Astur-Leonese linguistic group
| Astur-Leonese | |
|---|---|
| Asturllionés | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Spain (in the autonomous communities of Asturias, northwestern Castile and León and Cantabria) and small border areas in northeastern Portugal. |
| Linguistic classification: |
Indo-European
|
| Subdivisions: |
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| Glottolog: |
astu1244 (Asturo-Leonese) extr1243 (Extremaduran) |
Astur-Leonese area
|
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Astur-Leonese is a group of mutually intelligible Romance dialects of the West Iberian branch, including:
In addition:
Leonese (in the sense of the whole linguistic group) was once regarded as an informal dialect (basilect) of Spanish, but in 1906, Ramón Menéndez Pidal showed it was the result of Latin evolution in the Kingdom of León. As is noted by the Spanish scholar Inés Fernández Ordoñez, Menéndez Pidal always maintained the idea that the Spanish language (or the common Spanish language, "la lengua común española", as he sometimes called it) evolved from a Castilian base which would have absorbed, or merged with, Leonese and Aragonese. In that sense, in his works, "Historia de la Lengua Española" (History of the Spanish language) and especially "El español en sus primeros tiempos" (Spanish in its early times), this author explains the stages of this process, taking into account the influence caused in the first steps of the Spanish language, both by the Leonese dialect and the Aragonese dialect, and finally and in last place by Castilian, which, nowadays, due to the political integration process produced during the last eight centuries, has absorbed almost completely to the other two dialects.
Leonese is officially recognised by the Autonomous Community of Castile and León (2006). In Asturias it is protected under the Autonomous Statute legislation and is an optional language at schools, where it is widely studied.
In Portugal, the related Mirandese language is recognized by the Assembly of the Republic as a co-official language along with Portuguese for local matters, and it is taught in public schools in the areas where Mirandese is natively spoken. Initially thought to be a basilect of Portuguese, José Leite de Vasconcelos studied Mirandese and concluded it was a separate language from Portuguese.
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