Hispanic Dialectology and Comparative Romance Linguistics

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Before we start looking at dialectal differences on the Hispanic peninsula, it has to be a good idea to find an answer to the question, what is a language and what is a dialect? This is actually a subject of furious debate among purists, separatists, revolutionaries and small-minded, bigoted idiots worldwide, but whichever conclusions we arrive at over the next few sentences we know at least one thing for sure, namely that Spain in particular has plenty of them, whether they are dialects, languages, linguistic birthmarks or simply collections of words and grammatical rules.

To start with there's Castilian. Now that's definitely a language. Even Franco admitted that. Catalan and Galician (gallego) are also languages nowadays. Now Franco would not have liked that. He'd have you fined a fiver on-the-spot in the sixties for just speaking Catalan on the street. Then again, at least just speaking a language or dialect didn't get you shot. You had to have an opinion to get that far; thank heaven for small mercies, as the Roman Catholics used to say: We haven't forgotten about Basque by the way -it's just so bloody difficult we need time to work towards it!

Catalan is spoken outside of Catalunya/Cataluña/Catalonia by many, and is used especially in business matters, although you'll find it takes preference over Castilian in conversations between locals throughout Catalunya, and also Valencia and the Balearic islands where it is spoken but with some notable differences, particularly in orthography and historical place names, where the definite article and combinations of articles and prepositions are quite different, for example.

Galician is often seen as a dialect of Portuguese rather than Spanish, and many Galicians find dialects of Portuguese easier to understand than those of Spain! If this seems strange, think of how geographical separation makes dialects or accents more alien in your own country; it is quite normal for people at one end of a country to be acutely sensitive to minute differences in pronunciation within their own region, and equally insensitive to the same at the other end it, often to the extent of tarring huge numbers of dialects with the same linguistic brush: many people in London, for example would be unable to distinguish between speakers from North, South and West Yorkshire, those of East and West Lancashire, and parts of Cheshire and Derbyshire, lumping them all together as northerners or more pejoratively, bloody provincials.

A dialect is either a deviation from or a corruption of standard speech, depending on your point of view and whether such a standard can actually be ascertained. Germany, for example, is full of dialects and despite the existence of Hoch Deutsch (high German), nobody is really totally sure of how to speak properly, even in the age of Teutonic world domination via the Euro and those interfering little beggars in Brussels! In Spain, Asturian, Leonese, Asturo-Leonese, Arragonese and Andaluz are all dialects which we shall look at later. There is obviously a lot of overlap between them, and particularly where two, or three regions meet. As a point of comparison, we might take the accents of Runcorn, Widnes and Warrington (dubbed woolyback accents by Scousers who associate the rednecks who are afflicted with them with sheep-shagging!), as set against big brothers or sisters, Mancunian and Liverpudlian.

Dialect study often plays a leading role in helping us to understand otherwise apparently inexplicable phenomena; for example, in Germanic linguistics Verner's Law addresses variations in orthographic representation by looking at regional changes in pitch accent in association with stress accent on the root syllable or suffix. It is important not to confuse dialect with accent: people can have completely different local accents but still speak the same dialect. You could consider, say, the Queen's English to be a dialect just as much as the speech of Lancashire, Newcastle, Yorkshire or the East End of London, in all of which places one comes across many cases of local syntax (eg off of in Cockney), regional lexis (eg summit/summet for something in Lancashire, almost standard on Coronation Street) and different usage (eg while for until in Yorkshire). It is these distinctive markers which go beyond accent and give local speech linguistic character as well as colour.

Before diving in at the deep end with some Classical and vulgar Latin for some help with derivation, roots and dialectal development patterns there are a couple of points worth mentioning while still on the general subject of dialects. Firstly, they are not bound by hard-and-fast rules like languages are and generally exist predominantly in spoken form, which is why we have chosen to use phonemic rather than phonetic transcriptions in this work. Obviously, dialects follow patterns and many of these can be traced straight back to Latin and, in a sense can be sometimes considered as a purer form of expression; fortunately, Spanish is pretty much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) - it does not suffer from more recent pompous Latinisation by academicians such as those of the Académie Française in the nineteenth century - who, incidentally got it all wrong and if you'll pardon the expression were entirely up their own arses.

The other important thing about dialects is that they're not just accents. A Galician may also speak Castilian with an Galician accent, but you can't accuse him of speaking to you in a foreign language (gallego) just for  that. Galician often has more in common with modern Lisbonese than Castilian; take for example the non-diphthongization of Classical Latin short O (Ŏ): MŎRIT > more (Galician), > muere (Spanish). Compare morre (Portuguese) and mor (Catalan).

Other Hispanic dialects also often differ in phonological development from standard Spanish. Latin intervocalic CT for example palatalizes to ch in Castilian eg PĚCTU(S) > pecho (chest), but becomes pieito in Aragonese and Leonese. Compare with pit (Catalan), petto (Italian), peito (Portuguese) and pechs (Provençal). The words for well and leaf illustrate a similar phenomenon re: C.L. ŎD and ŎL respectively: PŎDIU > poyo (Spanish) but pueyo (Aragonese and Leonese) cf puig (Catalan) and pog/poi (Provençal), and FŎLIA > hoja (Spanish) but fuella (Aragonese and Leonese) cf folha (Portuguese and Provençal and fulla in Catalan.

Portuguese often offers us an earlier stage of phonological development in Castilian; we shall use the first example above to illustrate this:

PĚCTU(S) > [péktu > péxto > péjto (Portuguese) > péĉo (Spanish)

And now for the dreaded Basque: In Northern Spain and South West France there are as many as one million speakers of this peculiar language. What makes it most peculiar is its utter isolation from every other language in the whole wide world. Philologists have tried in vain to tie it in with a number of now extinct dialects and languages over the years. One of these was Etruscan, and another Sumerian. Whichever way, it is certain that Basque pre-dated the arrival of the Romans.