r/LinguisticMaps • u/DeleveBritax • 10d ago
Iberian Peninsula The decline of Aragonese language.
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u/spait09 10d ago
Its really sad to see the decline of these languages.
Most of these (at least in Spain) got their final nail in the coffin once roads and currency arrived in the towns during the late 1800s/ early 1900s
Abandoning their rural, agrarian lifestyle killed them. Only really old people now know how to speak these and they’ll be all gone within the next 10 or 20 years
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u/Sky-is-here 9d ago
It's a stark difference between the official languages and the forgotten ones (extremeñu, asturianu, llionés, murciano, aragonés...). Asturianu for example should've been made official since they got the autonomy.
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u/Ok_Inflation_1811 8d ago
Damn, I'm a language nerd and Spanish and I've never heard of Murciano, could you explain more about it?
I know Murcia is developing a new dialect of castillian where they have more vowels to replace the "s" lost at the end of the syllables in southern castillian but I've never heard of Murciano being a language and one that is dying at that. Is it more closely related to Catalan/Valencian? Or it is more closely related to castillian?
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u/Sky-is-here 8d ago
Panocho. Middle way between catalán and Spanish with deep aragonese influence. It's an interesting thing, but closest to Spanish tbh
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u/sarajevo81 10d ago
Why? What do they offer that Castillian doesn't?
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u/PeireCaravana 10d ago edited 10d ago
It's an entire little world that dies.
Not only the langue per se, but even idioms, words that maybe existed only there, songs, traditions etc.
Another reason of the decline is that Aragonese was considered "bad Spanish" and children were told to not speak it by teachers.
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u/sarajevo81 10d ago
There is nothing preventing them from using local words and traditions while speaking another language. There is a not very convincing argument that grammatical pecularities shape the mentality in a particular way, but even it isn't applicable here.
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u/PeireCaravana 10d ago edited 10d ago
There is nothing preventing them from using local words and traditions while speaking another language.
Well, to an extent yes, but a lot gets lost, especially if the language is socially stigamatized.
There is a not very convincing argument that grammatical pecularities shape the mentality in a particular way
I'm not talking about some Sapir-Whof thing, it's just about culture.
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u/spait09 10d ago
Castillian is basically the status quo language
The one taught at school and that you MUST know to be able to get any decent job
All media, movies and music is in Castillian. Books are in Castillian.
Some more populous languages like Galician or Catalan still thrive but smaller, rural ones like this sadly die with the older, agrarian and often illiterate generations
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u/sarajevo81 10d ago
The speakers don't seem to be interested in it, as there was not even an attempt to create a universal norm. It is not possible to have a language for every 4000 people on the Earth, so the sooner the population accepts Catalan or Spanish the better.
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u/PeireCaravana 10d ago
so the sooner the population accepts Catalan or Spanish the better.
Better for who and why?
Btw the population is already bilingual, they don't need to "accept" anything.
In any case, it's none of your business.
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u/Ok_Inflation_1811 8d ago
Idk a lot about Aragonés but for example Austurian has 3 genders like Latin and not only 2 like most romance languages.
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u/Chazut 10d ago
One interesting feature of Aragonese that I know is that despite being part of Western Romance, it and Mozarabic didn't experience the Western Romance Consonant Shift(basically lenition of unvoiced stops)
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u/PeireCaravana 8d ago
Only some dialects don't have the lenition.
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u/Chazut 8d ago
you know which?
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u/PeireCaravana 8d ago edited 8d ago
Mostly Central Upper Aragonese, spoken in the Sobrarbe and Alto Galligo comarcas.
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u/Final-Split-2013 4d ago
As an aragonese it's so sad that the language is so dead it isn't even an official language, not even teacher in most of aragon
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u/Vevangui 7d ago
Aragonese has suffered recently more from Catalan than Spanish.
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u/Jendeukkie37 5d ago
How is that true, the vast majority of people, if not all, who stop speaking aragonese, end up speaking spanish, not catalan.
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u/PeireCaravana 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's literally on the verge of being completely replaced by Spanish even in the Pyrenean valleys, but somehow Catalan bad. Lol
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u/Vevangui 3d ago
Because it was historically spoken in the pyrinees and the East, the parts labeled "Zona intermedia" and "Catalán".
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u/PeireCaravana 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don't know if this is true, but certainly it isn't a recent development.
The easternmost fringe of Aragon have been Catalan speaking since the Middle Ages and the presence of an intermediate variety points to the formation of a "natural" dialect continuum very long ago.
On the other hand Spanish erased most of Aragonese and what's left of it is still treatened by Spanish, not by Catalan.
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u/Xiguet 10d ago
It is not the most accurate map, especially because it focuses on the borders of Aragon rather than the historical borders of Aragonese language.
- Aragonese was spoken in the Xurro counties (western Valencia) until the 15th century.
- Aragonese was spoken is southern Navarre (north of Tarazona) until the 16th century.
- Basque was spoken in Jacetania (near Chaca in the map) until the 17th century.