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The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance [3] or sometimes Iberian languages [note 1] are a group of Romance languages that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, an area consisting primarily of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra and southern France.
Apr 25, 2023 · Ibero-Romance languages are one of many subfamilies within the larger Romance language family. Asturian is predominantly spoken within the autonomous community of the Principality of Asturias...
- Yes, Asturian, the Western Iberian language in northwest Spain, is still spoken today. There are about 709,000 speakers of Asturian in the world to...
- Yes, Spanish is spoken in the Principality of Asturias. It is spoken alongside the Asturian language and its various dialects.
- No, Asturian is not a Celtic language. However, the Asturian people are related to the Celtic people who once lived in the region.
- The Asturians are known for their language, Asturian, as well as other elements of their culture. This includes the gaita asturiana , or Asturian b...
- Overview
- Classification methods and problems
- Languages of the family
Though it is quite clear which languages can be classified as Romance, on the basis primarily of lexical (vocabulary) and morphological (structural) similarities, the subgrouping of the languages within the family is less straightforward. Most classifications are, overtly or covertly, historico-geographic—so that Spanish and Portuguese are Ibero-Romance, French and Franco-Provençal are Gallo-Romance, and so on. Shared features in each subgroup that are not seen in other such groups are assumed to be ultimately traceable to languages spoken before Romanization. The first subdivision of the Romance area is usually into West and East Romance, with a dividing line drawn across Italy between La Spezia and Rimini. On the basis of a few heterogeneous phonetic features, one theory maintains that separation into dialects began early, with the Eastern dialect areas (including central and south Italy) developing popular features and the school-influenced Western speech areas maintaining more literary standards. Beyond this, the substrata (indigenous languages eventually displaced by Latin) and superstrata (languages later superimposed on Latin by conquerors) are held to have occasioned further subdivisions. Within such a schema there remain problem cases. Is Catalan, for instance, Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance, given that its medieval literary language was close to Provençal? Do the Rhaetian dialects group together, even though the dialects found in Italy are closer to Italian and the Swiss ones closer to French? Sardinian is generally regarded as linguistically separate, its isolation from the rest of the Roman Empire by incorporation into the Vandal kingdom in the mid-5th century providing historical support for the thesis. The exact position of Dalmatian in any classification is open to dispute.
A family tree classification is commonly used for the Romance languages. If, however, historical treatment of one phonetic feature is taken as a classificatory criterion for construction of a tree, results differ. Classified according to the historical development of stressed vowels, French would be grouped with North Italian and Dalmatian but not with Occitan, while Central Italian would be isolated. Classifications that are not based on family trees usually involve ranking languages according to degree of differentiation rather than grouping them; thus, if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated and French most (though in vocabulary Romanian has changed most). By most nonhistorical measures, standard Italian is a “central” language (i.e., it is quite close and often readily intelligible to all other Romance languages), whereas French and Romanian are peripheral (they lack similarity to other Romance languages and require more effort for other Romance speakers to understand them).
Though it is quite clear which languages can be classified as Romance, on the basis primarily of lexical (vocabulary) and morphological (structural) similarities, the subgrouping of the languages within the family is less straightforward. Most classifications are, overtly or covertly, historico-geographic—so that Spanish and Portuguese are Ibero-Romance, French and Franco-Provençal are Gallo-Romance, and so on. Shared features in each subgroup that are not seen in other such groups are assumed to be ultimately traceable to languages spoken before Romanization. The first subdivision of the Romance area is usually into West and East Romance, with a dividing line drawn across Italy between La Spezia and Rimini. On the basis of a few heterogeneous phonetic features, one theory maintains that separation into dialects began early, with the Eastern dialect areas (including central and south Italy) developing popular features and the school-influenced Western speech areas maintaining more literary standards. Beyond this, the substrata (indigenous languages eventually displaced by Latin) and superstrata (languages later superimposed on Latin by conquerors) are held to have occasioned further subdivisions. Within such a schema there remain problem cases. Is Catalan, for instance, Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance, given that its medieval literary language was close to Provençal? Do the Rhaetian dialects group together, even though the dialects found in Italy are closer to Italian and the Swiss ones closer to French? Sardinian is generally regarded as linguistically separate, its isolation from the rest of the Roman Empire by incorporation into the Vandal kingdom in the mid-5th century providing historical support for the thesis. The exact position of Dalmatian in any classification is open to dispute.
A family tree classification is commonly used for the Romance languages. If, however, historical treatment of one phonetic feature is taken as a classificatory criterion for construction of a tree, results differ. Classified according to the historical development of stressed vowels, French would be grouped with North Italian and Dalmatian but not with Occitan, while Central Italian would be isolated. Classifications that are not based on family trees usually involve ranking languages according to degree of differentiation rather than grouping them; thus, if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated and French most (though in vocabulary Romanian has changed most). By most nonhistorical measures, standard Italian is a “central” language (i.e., it is quite close and often readily intelligible to all other Romance languages), whereas French and Romanian are peripheral (they lack similarity to other Romance languages and require more effort for other Romance speakers to understand them).
What constitutes a language, as distinct from a dialect, is a vexing question, and opinion varies on just how many Romance languages are spoken today. The political definition of a language—one that is accepted as standard by a nation or people—is the least ambiguous one; according to that definition, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are certainly languages and possibly also Romansh (since 1996 a semiofficial language of Switzerland, probably related to other Rhaetian dialects spoken in Italy) and Catalan (the official language of Andorra and the joint official language [together with Spanish] of the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands). On linguistic grounds Sardinian (not the language of an independent nation since the 14th century) and Occitan (the medieval Provençal) are usually regarded as languages rather than dialects. The Rhaetian dialects of Italy (Ladin in the Dolomites and Friulian around Udine) are sometimes regarded as non-Italian, sometimes as dialects of the Italian language. Sicilian is different enough from northern and central Italian dialects to be given separate status often, but in Italy all neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible, with differences becoming more marked with geographic distance. Franco-Provençal (the name given to a group of dialects spoken around the Alpine region of France and Italy) is often considered to be different from both French and Occitan, though some linguists hold that it is merely a transitional dialect. In the 21st century, few of the French know Franco-Provençal, though it still survives in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta region (where French, rather than Italian, remains the language of culture). Asturian and Galician (both spoken in Spain and Portugal), Corsican (France and Italy), and Piemontese, or Piedmontese (Italy), were once considered dialects of national languages, but by the 21st century they were considered distinct enough from the languages of their respective countries to be granted the status of languages. Other “dialects” also are fighting for “language” status on the basis of their written traditions or the active promotion of their use in writing.
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino (not to be confused with Ladin), was once regarded not as an independent language but as an archaic form of Castilian Spanish preserving many features of the 15th-century language that was current when the Jews were expelled from Spain. There are some 100,000 to 200,000 speakers, mostly originating in the Balkans and Asia Minor but, after World War II, concentrated in Israel; most now reside in Israel, and others live in Turkey.
Some linguists believe that creoles are often different languages from their metropolitan counterparts. Haitian Creole, for instance, is said to be mutually unintelligible with French. Intelligibility varies so much with the speaker and the hearer, however, that it is difficult to formulate firm criteria on that basis.
Many Romance dialects literally or virtually ceased to be spoken in the 20th century. Of these, Dalmatian is the most striking, its last known speaker, one Tuone Udaina (Italian Antonio Udina), having been blown up by a land mine in 1898. He was the main source of knowledge for his parents’ dialect (that of the island of Veglia [modern Krk], though he was hardly an ideal informant. Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents’ private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well. Most of the other evidence for Dalmatian derives from documents from Zara (modern Zadar) and Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) dating to the 13th–16th centuries. It is possible that, apart from isolated pockets, the language was then replaced by Croatian and, to a lesser extent, by Venetian (a dialect of Italian). It is certain, even from scanty evidence, that Dalmatian was a language in its own right, noticeably different from other Romance languages.
On the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia close to the island of Krk, another Romance variety precariously survives with probably fewer than one thousand speakers; known as Istriot, it may be related to Vegliot. Though some scholars connect it with Rhaetian Friulian dialects or with Venetian dialects of Italian, others maintain that it is an independent language. There are no texts except those collected by linguists. A little farther north in the same peninsula, another Romance dialect, Istro-Romanian (with about 300 mother tongue speakers in the second decade of the 21st century), is threatened with extinction. Usually classified as a Romanian dialect, it may have been carried to the Istrian Peninsula by Romanians from the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula who took refuge from the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries; it has undergone strong Croatian influence. The first evidence of its existence is a short list of words in a historical work of 1698; there are also collections of folklore texts from the 19th century, but it is otherwise unwritten. Another isolated Romanian dialect that may be nearing extinction is Megleno-Romanian, spoken mainly in Kilkís prefecture, Greece, just west of the Vardar River, on the border between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece. In 1914 there were 13,000 speakers, but many emigrated to Asia Minor, other parts of what was once Yugoslavia, and Romania, where small pockets survive (they numbered about 5,000 speakers in the early 21st century). The only texts are those transcribed from oral traditions.
Other Romance tongues earlier ceased to be spoken. There is evidence, for instance, of an Ibero-Romance dialect spoken in Arab-occupied Spain until shortly after its reconquest by the Spanish, accomplished at the end of the 15th century. Usually known as Mozarabic, from the Arabic word meaning “Arabized person,” or as ʿajamī (“barbarian language”), it was originally the spoken language of the urban bourgeoisie, who remained Christian while the peasantry generally converted to Islam, but it appears that many Arabs also came to speak Mozarabic. Because most of the evidence, apart from a 15th-century glossary from Granada, is written in Arabic script (which uses no vowel signs), it is difficult to reconstruct the phonology of the language, but it appears to be a very conservative Ibero-Romance dialect. Much of modern information about Mozarabic comes from medical and botanical works that give Mozarabic terms alongside the Arabic. To this was added the discovery of Mozarabic refrains (kharjahs) attached to Arabic love ballads (muwashshaḥs) of the 11th and 12th centuries; study of these began only in 1948. For much of the Muslim period (beginning in 711), Christians were treated tolerantly and became culturally Arabized. Even after persecution by zealous Muslim newcomers in the 12th century, the Mozarabs were often in conflict with Westernized “liberators” from the north. Their language died out soon after the Arabs were driven out of Spain at the end of the 15th century, though it is sometimes claimed that Mozarabic has left its mark on the dialects of southern Spain and Portugal.
West Iberian is a branch of the Ibero-Romance languages that includes the Castilian languages (Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish), Astur-Leonese (Asturian, Leonese, Mirandese, Extremaduran (sometimes) and Cantabrian), [1] [2] and the descendants of Galician-Portuguese.
Historic languages. Pre-Roman languages of Iberia circa 300 BC. The following languages were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman occupation and the spread of the Latin language. Aquitanian (probably closely related to or the same as Proto-Basque) Proto-Basque. Iberian. Tartessian. Indo-European languages. Celtic languages. Celtiberian.
The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages are a group of Romance languages that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, an area consisting primarily of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra and southern France. They are today more commonly separated into West Iberian and Occitano-Romance language groups.
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The Ibero-Romance languages are a subgroup of Romance languages that possibly form a phylogenetic subgroup within the Romance family. The Ibero-Romance languages developed in territories occupied by the Romans around the year 415, that is, the Iberian Peninsula, the south of Gaul and the north of the Maghreb and their subsequent conquests.
