanish, or during the learning process of one or more recently arrived immigrant students  There is also some intergenerational shift towards Catalan More recently, several Spanish political forces have tried to increase the use of Spanish in the Catalan educational system  As a result, in May 2022 the Spanish Supreme Court urged the Catalan regional government to enforce a measure by which 25% of all lessons must be taught in Spanish According to the Statistical Institute of Catalonia, in 2013 the Catalan language is the second most commonly used in Catalonia, after Spanish, as a native or self-defining language: 7% of the population self-identifies with both Catalan and Spanish equally, 36 4% with Catalan and 47 5% only Spanish  In 2003 the same studies concluded no language preference for self-identification within the population above 15 years old: 5% self-identified with both languages, 44 3% with Catalan and 47 5% with Spanish  To promote use of Catalan, the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonia's official Autonomous government) spends part of its annual budget on the promotion of the use of Catalan in Catalonia and in other territories, with entities such as Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística (Consortium for Linguistic Normalization)In Andorra, Catalan has always been the sole official language  Since the promulgation of the 1993 constitution, several policies favoring Catalan have been enforced, like Catalan medium education On the other hand, there are several language shift processes currently taking place  In the Northern Catalonia area of France, Catalan has followed the same trend as the other minority languages of France, with most of its native speakers being 60 or older (as of 2004)  Catalan is studied as a foreign language by 30% of the primary education students, and by 15% of the secondary  The cultural association La Bressola promotes a network of community-run schools engaged in Catalan language immersion programs 
In Alicante province, Catalan is being replaced by Spanish and in Alghero by Italian  There is also well ingrained diglossia in the Valencian Community, Ibiza, and to a lesser extent, in the rest of the Balearic islands During the 20th century many Catalans emigrated or went into exile to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and other South American countries  They formed a large number of Catalan colonies that today continue to maintain the Catalan language  They also founded many Catalan casals (associations) 

Classification and relationship with other Romance languages
One classification of Catalan is given by Pèire Bèc:

Romance languages
Italo-Western languages
Western Romance languages
Gallo-Iberian languages
Gallo-Romance languages
Occitano-Romance languages
Catalan languageHowever, the ascription of Catalan to the Occitano-Romance branch of Gallo-Romance languages is not shared by all linguists and philologists, particularly among Spanish ones, such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal 
Catalan bears varying degrees of similarity to the linguistic varieties subsumed under the cover term Occitan language (see also differences between Occitan and Catalan and Gallo-Romance languages)  Thus, as it should be expected from closely related languages, Catalan today shares many traits with other Romance languages 

Relationship with other Romance languages
Some include Catalan in Occitan, as the linguistic distance between this language and some Occitan dialects (such as the Gascon language) is similar to the distance among different Occitan dialects  Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative Catalan shares many traits with the other neighboring Romance languages (Occitan, French, Italian, Sardinian as well as Spanish and Portuguese among others)  However, despite being spoken mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, Catalan has marked differences with the Iberian Romance group (Spanish and Portuguese) in terms of pronunciation, grammar, and especially vocabulary; it shows instead its closest affinity with languages native to France and northern Italy, particularly Occitan and to a lesser extent Gallo-Romance (Franco-Provençal, French, Gallo-Italian) According to Ethnologue, the lexical similarity between Catalan and other Romance languages is: 87% with Italian; 85% with Portuguese and Spanish; 76% with Ladin and Romansh; 75% with Sardinian; and 73% with Romanian 
During much of its history, and especially during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975), the Catalan language was ridiculed as a mere dialect of Spanish  This view, based on political and ideological considerations, has no linguistic validity  Spanish and Catalan have important differences in their sound systems, lexicon, and grammatical features, placing the language in features closer to Occitan (and French) There is evidence that, at least from the 2nd century a d , the vocabulary and phonology of Roman Tarraconensis was different from the rest of Roman Hispania  Differentiation arose generally because Spanish, Asturian, and Galician-Portuguese share certain peripheral archaisms (Spanish hervir, Asturian and Portuguese ferver vs  Catalan bullir, Occitan bolir "to boil") and innovatory regionalisms (Sp novillo, Ast nuviellu vs  Cat torell, Oc taurèl "bullock"), while Catalan has a shared history with the Western Romance innovative core, especially Occitan Like all Romance languages, Catalan has a handful of native words which are unique to it, or rare elsewhere  These include:

verbs: cōnfīgere 'to fasten; transfix' > confegir 'to compose, write up', congemināre > conjuminar 'to combine, conjugate', de-ex-somnitare > deixondar/-ir 'to wake; awaken', dēnsāre 'to thicken; crowd together' > desar 'to save, keep', īgnōrāre > enyorar 'to miss, yearn, pine for', indāgāre 'to investigate, track' > Old Catalan enagar 'to incite, induce', odiāre > OCat ujar 'to exhaust, fatigue', pācificāre > apaivagar 'to appease, mollify', repudiāre > rebutjar 'to reject, refuse';
nouns: brīsa > brisa 'pomace', buda > boga 'reedmace', catarrhu > cadarn 'catarrh', congesta > congesta 'snowdrift', dēlīrium > deler 'ardor, passion', fretu > freu 'brake', lābem > (a)llau 'avalanche', ōra > vora 'edge, border', pistrīce 'sawfish' > pestriu > pestiu 'thresher shark, smooth hound; ray', prūna 'live coal' > espurna 'spark', tardātiōnem > tardaó > tardor 'autumn' The Gothic superstrate produced different outcomes in Spanish and Catalan  For example, Catalan fang "mud" and rostir "to roast", of Germanic origin, contrast with Spanish lodo and asar, of Latin origin; whereas Catalan filosa "spinning wheel" and templa "temple", of Latin origin, contrast with Spanish rueca and sien, of Germanic origin The same happens with Arabic loanwords  Thus, Catalan alfàbia "large earthenware jar" and rajola "tile", of Arabic origin, contrast with Spanish tinaja and teja, of Latin origin; whereas Catalan oli "oil" and oliva "olive", of Latin origin, contrast with Spanish aceite and aceituna  However, the Arabic element in Spanish is generally much more prevalent Situated between two large linguistic blocks (Iberian Romance and Gallo-Romance), Catalan has many unique lexical choices, such as enyorar "to miss somebody", apaivagar "to calm somebody down", and rebutjar "reject" 

Geographic distribution
Catalan-speaking territories
Traditionally Catalan-speaking territories are sometimes called the Països Catalans (Catalan Countries), a denomination based on cultural affinity and common heritage, that has also had a subsequent political interpretation but no official status  Various interpretations of the term may include some or all of these regions 

Number of speakers
The number of people known to be fluent in Catalan varies depending on the sources used  A 2004 study did not count the total number of speakers, but estimated a total of 9–9 5 million by matching the percentage of speakers to the population of each area where Catalan is spoken  The web site of the Generalitat de Catalunya estimated that as of 2004 there were 9,118,882 speakers of Catalan  These figures only reflect potential speakers; today it is the native language of only 35 6% of the Catalan population  According to Ethnologue, Catalan had 4 1 million native speakers and 5 1 million second-language speakers in 2021 

According to a 2011 study the total number of Catalan speakers is over 9 8 million, with 5 9 million residing in Catalonia  More than half of them speak Catalan as a second language, with native speakers being about 4 4 million of those (more than 2 8 in Catalonia)  Very few Catalan monoglots exist; basically, virtually all of the Catalan speakers in Spain are bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, with a sizable population of Spanish-only speakers of immigrant origin (typically born outside Catalonia or whose parents were both born outside Catalonia) existing in the major Catalan urban areas as well 
In Roussillon, only a minority of French Catalans speak Catalan nowadays, with French being the majority language for the inhabitants after a continued process of language shift  According to a 2019 survey by the Catalan government, 31 5% of the inhabitants of Catalonia have Catalan as first language at home whereas 52 7% have Spanish, 2 8% both Catalan and Spanish and 10 8% other languages Spanish is the most spoken language in Barcelona (according to the linguistic census held by the Government of Catalonia in 2013) and it is understood almost universally  According to this census of 2013 Catalan is also very commonly spoken in the city of 1,501,262: it is understood by 95% of the population, while 72 3% over the age of 2 can speak it (1,137,816), 79% can read it (1,246 555), and 53% can write it (835,080)  The proportion in Barcelona who can speak it, 72 3%, is lower than that of the overall Catalan population, of whom 81 2% over the age of 15 speak the language  Knowledge of Catalan has increased significantly in recent decades thanks to a language immersion educational system  An important social characteristic of the Catalan language is that all the areas where it is spoken are bilingual in practice: together with the French language in Roussillon, with Italian in Alghero, with Spanish and French in Andorra and with Spanish in the rest of the territories 

1 ^  The number of people who understand Catalan includes those who can speak it 
2 ^  Figures relate to all self-declared capable speakers, not just native speakers 

Level of knowledge
(% of the population 15 years old and older) 

Social use
(% of the population 15 years old and older) 

Native language
Phonology
Catalan phonology varies by dialect  Notable features include:
Marked contrast of the vowel pairs /ɛ e/ and /ɔ o/, as in other Western Romance languages, other than Spanish 
Lack of diphthongization of Latin short ĕ, ŏ, as in Galician and Portuguese, but unlike French, Spanish, or Italian 
Abundance of diphthongs containing /w/, as in Galician and Portuguese In contrast to other Romance languages, Catalan has many monosyllabic words, and these may end in a wide variety of consonants, including some consonant clusters  Additionally, Catalan has final obstruent devoicing, which gives rise to an abundance of such couplets as amic ("male friend") vs  amiga ("female friend") Central Catalan pronunciation is considered to be standard for the language  The descriptions below are mostly representative of this variety  For the differences in pronunciation between the different dialects, see the section on pronunciation of dialects in this article 

Vowels
Catalan has inherited the typical vowel system of Vulgar Latin, with seven stressed phonemes: /a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, a common feature in Western Romance, with the exception of Spanish  Balearic also has instances of stressed /ə/  Dialects differ in the different degrees of vowel reduction, and the incidence of the pair /ɛ e/ In Central Catalan, unstressed vowels reduce to three: /a e ɛ/ > [ə]; /o ɔ u/ > [u]; /i/ remains distinct  The other dialects have different vowel reduction processes (see the section pronunciation of dialects in this article) 

Consonants
The consonant system of Catalan is rather conservative 

/l/ has a velarized allophone in syllable coda position in most dialects  However, /l/ is velarized irrespective of position in Eastern dialects like Majorcan and standard Eastern Catalan 
/v/ occurs in Balearic, Algherese, standard Valencian and some areas in southern Catalonia  It has merged with /b/ elsewhere 
Voiced obstruents undergo final-obstruent devoicing: /b/ > [p], /d/ > [t], /ɡ/ > [k] 
Voiced stops become lenited to approximants in syllable onsets, after continuants: /b/ > [β], /d/ > [ð], /ɡ/ > [ɣ]  Exceptions include /d/ after lateral consonants, and /b/ after /f/  In coda position, these sounds are realized as stops, except in some Valencian dialects where they are lenited 
There is some confusion in the literature about the precise phonetic characteristics of /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/  Some sources describe them as "postalveolar"  Others as "back alveolo-palatal", implying that the characters ⟨ɕ ʑ tɕ dʑ⟩ would be more accurate  However, in all literature only the characters for palato-alveolar affricates and fricatives are used, even when the same sources use ⟨ɕ ʑ⟩ for other languages like Polish and Chinese 
The distribution of the two rhotics /r/ and /ɾ/ closely parallels that of Spanish  Between vowels, the two contrast, but they are otherwise in complementary distribution: in the onset of the first syllable in a word, [r] appears unless preceded by a consonant  Dialects vary in regards to rhotics in the coda with Western Catalan generally featuring [ɾ] and Central Catalan dialects featuring a weakly trilled [r] unless it precedes a vowel-initial word in the same prosodic unit, in which case [ɾ] appears 
In careful speech, /n/, /m/, /l/ may be geminated  Geminated /ʎ/ may also occur  Some analyze intervocalic [r] as the result of gemination of a single rhotic phoneme  This is similar to the common analysis of Spanish and Portuguese rhotics 

Phonological evolution
Sociolinguistics
Catalan sociolinguistics studies the situation of Catalan in the world and the different varieties that this language presents  It is a subdiscipline of Catalan philology and other affine studies and has as an objective to analyze the relation between the Catalan language, the speakers and the close reality (including the one of other languages in contact) 

Preferential subjects of study
Dialects of Catalan
Variations of Catalan by class, gender, profession, age and level of studies
Process of linguistic normalization
Relations between Catalan and Spanish or French
Perception on the language of Catalan speakers and non-speakers
Presence of Catalan in several fields: tagging, public function, media, professional sectors

Dialects
Overview
The dialects of the Catalan language feature a relative uniformity, especially when compared to other Romance languages; both in terms of vocabulary, semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology  Mutual intelligibility between dialects is very high, estimates ranging from 90% to 95%  The only exception is the isolated idiosyncratic Algherese dialect Catalan is split in two major dialectal blocks: Eastern and Western  The main difference lies in the treatment of unstressed a and e; which have merged to /ə/ in Eastern dialects, but which remain distinct as /a/ and /e/ in Western dialects  There are a few other differences in pronunciation, verbal morphology, and vocabulary Western Catalan comprises the two dialects of Northwestern Catalan and Valencian; the Eastern block comprises four dialects: Central Catalan, Balearic, Rossellonese, and Algherese  Each dialect can be further subdivided in several subdialects  The terms "Catalan" and "Valencian" (respectively used in Catalonia and the Valencian Community) refer to two varieties of the same language  There are two institutions regulating the two standard varieties, the Institute of Catalan Studies in Catalonia and the Valencian Academy of the Language in the Valencian Community 
Central Catalan is considered the standard pronunciation of the language and has the largest number of speakers  It is spoken in the densely populated regions of the Barcelona province, the eastern half of the province of Tarragona, and most of the province of Girona Catalan has an inflectional grammar  Nouns have two genders (masculine, feminine), and two numbers (singular, plural)  Pronouns additionally can have a neuter gender, and some are also inflected for case and politeness, and can be combined in very complex ways  Verbs are split in several paradigms and are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, mood, and gender  In terms of pronunciation, Catalan has many words ending in a wide variety of consonants and some consonant clusters, in contrast with many other Romance languages 

Pronunciation
Vowels
Catalan has inherited the typical vowel system of Vulgar Latin, with seven stressed phonemes: /a ɛ e i ɔ o u/, a common feature in Western Romance, except Spanish  Balearic has also instances of stressed /ə/  Dialects differ in the different degrees of vowel reduction, and the incidence of the pair /ɛ e/ In Eastern Catalan (except Majorcan), unstressed vowels reduce to three: /a e ɛ/ > [ə]; /o ɔ u/ > [u]; /i/ remains distinct  There are a few instances of unreduced [e], [o] in some words  Algherese has lowered [ə] to [a] 
In Majorcan, unstressed vowels reduce to four: /a e ɛ/ follow the Eastern Catalan reduction pattern; however /o ɔ/ reduce to [o], with /u/ remaining distinct, as in Western Catalan In Western Catalan, unstressed vowels reduce to five: /e ɛ/ > [e]; /o ɔ/ > [o]; /a u i/ remain distinct  This reduction pattern, inherited from Proto-Romance, is also found in Italian and Portuguese  Some Western dialects present further reduction or vowel harmony in some cases Central, Western, and Balearic differ in the lexical incidence of stressed /e/ and /ɛ/  Usually, words with /ɛ/ in Central Catalan correspond to /ə/ in Balearic and /e/ in Western Catalan  Words with /e/ in Balearic almost always have /e/ in Central and Western Catalan as well  As a result, Central Catalan has a much higher incidence of /ɛ/ 

Consonants
Morphology
Western Catalan: In verbs, the ending for 1st-person present indicative is -e in verbs of the 1st conjugation and -∅ in verbs of the 2nd and 3rd conjugations in most of the Valencian Community, or -o in all verb conjugations in the Northern Valencian Community and Western Catalonia E g  parle, tem, sent (Valencian); parlo, temo, sento (Northwestern Catalan) 
Eastern Catalan: In verbs, the ending for 1st-person present indicative is -o, -i, or -∅ in all conjugations  E g  parlo (Central), parl (Balearic), and parli (Northern), all meaning ('I speak') 

Western Catalan: In verbs, the inchoative endings are -isc/-esc, -ix, -ixen, -isca/-esca 
Eastern Catalan: In verbs, the inchoative endings are -eixo, -eix, -eixen, -eixi 
Western Catalan: In nouns and adjectives, maintenance of /n/ of medieval plurals in proparoxytone words E g  hòmens 'men', jóvens 'youth' 
Eastern Catalan: In nouns and adjectives, loss of /n/ of medieval plurals in proparoxytone words E g  homes 'men', joves 'youth' (Ibicencan, however, follows the model of Western Catalan in this case) 

Vocabulary
Despite its relative lexical unity, the two dialectal blocks of Catalan (Eastern and Western) show some differences in word choices  Any lexical divergence within any of the two groups can be explained as an archaism  Also, usually Central Catalan acts as an innovative element 

Standards
Standard Catalan, virtually accepted by all speakers, is mostly based on Eastern Catalan, which is the most widely used dialect  Nevertheless, the standards of the Valencian Community and the Balearics admit alternative forms, mostly traditional ones, which are not current in eastern Catalonia The most notable difference between both standards is some tonic ⟨e⟩ accentuation, for instance: francès, anglès (IEC) – francés, anglés (AVL)  Nevertheless, AVL's standard keeps the grave accent ⟨è⟩, while pronouncing it as /e/ rather than /ɛ/, in some words like: què ('what'), or València  Other divergences include the use of ⟨tl⟩ (AVL) in some words instead of ⟨tll⟩ like in ametla/ametlla ('almond'), espatla/espatlla ('back'), the use of elided demonstratives (este 'this', eixe 'that') in the same level as reinforced ones (aquest, aqueix) or the use of many verbal forms common in Valencian, and some of these common in the rest of Western Catalan too, like subjunctive mood or inchoative conjugation in -ix- at the same level as -eix- or the priority use of -e morpheme in 1st person singular in present indicative (-ar verbs): jo compre instead of jo compro ('I buy') 
In the Balearic Islands, IEC's standard is used but adapted for the Balearic dialect by the University of the Balearic Islands's philological section  In this way, for instance, IEC says it is correct writing cantam as much as cantem ('we sing'), but the university says that the priority form in the Balearic Islands must be cantam in all fields  Another feature of the Balearic standard is the non-ending in the 1st person singular present indicative: jo compr ('I buy'), jo tem ('I fear'), jo dorm ('I sleep') 
In Alghero, the IEC has adapted its standard to the Algherese dialect  In this standard one can find, among other features: the definite article lo instead of el, special possessive pronouns and determinants la mia ('mine'), lo sou/la sua ('his/her'), lo tou/la tua ('yours'), and so on, the use of -v- /v/ in the imperfect tense in all conjugations: cantava, creixiva, llegiva; the use of many archaic words, usual words in Algherese: manco instead of menys ('less'), calqui u instead of algú ('someone'), qual/quala instead of quin/quina ('which'), and so on; and the adaptation of weak pronouns 
In 2011, the Aragonese government passed a decree approving the statutes of a new language regulator of Catalan in La Franja (the so-called Catalan-speaking areas of Aragon) as originally provided for by Law 10/2009  The new entity, designated as Acadèmia Aragonesa del Català, shall allow a facultative education in Catalan and a standardization of the Catalan language in La Franja 

Status of Valencian
Valencian is classified as a Western dialect, along with the northwestern varieties spoken in Western Catalonia (provinces of Lleida and the western half of Tarragona)  Central Catalan has 90% to 95% inherent intelligibility for speakers of Valencian Linguists, including Valencian scholars, deal with Catalan and Valencian as the same language  The official regulating body of the language of the Valencian Community, the Valencian Academy of Language (Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, AVL) declares the linguistic unity between Valencian and Catalan varieties 

The AVL, created by the Valencian parliament, is in charge of dictating the official rules governing the use of Valencian, and its standard is based on the Norms of Castelló (Normes de Castelló)  Currently, everyone who writes in Valencian uses this standard, except the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana, RACV), which uses for Valencian an independent standard 
Despite the position of the official organizations, an opinion poll carried out between 2001 and 2004 showed that the majority of the Valencian people consider Valencian different from Catalan  This position is promoted by people who do not use Valencian regularly  Furthermore, the data indicates that younger generations educated in Valencian are much less likely to hold these views  A minority of Valencian scholars active in fields other than linguistics defends the position of the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana, RACV), which uses for Valencian a standard independent from Catalan This clash of opinions has sparked much controversy  For example, during the drafting of the European Constitution in 2004, the Spanish government supplied the EU with translations of the text into Basque, Galician, Catalan, and Valencian, but the latter two were identical 

Vocabulary
Word choices
Despite its relative lexical unity, the two dialectal blocks of Catalan (Eastern and Western) show some differences in word choices  Any lexical divergence within any of the two groups can be explained as an archaism  Also, usually Central Catalan acts as an innovative element Literary Catalan allows the use of words from different dialects, except those of very restricted use  However, from the 19th century onwards, there has been a tendency towards favoring words of Northern dialects to the detriment of others, even though nowadays there is a greater freedom of choice 

Latin and Greek loanwords
Like other languages, Catalan has a large list of loanwords from Greek and Latin  This process started very early, and one can find such examples in Ramon Llull's work  In the 14th and 15th centuries Catalan had a far greater number of Greco-Latin loanwords than other Romance languages, as is attested for example in Roís de Corella's writings  The incorporation of learned, or "bookish" words from its own ancestor language, Latin, into Catalan is arguably another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language and the liturgical language of the Church  Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Catalan speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Catalan 

Word formation
The process of morphological derivation in Catalan follows the same principles as the other Romance languages, where agglutination is common  Many times, several affixes are appended to a preexisting lexeme, and some sound alternations can occur, for example elèctric [əˈlɛktrik] ("electrical") vs  electricitat [ələktrisiˈtat]  Prefixes are usually appended to verbs, as in preveure ("foresee") There is greater regularity in the process of word-compounding, where one can find compounded words formed much like those in English 

Writing system
Catalan uses the Latin script, with some added symbols and digraphs  The Catalan orthography is systematic and largely phonologically based  Standardization of Catalan was among the topics discussed during the First International Congress of the Catalan Language, held in Barcelona October 1906  Subsequently, the Philological Section of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC, founded in 1911) published the Normes ortogràfiques in 1913 under the direction of Antoni Maria Alcover and Pompeu Fabra  In 1932, Valencian writers and intellectuals gathered in Castelló de la Plana to make a formal adoption of the so-called Normes de Castelló, a set of guidelines following Pompeu Fabra's Catalan language norms 

Grammar
The grammar of Catalan is similar to other Romance languages  Features include:
Use of definite and indefinite articles 
Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are inflected for gender (masculine and feminine), and number (singular and plural)  There is no case inflexion, except in pronouns 
Verbs are highly inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, and mood (including a subjunctive) 
There are no modal auxiliaries 
Word order is freer than in English 

Gender and number inflection
In gender inflection, the most notable feature is (compared to Portuguese, Spanish or Italian), the loss of the typical masculine suffix -o  Thus, the alternance of -o/-a, has been replaced by ø/-a  There are only a few exceptions, like minso/minsa ("scarce")  Many not completely predictable morphological alternations may occur, such as:
Affrication: boig/boja ("insane") vs  lleig/lletja ("ugly")
Loss of n: pla/plana ("flat") vs  segon/segona ("second")
Final obstruent devoicing: sentit/sentida ("felt") vs  dit/dita ("said")Catalan has few suppletive couplets, like Italian and Spanish, and unlike French  Thus, Catalan has noi/noia ("boy"/"girl") and gall/gallina ("cock"/"hen"), whereas French has garçon/fille and coq/poule There is a tendency to abandon traditionally gender-invariable adjectives in favor of marked ones, something prevalent in Occitan and French  Thus, one can find bullent/bullenta ("boiling") in contrast with traditional bullent/bullent As in the other Western Romance languages, the main plural expression is the suffix -s, which may create morphological alternations similar to the ones found in gender inflection, albeit more rarely  The most important one is the addition of -o- before certain consonant groups, a phonetic phenomenon that does not affect feminine forms: el pols/els polsos ("the pulse"/"the pulses") vs  la pols/les pols ("the dust"/"the dusts") 

Determiners
The inflection of determinatives is complex, specially because of the high number of elisions, but is similar to the neighboring languages  Catalan has more contractions of preposition + article than Spanish, like dels ("of + the [plural]"), but not as many as Italian (which has sul, col, nel, etc ) Central Catalan has abandoned almost completely unstressed possessives (mon, etc ) in favor of constructions of article + stressed forms (el meu, etc ), a feature shared with Italian 

Personal pronouns
The morphology of Catalan personal pronouns is complex, especially in unstressed forms, which are numerous (13 distinct forms, compared to 11 in Spanish or 9 in Italian)  Features include the gender-neutral ho and the great degree of freedom when combining different unstressed pronouns (65 combinations) Catalan pronouns exhibit T–V distinction, like all other Romance languages (and most European languages, but not Modern English)  This feature implies the use of a different set of second person pronouns for formality 
This flexibility allows Catalan to use extraposition extensively, much more than French or Spanish  Thus, Catalan can have m'hi recomanaren ("they recommended me to him"), whereas in French one must say ils m'ont recommandé à lui, and Spanish me recomendaron a él  This allows the placement of almost any nominal term as a sentence topic, without having to use so often the passive voice (as in French or English), or identifying the direct object with a preposition (as in Spanish) 

Verbs
Like all the Romance languages, Catalan verbal inflection is more complex than the nominal  Suffixation is omnipresent, whereas morphological alternations play a secondary role  Vowel alternances are active, as well as infixation and suppletion  However, these are not as productive as in Spanish, and are mostly restricted to irregular verbs The Catalan verbal system is basically common to all Western Romance, except that most dialects have replaced the synthetic indicative perfect with a periphrastic form of anar ("to go") + infinitive Catalan verbs are traditionally divided into three conjugations, with vowel themes -a-, -e-, -i-, the last two being split into two subtypes  However, this division is mostly theoretical  Only the first conjugation is nowadays productive (with about 3500 common verbs), whereas the third (the subtype of servir, with about 700 common verbs) is semiproductive  The verbs of the second conjugation are fewer than 100, and it is not possible to create new ones, except by compounding 

Syntax
The grammar of Catalan follows the general pattern of Western Romance languages  The primary word order is subject–verb–object  However, word order is very flexible  Commonly, verb-subject constructions are used to achieve a semantic effect  The sentence "The train has arrived" could be translated as Ha arribat el tren or El tren ha arribat  Both sentences mean "the train has arrived", but the former puts a focus on the train, while the latter puts a focus on the arrival  This subtle distinction is described as "what you might say while waiting in the station" versus "what you might say on the train "

Catalan names
In Spain, every person officially has two surnames, one of which is the father's first surname and the other is the mother's first surname  The law contemplates the possibility of joining both surnames with the Catalan conjunction i ("and") 

Sample text
Selected text from Manuel de Pedrolo's 1970 novel Un amor fora ciutat ("A love affair outside the city") 

See also
Notes
Passage 6:
Serbian language
Serbian (српски / srpski, pronounced [sr̩̂pskiː]) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs  It is the official and national language of Serbia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and co-official in Montenegro and Kosovo  It is a recognized minority language in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic 
Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina), which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties and therefore the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins was issued in 2017  The other dialect spoken by Serbs is Torlakian in southeastern Serbia, which is transitional to Macedonian and Bulgarian 
Serbian is practically the only European standard language whose speakers are fully functionally digraphic, using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets  The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created it based on phonemic principles  The Latin alphabet used for Serbian (latinica) was designed by the Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s based on the Czech system with a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system 

Classification
Serbian is a standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language (Indo-European), of the South Slavic subgroup  Other standardized forms of Serbo-Croatian are Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin  "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language shows that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system " It has lower intelligibility with the Eastern South Slavic languages Bulgarian and Macedonian, than with Slovene (Slovene is part of the Western South Slavic subgroup, but there are still significant differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation to the standardized forms of Serbo-Croatian, although it is closer to the Kajkavian and Chakavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian) 

Geographic distribution
Figures of speakers according to countries:

Serbia: 6,540,699 (official language)
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1,086,027 (co-official language)
Germany: 568,240
Austria: 350,000
Montenegro: 265,890 (language in official use)
Switzerland: 186,000
United States: 172,874
Sweden: 120,000
Italy: 106,498
Kosovo: est  70 000–100 000 (co-official language)
Canada: 72,690
Australia: 55,114
Croatia: 52,879 (recognized minority language)
Slovenia: 38,964
North Macedonia: 24,773 (recognized minority language)
Romania: 22,518 (recognized minority language)

Status in Montenegro
Serbian was the official language of Montenegro until October 2007 when the new Constitution of Montenegro replaced the Constitution of 1992  Amid opposition from pro-Serbian parties, Montenegrin was made the sole official language of the country, and Serbian was given the status of a language in official use along with Bosnian, Albanian, and Croatian In the 2011 Montenegrin census, 42 88% declared Serbian to be their native language, while Montenegrin was declared by 36 97% of the population 

Differences between standard Serbian and standard Croatian and Bosnian
Writing system
Standard Serbian language uses both Cyrillic (ћирилица, ćirilica) and Latin script (latinica, латиница)  Serbian is a rare example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them  Media and publishers typically select one alphabet or the other  In general, the alphabets are used interchangeably; except in the legal sphere, where Cyrillic is required, there is no context where one alphabet or another predominates 
Although Serbian language authorities have recognized the official status of both scripts in contemporary Standard Serbian for more than half of a century now, due to historical reasons, the Cyrillic script was made the official script of Serbia's administration by the 2006 Constitution The Latin script continues to be used in official contexts, although the government has indicated its desire to phase out this practice due to national sentiment  The Ministry of Culture believes that Cyrillic is the "identity script" of the Serbian nation However, the law does not regulate scripts in standard language, or standard language itself by any means, leaving the choice of script as a matter of personal preference and to the free will in all aspects of life (publishing, media, trade and commerce, etc ), except in government paperwork production and in official written communication with state officials, which have to be in Cyrillic 

Usage
To most Serbians, the Latin script tends to imply a cosmopolitan or neutral attitude, while Cyrillic appeals to a more traditional or vintage sensibility In media, the public broadcaster, Radio Television of Serbia, predominantly uses the Cyrillic script whereas the privately run broadcasters, like RTV Pink, predominantly use the Latin script  Newspapers can be found in both scripts 
In the public sphere, with logos, outdoor signage and retail packaging, the Latin script predominates, although both scripts are commonly seen  The Serbian government has encouraged increasing the use of Cyrillic in these contexts  Larger signs, especially those put up by the government, will often feature both alphabets; if the sign has English on it, then usually only Cyrillic is used for the Serbian text 
A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors the Cyrillic one Latin script has become more and more popular in Serbia, as it is easier to input on phones and computers 

Alphabetic order
The sort order of the ćirilica (ћирилица) alphabet:

Cyrillic order called Azbuka (азбука): А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ ШThe sort order of the latinica (латиница) alphabet:

Latin order called Abeceda (абецеда): A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž

Grammar
Serbian is a highly inflected language, with grammatical morphology for nouns, pronouns and adjectives as well as verbs 

Nouns
Serbian nouns are classified into three declensional types, denoted largely by their nominative case endings as "-a" type, "-i" and "-e" type  Into each of these declensional types may fall nouns of any of three genders: masculine, feminine or neuter  Each noun may be inflected to represent the noun's grammatical case, of which Serbian has seven:

Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Vocative
Instrumental
LocativeNouns are further inflected to represent the noun's number, singular or plural 

Pronouns
Pronouns, when used, are inflected along the same case and number morphology as nouns  Serbian is a pro-drop language, meaning that pronouns may be omitted from a sentence when their meaning is easily inferred from the text  In cases where pronouns may be dropped, they may also be used to add emphasis  For example:

Adjectives
Adjectives in Serbian may be placed before or after the noun they modify, but must agree in number, gender and case with the modified noun 

Verbs
Serbian verbs are conjugated in four past forms—perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect—of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but the majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic), one future tense (also known as the first future tense, as opposed to the second future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and one present tense  These are the tenses of the indicative mood  Apart from the indicative mood, there is also the imperative mood  The conditional mood has two more tenses: the first conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses) and the second conditional (without use in the spoken language—it should be used for impossible conditional clauses)  Serbian has active and passive voice 
As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian has one infinitive, two adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and two adverbial participles (the present and the past) 

Vocabulary
Most Serbian words are of native Slavic lexical stock, tracing back to the Proto-Slavic language  There are many loanwords from different languages, reflecting cultural interaction throughout history  Notable loanwords were borrowed from Greek, Latin, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian, English, Russian, German, Czech and French 

Serbian literature
Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevanđelje (Miroslav's Gospel) in 1186 and Dušanov zakonik (Dušan's Code) in 1349  Little secular medieval literature has been preserved, but what there is shows that it was in accord with its time; for example, the Serbian Alexandride, a book about Alexander the Great, and a translation of Tristan and Iseult into Serbian  Although not belonging to the literature proper, the corpus of Serbian literacy in the 14th and 15th centuries contains numerous legal, commercial and administrative texts with marked presence of Serbian vernacular juxtaposed on the matrix of Serbian Church Slavonic 
By the beginning of the 14th century the Serbo-Croatian language, which was so rigorously proscribed by earlier local laws, becomes the dominant language of the Republic of Ragusa  However, despite her wealthy citizens speaking the Serbo-Croatian dialect of Dubrovnik in their family circles, they sent their children to Florentine schools to become perfectly fluent in Italian  Since the beginning of the 13th century, the entire official correspondence of Dubrovnik with states in the hinterland was conducted in Serbian In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and for the next 400 years there was no opportunity for the creation of secular written literature  However, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being epic poetry  The epic poems were mainly written down in the 19th century, and preserved in oral tradition up to the 1950s, a few centuries or even a millennium longer than by most other "epic folks"  Goethe and Jacob Grimm learned Serbian in order to read Serbian epic poetry in the original  By the end of the 18th century, the written literature had become estranged from the spoken language  In the second half of the 18th century, the new language appeared, called Slavonic-Serbian  This artificial idiom superseded the works of poets and historians like Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović, who wrote in essentially modern Serbian in the 1720s  These vernacular compositions have remained cloistered from the general public and received due attention only with the advent of modern literary historians and writers like Milorad Pavić  In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić promoted the spoken language of the people as a literary norm 

Dialects
The dialects of Serbo-Croatian, regarded Serbian (traditionally spoken in Serbia), include:

Šumadija–Vojvodina (Ekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): central and northern Serbia
Eastern Herzegovinian (Ijekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): southwestern Serbia, western half of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia
Kosovo–Resava (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern central Serbia, central Kosovo
Smederevo–Vršac (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): east-central Serbia
Prizren–Timok (transitional Torlakian): southeastern Serbia, southern Kosovo
Zeta–Raška (Ijekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern half of Montenegro, southwestern Serbia

Dictionaries
Vuk Karadžić's Srpski rječnik, first published in 1818, is the earliest dictionary of modern literary Serbian  The Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (I–XXIII), published by the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1880 to 1976, is the only general historical dictionary of Serbo-Croatian  Its first editor was Đuro Daničić, followed by Pero Budmani and the famous Vukovian Tomislav Maretić  The sources of this dictionary are, especially in the first volumes, mainly Štokavian  There are older, pre-standard dictionaries, such as the 1791 German–Serbian dictionary or 15th century Arabic-Persian-Greek-Serbian Conversation Textbook 

Standard dictionaries
Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language (Rečnik srpskohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika) is the biggest dictionary of Serbian (and Serbo-Croatian as a whole) and still unfinished  Starting in 1959, 21 volumes were published as of 2020 and about 40 are expected by the time it is finished 
Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary Language (Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika) in six volumes in 1967–1976, started as a common project of Matica srpska (published in Cyrillic) and Matica hrvatska (published in Latin)  Only the first three volumes were published by Matica hrvatska due to negative feedback from Croatian linguists 
Dictionary of the Serbian language (Rečnik srpskoga jezika; ISBN 978-86-7946-004-2) in one volume, published in 2007 by Matica srpska, which on more than 1500 pages in A4 format explains more than 85,000 entries 

Etymological dictionaries
The standard and the only completed etymological dictionary of Serbian is the "Skok", written by the Croatian linguist Petar Skok: Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian")  I-IV  Zagreb 1971–1974 
There is also a new monumental Etimološki rečnik srpskog jezika (Etymological Dictionary of Serbian)  So far, two volumes have been published: I (with words on A-), and II (Ba-Bd) 
There are specialized etymological dictionaries for German, Italian, Croatian, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, English and other loanwords (cf  chapter word origin) 

Dialectal dictionaries
Kosovsko-resavski dialect dictionaries:
Gliša Elezović, Rečnik kosovsko-metohiskog dijalekta I-II  1932/1935 
Prizren-Timok (Torlakian) dialect dictionaries:
Brana Mitrović, Rečnik leskovačkog govora  Leskovac 1984 
Nikola Živković, Rečnik pirotskog govora  Pirot, 1987 
Miodrag Marković, Rečnik crnorečkog govora I-II  1986/1993 
Jakša Dinić, Rečnik timočkog govora I-III 1988–1992 
Jakša Dinić, Timocki dijalekatski recnik, (Institut za srpski jezik, Monografije 4; ISBN 978-86-82873-17-4) Beograd 2008,
Momčilo Zlatanović, Rečnik govora južne Srbije  Vranje, 1998, 1–491 
East-Herzegovinian dialect dictionaries:
Milija Stanić, Uskočki rečnik I–II  Beograd 1990/1991 
Miloš Vujičić, Rečnik govora Prošćenja kod Mojkovca  Podgorica, 1995 
Srđan Musić, Romanizmi u severozapadnoj Boki Kotorskoj  1972 
Svetozar Gagović, Iz leksike Pive  Beograd 2004 
Zeta-Pešter dialect:
Rada Stijović, Iz leksike Vasojevića  1990 
Drago Ćupić – Željko Ćupić, Rečnik govora Zagarača  1997 
Vesna Lipovac-Radulović, Romanizmi u Crnoj Gori – jugoistočni dio Boke Kotorske  Cetinje – Titograd, 1981 
Vesna Lipovac-Radulović, Romanizmi u Budvi i Paštrovićima  Novi Sad 1997 
Others:
Rečnik srpskih govora Vojvodine  Novi Sad 
Mile Tomić, Rečnik radimskog govora – dijaspora, Rumunija  1989 

Sample text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbian, written in the Cyrillic script:
Сва људска бића рађају се слободна и једнака у достојанству и правима  Она су обдарена разумом и свешћу и треба једни према другима да поступају у духу братства 
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbian, written in the Latin alphabet:
Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima  Ona su obdarena razumom i svešću i treba jedni prema drugima da postupaju u duhu bratstva 
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights  They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood 

See also
Context 3:   However, in the first round, Mazowiecki finished in a distant third, with only 18 7 percent of the vote, well behind Tymiński 
The reasons for Tymiński's unexpected success remain unclear  His vague promise to create wealth for everyone quickly, supported by his image as a patriotic Pole who had succeeded abroad, was well received at a time of radical political change and a worsening economic situation  There was increasing disappointment with the trench warfare that had broken out within the former anti-communist opposition so a mysterious, honest and patriotic stranger "straight out of nowhere" had considerable appeal 
Another factor was that Tymiński's use of political-marketing methods unknown in Poland at the time  A key element of his campaign was an omnipresent black briefcase, allegedly containing "secret documents" which would destroy his rivals' careers when the time was right  Although the elections passed without the briefcase being opened, its presence attracted constant attention  Tymiński's adversaries adopted a similar strategy; the daily Gazeta Wyborcza (which supported Mazowiecki) reported that Tymiński had had contact with the secret police, a story that was not withdrawn until after the elections 
Despite Tymiński's defeat, he had not only humiliated Mazowiecki (one of the best-known and most-respected figures in Polish politics), but also forced Wałęsa (who at that time was a national hero) into a runoff   After the election Tymiński tried to establish a new political party, but quickly disappeared from the political scene in Poland 

Candidates
Results
Passage 7:
Raymond Triboulet
Raymond Triboulet (3 October 1906 – 26 May 2006) was a French politician  He was a leading World War II resistance fighter who helped U S , Canadian, and British troops invade France, which was then occupied by Nazi Germany 

Biography
Born in Paris, Raymond Triboulet was a farmer and also had a law degree  At the start of World War II he enlisted in the French Army and was taken prisoner, but was later freed and returned home under the German occupation in 1941  He then joined the Calvados section of the group "Ceux de la Résistance", or Those of the Resistance 
By informing Allied forces of German movements between the towns of Caen and Bayeux, he contributed to the success of the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944  Following the reinstatement of a legitimate French government, Charles de Gaulle appointed him the first local governor of liberated France, in the Normandy town of Bayeux 
He was elected to Parliament in 1946 and served until 1973  He served as a minister in the governments of Michel Debré and Georges Pompidou from 1959 to 1966 and then became a member of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament 
He was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1979, serving as its president in 1991 

Publications
Un gaulliste de la IVe, Plon, 1985 (A Gaullist from the IVth Republic)
Un ministre du Général, Plon, 1985 (Minister to the General)

External links
Obituary, The Guardian, 16 June 2006 accessed at [1] 19 July 2006
Raymond Triboulet accessed at fr:Raymond Triboulet 21:02, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Passage 8:
Green
Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum  It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495–570 nm  In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combination of yellow and cyan; in the RGB color model, used on television and computer screens, it is one of the additive primary colors, along with red and blue, which are mixed in different combinations to create all other colors  By far the largest contributor to green in nature is chlorophyll, the chemical by which plants photosynthesize and convert sunlight into chemical energy  Many creatures have adapted to their green environments by taking on a green hue themselves as camouflage  Several minerals have a green color, including the emerald, which is colored green by its chromium content 
During post-classical and early modern Europe, green was the color commonly associated with wealth, merchants, bankers, and the gentry, while red was reserved for the nobility  For this reason, the costume of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and the benches in the British House of Commons are green while those in the House of Lords are red  It also has a long historical tradition as the color of Ireland and of Gaelic culture  It is the historic color of Islam, representing the lush vegetation of Paradise  It was the color of the banner of Muhammad, and is found in the flags of nearly all Islamic countries In surveys made in American, European, and Islamic countries, green is the color most commonly associated with nature, life, health, youth, spring, hope, and envy  In the European Union and the United States, green is also sometimes associated with toxicity and poor health, but in China and most of Asia, its associations are very positive, as the symbol of fertility and happiness  Because of its association with nature, it is the color of the environmental movement  Political groups advocating environmental protection and social justice describe themselves as part of the Green movement, some naming themselves Green parties  This has led to similar campaigns in advertising, as companies have sold green, or environmentally friendly, products  Green is also the traditional color of safety and permission; a green light means go ahead, a green card permits permanent residence in the United States 

Etymology and linguistic definitions
The word green comes from the Middle English and Old English word grene, which, like the German word grün, has the same root as the words grass and grow  It is from a Common Germanic *gronja-, which is also reflected in Old Norse grænn, Old High German gruoni (but unattested in East Germanic), ultimately from a PIE root *ghre- "to grow", and root-cognate with grass and to grow 
The first recorded use of the word as a color term in Old English dates to ca  AD 700 Latin with viridis also has a genuine and widely used term for "green"  Related to virere "to grow" and ver "spring", it gave rise to words in several Romance languages, French vert, Italian verde (and English vert, verdure etc )  Likewise the Slavic languages with zelenъ  Ancient Greek also had a term for yellowish, pale green – χλωρός, chloros (cf  the color of chlorine), cognate with χλοερός "verdant" and χλόη "chloe, the green of new growth" 
Thus, the languages mentioned above (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek) have old terms for "green" which are derived from words for fresh, sprouting vegetation 
However, comparative linguistics makes clear that these terms were coined independently, over the past few millennia, and there is no identifiable single Proto-Indo-European or word for "green"  For example, the Slavic zelenъ is cognate with Sanskrit hari "yellow, ochre, golden" 
The Turkic languages also have jašɨl "green" or "yellowish green", compared to a Mongolian word for "meadow" 

Languages where green and blue are one color
In some languages, including old Chinese, Thai, old Japanese, and Vietnamese, the same word can mean either blue or green  The Chinese character 青 (pronounced qīng in Mandarin, ao in Japanese, and thanh in Sino-Vietnamese) has a meaning that covers both blue and green; blue and green are traditionally considered shades of "青"  In more contemporary terms, they are 藍 (lán, in Mandarin) and 綠 (lǜ, in Mandarin) respectively  Japanese also has two terms that refer specifically to the color green, 緑 (midori, which is derived from the classical Japanese descriptive verb midoru "to be in leaf, to flourish" in reference to trees) and グリーン (guriin, which is derived from the English word "green")  However, in Japan, although the traffic lights have the same colors as other countries have, the green light is described using the same word as for blue, aoi, because green is considered a shade of aoi; similarly, green variants of certain fruits and vegetables such as green apples, green shiso (as opposed to red apples and red shiso) will be described with the word aoi  Vietnamese uses a single word for both blue and green, xanh, with variants such as xanh da trời (azure, lit  "sky blue"), lam (blue), and lục (green; also xanh lá cây, lit  "leaf green") 
"Green" in modern European languages corresponds to about 520–570 nm, but many historical and non-European languages make other choices, e g  using a term for the range of ca  450–530 nm ("blue/green") and another for ca  530–590 nm ("green/yellow")  In the comparative study of color terms in the world's languages, green is only found as a separate category in languages with the fully developed range of six colors (white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue), or more rarely in systems with five colors (white, red, yellow, green, and black/blue)  These languages have introduced supplementary vocabulary to denote "green", but these terms are recognizable as recent adoptions that are not in origin color terms (much like the English adjective orange being in origin not a color term but the name of a fruit)  Thus, the Thai word เขียว kheīyw, besides meaning "green", also means "rank" and "smelly" and holds other unpleasant associations The Celtic languages had a term for "blue/green/grey", Proto-Celtic *glasto-, which gave rise to Old Irish glas "green, grey" and to Welsh glas "blue"  This word is cognate with the Ancient Greek γλαυκός "bluish green", contrasting with χλωρός "yellowish green" discussed above 

In modern Japanese, the term for green is 緑, while the old term for "blue/green", blue (青, Ao) now means "blue"  But in certain contexts, green is still conventionally referred to as 青, as in blue traffic light (青信号, ao shingō) and blue leaves (青葉, aoba), reflecting the absence of blue-green distinction in old Japanese (more accurately, the traditional Japanese color terminology grouped some shades of green with blue, and others with yellow tones) 

In science
Color vision and colorimetry
In optics, the perception of green is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 495–570 nm  The sensitivity of the dark-adapted human eye is greatest at about 507 nm, a blue-green color, while the light-adapted eye is most sensitive about 555 nm, a yellow-green; these are the peak locations of the rod and cone (scotopic and photopic, respectively) luminosity functions The perception of greenness (in opposition to redness forming one of the opponent mechanisms in human color vision) is evoked by light which triggers the medium-wavelength M cone cells in the eye more than the long-wavelength L cones  Light which triggers this greenness response more than the yellowness or blueness of the other color opponent mechanism is called green  A green light source typically has a spectral power distribution dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 487–570 nm 

Human eyes have color receptors known as cone cells, of which there are three types  In some cases, one is missing or faulty, which can cause color blindness, including the common inability to distinguish red and yellow from green, known as deuteranopia or red-green color blindness 
Green is restful to the eye  Studies show that a green environment can reduce fatigue In the subtractive color system, used in painting and color printing, green is created by a combination of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; in the RGB color model, used on television and computer screens, it is one of the additive primary colors, along with red and blue, which are mixed in different combinations to create all other colors  On the HSV color wheel, also known as the RGB color wheel, the complement of green is magenta; that is, a color corresponding to an equal mixture of red and blue light (one of the purples)  On a traditional color wheel, based on subtractive color, the complementary color to green is considered to be red In additive color devices such as computer displays and televisions, one of the primary light sources is typically a narrow-spectrum yellowish-green of dominant wavelength ~550 nm; this "green" primary is combined with an orangish-red "red" primary and a purplish-blue "blue" primary to produce any color in between – the RGB color model  A unique green (green appearing neither yellowish nor bluish) is produced on such a device by mixing light from the green primary with some light from the blue primary 

Lasers
Lasers emitting in the green part of the spectrum are widely available to the general public in a wide range of output powers  Green laser pointers outputting at 532 nm (563 5 THz) are relatively inexpensive compared to other wavelengths of the same power, and are very popular due to their good beam quality and very high apparent brightness  The most common green lasers use diode pumped solid state (DPSS) technology to create the green light 
An infrared laser diode at 808 nm is used to pump a crystal of neodymium-doped yttrium vanadium oxide (Nd:YVO4) or neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) and induces it to emit 281 76 THz (1064 nm)  This deeper infrared light is then passed through another crystal containing potassium, titanium and phosphorus (KTP), whose non-linear properties generate light at a frequency that is twice that of the incident beam (563 5 THz); in this case corresponding to the wavelength of 532 nm ("green") 
Other green wavelengths are also available using DPSS technology ranging from 501 nm to 543 nm 
Green wavelengths are also available from gas lasers, including the helium–neon laser (543 nm), the Argon-ion laser (514 nm) and the Krypton-ion laser (521 nm and 531 nm), as well as liquid dye lasers  Green lasers have a wide variety of applications, including pointing, illumination, surgery, laser light shows, spectroscopy, interferometry, fluorescence, holography, machine vision, non-lethal weapons, and bird control As of mid-2011, direct green laser diodes at 510 nm and 500 nm have become generally available,
although the price remains relatively prohibitive for widespread public use  The efficiency of these lasers (peak 3%) compared to that of DPSS green lasers (peak 35%)
may also be limiting adoption of the diodes to niche uses 

Pigments, food coloring and fireworks
Many minerals provide pigments which have been used in green paints and dyes over the centuries  Pigments, in this case, are minerals which reflect the color green, rather that emitting it through luminescent or phosphorescent qualities  The large number of green pigments makes it impossible to mention them all  Among the more notable green minerals, however is the emerald, which is colored green by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium 
Chromium(III) oxide (Cr2O3), is called chrome green, also called viridian or institutional green when used as a pigment  For many years, the source of amazonite's color was a mystery  Widely thought to have been due to copper because copper compounds often have blue and green colors, the blue-green color is likely to be derived from small quantities of lead and water in the feldspar 
Copper is the source of the green color in malachite pigments, chemically known as basic copper(II) carbonate Verdigris is made by placing a plate or blade of copper, brass or bronze, slightly warmed, into a vat of fermenting wine, leaving it there for several weeks, and then scraping off and drying the green powder that forms on the metal  The process of making verdigris was described in ancient times by Pliny  It was used by the Romans in the murals of Pompeii, and in Celtic medieval manuscripts as early as the 5th century AD  It produced a blue-green which no other pigment could imitate, but it had drawbacks: it was unstable, it could not resist dampness, it did not mix well with other colors, it could ruin other colors with which it came into contact, and it was toxic  Leonardo da Vinci, in his treatise on painting, warned artists not to use it  It was widely used in miniature paintings in Europe and Persia in the 16th and 17th centuries  Its use largely ended in the late 19th century, when it was replaced by the safer and more stable chrome green  Viridian, as described above, was patented in 1859  It became popular with painters, since, unlike other synthetic greens, it was stable and not toxic  Vincent van Gogh used it, along with Prussian blue, to create a dark blue sky with a greenish tint in his painting Café Terrace at Night Green earth is a natural pigment used since the time of the Roman Empire  It is composed of clay colored by iron oxide, magnesium, aluminum silicate, or potassium  Large deposits were found in the South of France near Nice, and in Italy around Verona, on Cyprus, and in Bohemia  The clay was crushed, washed to remove impurities, then powdered  It was sometimes called Green of Verona Mixtures of oxidized cobalt and zinc were also used to create green paints as early as the 18th century Cobalt green, sometimes known as Rinman's green or zinc green, is a translucent green pigment made by heating a mixture of cobalt (II) oxide and zinc oxide  Sven Rinman, a Swedish chemist, discovered this compound in 1780 
Green chrome oxide was a new synthetic green created by a chemist named Pannetier in Paris in about 1835  Emerald green was a synthetic deep green made in the 19th century by hydrating chrome oxide  It was also known as Guignet green 

There is no natural source for green food colorings which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration  Chlorophyll, the E numbers E140 and E141, is the most common green chemical found in nature, and only allowed in certain medicines and cosmetic materials Quinoline Yellow (E104) is a commonly used coloring in the United Kingdom but is banned in Australia, Japan, Norway and the United States Green S (E142) is prohibited in many countries, for it is known to cause hyperactivity, asthma, urticaria, and insomnia To create green sparks, fireworks use barium salts, such as barium chlorate, barium nitrate crystals, or barium chloride, also used for green fireplace logs  Copper salts typically burn blue, but cupric chloride (also known as "campfire blue") can also produce green flames  Green pyrotechnic flares can use a mix ratio 75:25 of boron and potassium nitrate  Smoke can be turned green by a mixture: solvent yellow 33, solvent green 3, lactose, magnesium carbonate plus sodium carbonate added to potassium chlorate 

Biology
Green is common in nature, as many plants  are green because of a complex chemical known as chlorophyll, which is involved in photosynthesis  Chlorophyll absorbs the long wavelengths of light (red) and short wavelengths of light (blue) much more efficiently than the wavelengths that appear green to the human eye, so light reflected by plants is enriched in green 
Chlorophyll absorbs green light poorly because it first arose in organisms living in oceans where purple halobacteria were already exploiting photosynthesis  Their purple color arose because they extracted energy in the green portion of the spectrum using bacteriorhodopsin  The new organisms that then later came to dominate the extraction of light were selected to exploit those portions of the spectrum not used by the halobacteria 

Animals typically use the color green as camouflage, blending in with the chlorophyll green of the surrounding environment  Most fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds appear green because of a reflection of blue light coming through an over-layer of yellow pigment  Perception of color can also be affected by the surrounding environment  For example, broadleaf forests typically have a yellow-green light about them as the trees filter the light  Turacoverdin is one chemical which can cause a green hue in birds, especially  Invertebrates such as insects or mollusks often display green colors because of porphyrin pigments, sometimes caused by diet  This can causes their feces to look green as well  Other chemicals which generally contribute to greenness among organisms are flavins (lychochromes) and hemanovadin  Humans have imitated this by wearing green clothing as a camouflage in military and other fields  Substances that may impart a greenish hue to one's skin include biliverdin, the green pigment in bile, and ceruloplasmin, a protein that carries copper ions in chelation 
The green huntsman spider is green due to the presence of bilin pigments in the spider's hemolymph (circulatory system fluids) and tissue fluids 
It hunts insects in green vegetation, where it is well camouflaged 

Green eyes
There is no green pigment in green eyes; like the color of blue eyes, it is an optical illusion; its appearance is caused by the combination of an amber or light brown pigmentation of the stroma, given by a low or moderate concentration of melanin, with the blue tone imparted by the Rayleigh scattering of the reflected light Nobody is brought into the world with green eyes  An infant has one of two eye hues: dark or blue  Following birth, cells called melanocytes start to discharge melanin, the earthy colored shade, in the child's irises  This begins happening since melanocytes respond to light in time 
Green eyes are most common in Northern and Central Europe 
They can also be found in Southern Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia  In Iceland, 89% of women and 87% of men have either blue or green eye color 
A study of Icelandic and Dutch adults found green eyes to be much more prevalent in women than in men 
Among European Americans, green eyes are most common among those of recent Celtic and Germanic ancestry, about 16% 

In history and art
Prehistoric history
Neolithic cave paintings do not have traces of green pigments, but neolithic peoples in northern Europe did make a green dye for clothing, made from the leaves of the birch tree  It was of very poor quality, more brown than green  Ceramics from ancient Mesopotamia show people wearing vivid green costumes, but it is not known how the colors were produced 

Ancient history
In Ancient Egypt, green was the symbol of regeneration and rebirth, and of the crops made possible by the annual flooding of the Nile  For painting on the walls of tombs or on papyrus, Egyptian artists used finely ground malachite, mined in the west Sinai and the eastern desert; a paintbox with malachite pigment was found inside the tomb of King Tutankhamun  They also used less expensive green earth pigment, or mixed yellow ochre and blue azurite  To dye fabrics green, they first colored them yellow with dye made from saffron and then soaked them in blue dye from the roots of the woad plant For the ancient Egyptians, green had very positive associations  The hieroglyph for green represented a growing papyrus sprout, showing the close connection between green, vegetation, vigor and growth  In wall paintings, the ruler of the underworld, Osiris, was typically portrayed with a green face, because green was the symbol of good health and rebirth  Palettes of green facial makeup, made with malachite, were found in tombs  It was worn by both the living and the dead, particularly around the eyes, to protect them from evil  Tombs also often contained small green amulets in the shape of scarab beetles made of malachite, which would protect and give vigor to the deceased  It also symbolized the sea, which was called the "Very Green" In Ancient Greece, green and blue were sometimes considered the same color, and the same word sometimes described the color of the sea and the color of trees  The philosopher Democritus described two different greens: chloron, or pale green, and prasinon, or leek green  Aristotle considered that green was located midway between black, symbolizing the earth, and white, symbolizing water  However, green was not counted among the four classic colors of Greek painting – red, yellow, black and white – and is rarely found in Greek art The Romans had a greater appreciation for the color green; it was the color of Venus, the goddess of gardens, vegetables and vineyards  The Romans made a fine green earth pigment that was widely used in the wall paintings of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Lyon, Vaison-la-Romaine, and other Roman cities  They also used the pigment verdigris, made by soaking copper plates in fermenting wine  By the second century AD, the Romans were using green in paintings, mosaics and glass, and there were ten different words in Latin for varieties of green 

Postclassical history
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the color of clothing showed a person's social rank and profession  Red could only be worn by the nobility, brown and gray by peasants, and green by merchants, bankers and the gentry and their families  The Mona Lisa wears green in her portrait, as does the bride in the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck 
There were no good vegetal green dyes which resisted washing and sunlight for those who wanted or were required to wear green  Green dyes were made out of the fern, plantain, buckthorn berries, the juice of nettles and of leeks, the digitalis plant, the broom plant, the leaves of the fraxinus, or ash tree, and the bark of the alder tree, but they rapidly faded or changed color  Only in the 16th century was a good green dye produced, by first dyeing the cloth blue with woad, and then yellow with Reseda luteola, also known as yellow-weed The pigments available to painters were more varied; monks in monasteries used verdigris, made by soaking copper in fermenting wine, to color medieval manuscripts  They also used finely-ground malachite, which made a luminous green  They used green earth colors for backgrounds 
During the early Renaissance, painters such as Duccio di Buoninsegna learned to paint faces first with a green undercoat, then with pink, which gave the faces a more realistic hue



ground_truth: 2016

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: In 1990, who became the president of the country that Germany invaded?

The following are given passages.
Context 3:  Over the centuries the pink has faded, making some of the faces look green 

Modern history
In the 18th and 19th century
The 18th and 19th centuries brought the discovery and production of synthetic green pigments and dyes, which rapidly replaced the earlier mineral and vegetable pigments and dyes  These new dyes were more stable and brilliant than the vegetable dyes, but some contained high levels of arsenic, and were eventually banned 
In the 18th and 19th centuries, green was associated with the romantic movement in literature and art  The German poet and philosopher Goethe declared that green was the most restful color, suitable for decorating bedrooms  Painters such as John Constable and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot depicted the lush green of rural landscapes and forests  Green was contrasted to the smoky grays and blacks of the Industrial Revolution 
The second half of the 19th century saw the use of green in art to create specific emotions, not just to imitate nature  One of the first to make color the central element of his picture was the American artist James McNeill Whistler, who created a series of paintings called "symphonies" or "noctures" of color, including Symphony in gray and green; The Ocean between 1866 and 1872 
The late 19th century also brought the systematic study of color theory, and particularly the study of how complementary colors such as red and green reinforced each other when they were placed next to each other  These studies were avidly followed by artists such as Vincent van Gogh  Describing his painting, The Night Cafe, to his brother Theo in 1888, Van Gogh wrote: "I sought to express with red and green the terrible human passions  The hall is blood red and pale yellow, with a green billiard table in the center, and four lamps of lemon yellow, with rays of orange and green  Everywhere it is a battle and antithesis of the most different reds and greens "

In the 20th and 21st century
In the 1980s green became a political symbol, the color of the Green Party in Germany and in many other European countries  It symbolized the environmental movement, and also a new politics of the left which rejected traditional socialism and communism  (See § In politics section below )

Symbolism and associations
Safety and permission
Green can communicate safety to proceed, as in traffic lights  Green and red were standardized as the colors of international railroad signals in the 19th century  The first traffic light, using green and red gas lamps, was erected in 1868 in front of the Houses of Parliament in London  It exploded the following year, injuring the policeman who operated it  In 1912, the first modern electric traffic lights were put up in Salt Lake City, Utah  Red was chosen largely because of its high visibility, and its association with danger, while green was chosen largely because it could not be mistaken for red  Today green lights universally signal that a system is turned on and working as it should  In many video games, green signifies both health and completed objectives, opposite red 

Nature, vivacity, and life
Green is the color most commonly associated in Europe and the United States with nature, vivacity and life 
It is the color of many environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, and of the Green Parties in Europe  Many cities have designated a garden or park as a green space, and use green trash bins and containers  A green cross is commonly used to designate pharmacies in Europe 
In China, green is associated with the east, with sunrise, and with life and growth  In Thailand, the color green is considered auspicious for those born on a Wednesday (light green for those born at night) 

Springtime, freshness, and hope
Green is the color most commonly associated in the United States and Europe with springtime, freshness, and hope  Green is often used to symbolize rebirth and renewal and immortality  In Ancient Egypt; the god Osiris, king of the underworld, was depicted as green-skinned  Green as the color of hope is connected with the color of springtime; hope represents the faith that things will improve after a period of difficulty, like the renewal of flowers and plants after the winter season 

Youth and inexperience
Green the color most commonly associated in Europe and the United States with youth  It also often is used to describe anyone young, inexperienced, probably by the analogy to immature and unripe fruit  Examples include green cheese, a term for a fresh, unaged cheese, and greenhorn, an inexperienced person 

Food and diet
The color green has been increasingly used by food companies, governments, and practitioners themselves to identify veganism and vegetarianism  The government of India requires food that is vegetarian to be marked with a green circle as part of the Food Safety and Standards Act of 2006 with changes to symbolism since but still maintaining the color green  In 2021, India introduced a green V to exclusively label vegan options  In the west, the V-Label, a green V designed by the European Vegetarian Union, has been used by food distributors to label vegan and vegetarian options 

Calm, tolerance, and the agreeable
Surveys also show that green is the color most associated with the calm, the agreeable, and tolerance  Red is associated with heat, blue with cold, and green with an agreeable temperature  Red is associated with dry, blue with wet, and green, in the middle, with dampness  Red is the most active color, blue the most passive; green, in the middle, is the color of neutrality and calm, sometimes used in architecture and design for these reasons 
Blue and green together symbolize harmony and balance  Experimental studies also show this calming effect in a statistical significant decrease of negative emotions
and increase of creative performance 

Jealousy and envy
Green is often associated with jealousy and envy  The expression "green-eyed monster" was first used by William Shakespeare in Othello: "it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on " Shakespeare also used it in the Merchant of Venice, speaking of "green-eyed jealousy" 

Love and sexuality
Green today is not commonly associated in Europe and the United States with love and sexuality, but in stories of the medieval period it sometimes represented love and the base, natural desires of man  It was the color of the serpent in the Garden of Eden who caused the downfall of Adam and Eve  However, for the troubadours, green was the color of growing love, and light green clothing was reserved for young women who were not yet married In Persian and Sudanese poetry, dark-skinned women, called "green" women, were considered erotic  The Chinese term for cuckold is "to wear a green hat " This was because in ancient China, prostitutes were called "the family of the green lantern" and a prostitute's family would wear a green headscarf In Victorian England, the color green was associated with homosexuality 

Dragons, fairies, monsters, and devils
In legends, folk tales and films, fairies, dragons, monsters, and the devil are often shown as green 
In the Middle Ages, the devil was usually shown as either red, black or green  Dragons were usually green, because they had the heads, claws and tails of reptiles 
Modern Chinese dragons are also often green, but unlike European dragons, they are benevolent; Chinese dragons traditionally symbolize potent and auspicious powers, particularly control over water, rainfall, hurricane, and floods  The dragon is also a symbol of power, strength, and good luck  The Emperor of China usually used the dragon as a symbol of his imperial power and strength  The dragon dance is a popular feature of Chinese festivals 
In Irish folklore and English folklore, the color was sometimes was associated with witchcraft, and with faeries and spirits  The type of Irish fairy known as a leprechaun is commonly portrayed wearing a green suit, though before the 20th century he was usually described as wearing a red suit 
In theater and film, green was often connected with monsters and the inhuman  The earliest films of Frankenstein were in black and white, but in the poster for the 1935 version The Bride of Frankenstein, the monster had a green face  Actor Bela Lugosi wore green-hued makeup for the role of Dracula in the 1927–1928 Broadway stage production 

Poison and sickness
Like other common colors, green has several completely opposite associations  While it is the color most associated by Europeans and Americans with good health, it is also the color most often associated with toxicity and poison  There was a solid foundation for this association; in the nineteenth century several popular paints and pigments, notably verdigris, vert de Schweinfurt and vert de Paris, were highly toxic, containing copper or arsenic  The intoxicating drink absinthe was known as "the green fairy" 
A green tinge in the skin is sometimes associated with nausea and sickness  The expression 'green at the gills' means appearing sick  The color, when combined with gold, is sometimes seen as representing the fading of youth  In some Far East cultures the color green is used as a symbol of sickness or nausea 

Social status, prosperity and the dollar
Green in Europe and the United States is sometimes associated with status and prosperity  From the Middle Ages to the 19th century it was often worn by bankers, merchants country gentlemen and others who were wealthy but not members of the nobility  The benches in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, where the landed gentry sat, are colored green 
In the United States green was connected with the dollar bill  Since 1861, the reverse side of the dollar bill has been green  Green was originally chosen because it deterred counterfeiters, who tried to use early camera equipment to duplicate banknotes  Also, since the banknotes were thin, the green on the back did not show through and muddle the pictures on the front of the banknote  Green continues to be used because the public now associates it with a strong and stable currency One of the more notable uses of this meaning is found in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz  The Emerald City in this story is a place where everyone wears tinted glasses that make everything appear green  According to the populist interpretation of the story, the city's color is used by the author, L  Frank Baum, to illustrate the financial system of America in his day, as he lived in a time when America was debating the use of paper money versus gold 

On flags
The flag of Italy (1797) was modeled after the French tricolor  It was originally the flag of the Cisalpine Republic, whose capital was Milan; red and white were the colors of Milan, and green was the color of the military uniforms of the army of the Cisalpine Republic  Other versions say it is the color of the Italian landscape, or symbolizes hope 
The flag of Brazil has a green field adapted from the flag of the Empire of Brazil  The green represented the royal family 
The flag of India was inspired by an earlier flag of the independence movement of Gandhi, which had a red band for Hinduism and a green band representing Islam, the second largest religion in India 
The flag of Pakistan symbolizes Pakistan's commitment to Islam and equal rights of religious minorities where the larger portion (3:2 ratio) of flag is dark green representing Muslim majority (98% of total population) while a white vertical bar (3:1 ratio) at the mast representing equal rights for religious minorities and minority religions in country  The crescent and star symbolizes progress and bright future respectively 
The Flag of Bangladesh has a green field based on a similar flag used during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971  It consists of a red disc on top of a green field  The red disc represents the sun rising over Bengal, and also the blood of those who died for the independence of Bangladesh  The green field stands for the lushness of the land of Bangladesh 
The flag of the international constructed language Esperanto has a green field and a green star in a white area  The green represents hope ("esperanto" means "one who hopes"), the white represents peace and neutrality and the star represents the five inhabited continents Green is one of the three colors (along with red and black, or red and gold) of Pan-Africanism  Several African countries thus use the color on their flags, including Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, Togo, Guinea, Benin, and Zimbabwe  The Pan-African colors are borrowed from the Ethiopian flag, one of the oldest independent African countries  Green on some African flags represents the natural richness of Africa Many flags of the Islamic world are green, as the color is considered sacred in Islam (see below)  The flag of Hamas, as well as the flag of Iran, is green, symbolizing their Islamist ideology  The 1977 flag of Libya consisted of a simple green field with no other characteristics  It was the only national flag in the world with just one color and no design, insignia, or other details  Some countries used green in their flags to represent their country's lush vegetation, as in the flag of Jamaica, and hope in the future, as in the flags of Portugal and Nigeria  The green cedar of Lebanon tree on the Flag of Lebanon officially represents steadiness and tolerance 

Green is a symbol of Ireland, which is often referred to as the "Emerald Isle"  The color is particularly identified with the republican and nationalist traditions in modern times  It is used this way on the flag of the Republic of Ireland, in balance with white and the Protestant orange  Green is a strong trend in the Irish holiday St  Patrick's Day 

In politics
The first recorded green party was a political faction in Constantinople during the 6th century Byzantine Empire  which took its name from a popular chariot racing team  They were bitter opponents of the blue faction, which supported Emperor Justinian I and which had its own chariot racing team  In 532 AD rioting between the factions began after one race, which led to the massacre of green supporters and the destruction of much of the center of Constantinople  (See Nika Riots) 
Green was the traditional color of Irish nationalism, beginning in the 17th century  The green harp flag, with a traditional gaelic harp, became the symbol of the movement  It was the banner of the Society of United Irishmen, which organized the ultimately unsuccessful Irish Rebellion of 1798  When Ireland achieved independence in 1922, green was incorporated into the national flag In the 1970s green became the color of the third biggest Swiss Federal Council political party, the Swiss People's Party SVP  The ideology is Swiss nationalism, national conservatism, right-wing populism, economic liberalism, agrarianism, isolationism, euroscepticism  The SVP was founded on September 22, 1971 and has 90,000 members In the 1980s green became the color of a number of new European political parties organized around an agenda of environmentalism  Green was chosen for its association with nature, health, and growth  The largest green party in Europe is Alliance '90/The Greens (German: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) in Germany, which was formed in 1993 from the merger of the German Green Party, founded in West Germany in 1980, and Alliance 90, founded during the Revolution of 1989–1990 in East Germany  In the 2009 federal elections, the party won 11% of the votes and 68 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag 
Green parties in Europe have programs based on ecology, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and social justice  Green parties are found in over one hundred countries, and most are members of the Global Green Network Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization which emerged from the anti-nuclear and peace movements in the 1970s  Its ship, the Rainbow Warrior, frequently tried to interfere with nuclear tests and whaling operations  The movement now has branches in forty countries 
The Australian Greens was founded in 1992  In the 2010 federal election, the party received 13% of the vote (more than 1 6 million votes) in the Senate, a first for any Australian minor party 
Green is the color associated with Puerto Rico's Independence Party, the smallest of that country's three major political parties, which advocates Puerto Rican independence from the United States 
In Taiwan, green is used by Democratic Progressive Party  Green in Taiwan associates with Taiwan independence movement 

In religion
Green is the traditional color of Islam  According to tradition, the robe and banner of Muhammad were green, and according to the Koran (XVIII, 31 and LXXVI, 21) those fortunate enough to live in paradise wear green silk robes  Muhammad is quoted in a hadith as saying that "water, greenery, and a beautiful face" were three universally good things  Green was accordingly adopted as a Shi'a color Al-Khidr ("The Green One"), was an important Qur'anic figure who was said to have met and traveled with Moses  He was given that name because of his role as a diplomat and negotiator  Green was also considered to be the median color between light and obscurity Roman Catholic and more traditional Protestant clergy wear green vestments at liturgical celebrations during Ordinary Time  In the Eastern Catholic Church, green is the color of Pentecost  Green is one of the Christmas colors as well, possibly dating back to pre-Christian times, when evergreens were worshiped for their ability to maintain their color through the winter season  Romans used green holly and evergreen as decorations for their winter solstice celebration called Saturnalia, which eventually evolved into a Christmas celebration  In Ireland and Scotland especially, green is used to represent Catholics, while orange is used to represent Protestantism  This is shown on the national flag of Ireland 
In Paganism, green represents abundance, growth, wealth, renewal, and balance  In magickal practices, green is often used to bring money and luck  One figure who shares parallels with various deities is the Green Man 

In gambling and sports
Gambling tables in a casino are traditionally green  The tradition is said to have started in gambling rooms in Venice in the 16th century 
Billiards tables are traditionally covered with green woolen cloth  The first indoor tables, dating to the 15th century, were colored green after the grass courts used for the similar lawn games of the period 
Green was the traditional color worn by hunters in the 19th century, particularly the shade called hunter green  In the 20th century most hunters began wearing the color olive drab, a shade of green, instead of hunter green 
Green is a common color for sports teams  Well-known teams include A S  Saint-Étienne of France, known as Les Verts (The Greens)  The Green Bay Packers, an American football team, has the color in its official name and wears green uniforms  A number of national soccer teams feature the color, with the color usually reflective of the teams' national flag 
British racing green was the international motor racing color of Britain from the early 1900s until the 1960s, when it was replaced by the colors of the sponsoring automobile companies 
A green belt in karate, taekwondo, and judo symbolizes a level of proficiency in the sport 

Idioms and expressions
Having a green thumb (American English) or green fingers (British English)  To be passionate about or talented at gardening  The expression was popularized beginning in 1925 by a BBC gardening program 
Greenhorn  Someone who is inexperienced 
Green-eyed monster  Refers to jealousy  (See section above on jealousy and envy) 
Greenmail  A term used in finance and corporate takeovers  It refers to the practice of a company paying a high price to buy back shares of its own stock to prevent an unfriendly takeover by another company or businessman  It originated in the 1980s on Wall Street, and originates from the green of dollars 
Green room  A room at a theater where actors rest when not onstage, or a room at a television studio where guests wait before going on-camera  It originated in the late 17th century from a room of that color at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London 
Greenwashing  Environmental activists sometimes use this term to describe the advertising of a company which promotes its positive environmental practices to cover up its environmental destruction 
Green around the gills  A description of a person who looks physically ill 
Going green  An expression commonly used to refer to preserving the natural environment, and participating in activities such as recycling materials 
Looking green  A description of a person who looks revolted or repulsed 

Notes
See also
Shades of green
Green pigments



ground_truth: Lech Wałęsa