Asturleonese language

Asturleonese (Astur-Leonese; Asturian: Asturlleonés; Spanish: Asturleonés; Portuguese: Asturo-leonês; Mirandese: Asturlhionés) is a Romance language spoken primarily in northwestern Spain, namely in the historical regions and Spain's modern-day autonomous communities of Asturias, northwestern Castile and León and Cantabria, and also in a small neighbouring area of Portugal. The name of the language is largely uncommon among its native speakers, as it forms a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties and therefore it is primarily referred to by various regional glossonyms like Leonese, Cantabrian, Asturian or Mirandese (in Portugal). Extremaduran is sometimes included as well. Asturleonese has been classified by UNESCO as an endangered language, as Asturian is being increasingly replaced by Spanish.

Phylogenetically, Asturleonese belongs to the West Iberian branch of the Romance languages that gradually developed from Vulgar Latin in the old Kingdom of León. The Asturleonese group is typically subdivided into three linguistic areas (Western, Central and Eastern) that form the vertical Asturleonese region, from Asturias, through León, to the north of Portugal and Extremadura. The Cantabrian Montañes in the East and Extremaduran in the South have transitional traits with Spanish (northern Spanish for Cantabrian, southern Spanish for Extremaduran). There are differing degrees of vitality of the language for each region in the area: Asturias and Miranda do Douro have historically been the regions in which Asturleonese has been the best preserved.

Leonese (used interchangeably with Asturleonese) was once regarded as an informal dialect (basilect) that developed from Castilian Spanish, but in 1906, Ramón Menéndez Pidal showed it developed from Latin independently, coming into its earliest distinguishable form in the old Kingdom of León. As is noted by the Spanish scholar Inés Fernández Ordóñez, Menéndez Pidal always maintained 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 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'), Menéndez Pidal explains the stages of this process, taking into account the influence Leonese and Aragonese had on the beginnings of modern Spanish.