Cantabrian dialect
| Cantabrian | |
|---|---|
| Cántabru, montañés | |
| Native to | Spain |
| Region | Autonomous community of Cantabria and Asturian municipalities of Peñamellera Alta, Peñamellera Baja and Ribadedeva. |
|
Native speakers
|
3,000 (2011) |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Cantabrian (cántabru, in Cantabrian) is a group of dialects belonging to Astur-Leonese. It is indigenous to the territories in and surrounding the Autonomous Community of Cantabria, in Northern Spain.
Traditionally, some dialects of this group have been further grouped by the name Montañés (that is, from the Mountain), being "La Montaña" (the Mountain) a traditional name for Cantabria due to its mountainous orography.
These dialects belong to the Northwestern Iberian dialect continuum, and have been classified as belonging to the Astur-Leonese domain by successive research works carried out through the 20th century, the first of them, the famous work El dialecto Leonés, by Menéndez Pidal.
This dialect group spans the whole territory of Cantabria. In addition, there is historical evidence of traits (such as toponyms, or certain constructions) linking the speech of some nearby areas to the Cantabrian Astur-Leonese group:
Some of this areas had historically been linked to Cantabria before the 1833 territorial division of Spain, and the creation of the Province of Santander (with the same territory as modern-day's Autonomous Community).
Based on the location on where dialects are spoken, we find a Traditional dialectal division of Cantabria, which normally correspondonds to the different valleys or territories:
However, based on linguistic evidence, R. Molleda proposed what is today the habitual division of dialectal areas in Cantabria. Molleda proposed to take the isogloss of the masculine plural gender morphology, which seems to surround a large portion of Eastern Cantabria, running from the mouth of the Besaya River in the North, and along the Pas-Besaya watershed. He then proceeded to name the resulting areas Western and Eastern, depending on the location to the West or East of the isogloss. This division has gained strength due to the fact that, even though masculine morphology is not a very important difference, many other isoglosses draw the same line.
There are some features in common with Spanish, the main of which is the set of consonants which is nearly identical to that of Northern Iberian Spanish. The only important difference is preservation of the voiceless glottal fricative (/h/) as an evolution of Latin's word initial f- as well as the [x-h] mergers; both feature are common in many Spanish dialects, especially those from Southern Spain and parts of Latin America.
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Wikipedia