# The origin of Andalusian Spanish traits



## Dymn

Well, Andalusian Spanish has some defining characteristics that set it apart from standard European Spanish, e.g. _ceceo/seseo_, frequent drop of intervocalic _d_'s, syllable-final aspiration of _s _and _z_, realization of _j _as /h/, drop of final _r_'s, etc.

My main question is if these traits are just an internal development of the language or if these are the result of the Arabic and Andalusi Romance substrate that was present in the region before the conquest by the Crown of Castile from eight to five centuries ago.

Thanks


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## Penyafort

In my opinion, for such a substrate to have influenced the Castilian brought there, it should have:
1) been still spoken by the time the traits started to develop,
2) existed as a defining trait in those languages,
3) been present too in the Portuguese and Catalan that were brought to previous Andalusi areas.

And we should probably add if it's difficult for those traits to be a result of internal development. And resolve such things as what happened before, the merging of voiced and voiceless sibilants or their deaffrication.


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## Riverplatense

I think that, like usual, this question is difficult to answer. Many of the Andalusian sound shifts can very well be explained without a substrate theory, like the loss of [ð], which is the last natural episode of the lenisation process of [t]. Drop of final [r] goes for Catalan as well, aspiration of /s/ also happened in Ancient Greek (cf. Lat. _semi_-, Gr. _ἡμι_- etc.), even if in other circumstances and the comparison is somehow far-fetched.


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## Dymn

Penyafort said:


> 1) been still spoken by the time the traits started to develop,


Yes, this theory would assume that those traits were the by-product of the local populace abandoning the local Andalusi Romance and adopting Castilian, which assumes most of the population after the Reconquista in those areas was native to the area and settlers from the north didn't have much demographic weight. I don't know the historic veracity of this. I also don't know what part of the Andalusi population spoke Romance dialects and what of them had adopted Arabic. I think in Valencia Arabic had long been imposed as the language of the people.



Penyafort said:


> 3) been present too in the Portuguese and Catalan that were brought to previous Andalusi areas.


Not necessarily since Andalusi Romance dialects were far from homogeneous. It would be ridiculous to state that the ~20% of Iberia that was under Christian control was split into something like five Romance languages while the rest of it spoke a single unitary language, which didn't even fulfill the functions of a literary language. But maybe we should expect some degree of commonalities. The Catalan case is exactly the opposite, Valencian varieties are almost neatly more conservative than Central Catalan, while in Castilian it's the Southern varieties that are more innovative.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

If I understand correctly aren't these Andalusian Spanish traits also present in Latin American Spanish?


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## Dymn

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> If I understand correctly aren't these Andalusian Spanish traits also present in Latin American Spanish?


_Seseo_ yes, _ustedes _as a colloquial pronoun too, these are two of the few unifying traits of Latin American Spanish, and they are also typical of Andalusia. _S-_aspiration depends on the country in Latin America (and it's not necessarily an Andalusian characteristic, it occurs in all of Southern Spanish up to Madrid).

My answer is yes-y, I think many of the Castilian settlers in the Americas were Andalusian. Seville was Castile's port to the Americas.


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## fdb

None of the features mentioned by you is shared by Arabic.


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## Penyafort

Dymn said:


> I also don't know what part of the Andalusi population spoke Romance dialects and what of them had adopted Arabic. I think in Valencia Arabic had long been imposed as the language of the people.



Romance Andalusi should have affected Northern traits rather than southern, as the first towns to be reconquered were in the North, at a time when Andalusi Romance dialects were still widely spoken. By the time the southern ones were reconquered, Arabic had been the only official language for some centuries and the last fluent speakers of Romance had probably died a couple of centuries before. My assumption is that, if it had survived, its state would be close to the one we see in Aragonese these days. Some of the words of Mozarabic origin seem clearly 'Arabianized' when entering the northern Romances. Think of _alberge _or _albérchigo _for the apricot, with those p's becoming b's.



Dymn said:


> Not necessarily since Andalusi Romance dialects were far from homogeneous. It would be ridiculous to state that the ~20% of Iberia that was under Christian control was split into something like five Romance languages while the rest of it spoke a single unitary language, which didn't even fulfill the functions of a literary language. But maybe we should expect some degree of commonalities. The Catalan case is exactly the opposite, Valencian varieties are almost neatly more conservative than Central Catalan, while in Castilian it's the Southern varieties that are more innovative.



I agree. But among these Andalusi commonalities, one probably was the evolution of CE/CI into /tS/, as we see in some words and placenames from all over the area. Things like these help us see that they had nothing to do with the Northern ones, as CE/CI were /ts/ in the rest of Western Romance languages, and their deaffrication into /s/ (or the Castilian interesting accomodation into /θ/ to avoid confusions) were common but independent innovations.


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## jmx

Dymn said:


> Well, Andalusian Spanish has some defining characteristics that set it apart from standard European Spanish, e.g. _ceceo/seseo_, frequent drop of intervocalic _d_'s, syllable-final aspiration of _s _and _z_, realization of _j _as /h/, drop of final _r_'s, etc.
> 
> My main question is if these traits are just an internal development of the language or if these are the result of the Arabic and Andalusi Romance substrate that was present in the region before the conquest by the Crown of Castile from eight to five centuries ago.


Your question seems to be based on the idea that modern Spanish "was born" in northern Spain and then "expanded" southwards, replacing whatever was spoken there before. As I told you in another thread, I don't buy this idea, for which I see no convincing proof.

In addition, you mix up "Andalusian Spanish" and "Southern Spanish", and then you acknowledge that in fact many "Andalusian traits" cover an area that is like 3-4 times the size of Andalusia. A little more of accuracy in the definitions would help.


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## Dymn

jmx said:


> As I told you in another thread, I don't buy this idea, for which I see no convincing proof.


Well I do humbly buy this idea, but it's not the main topic of the thread. Anyway, a relevant question here would be Castilian/Spanish reach Andalusia? Why do people in Burgos and Seville speak the same language? Who adapted to whose language? And if they did, was it the locals, or some kind of resettlement? I think those answers are indeed relevant to the thread.



jmx said:


> In addition, you mix up "Andalusian Spanish" and "Southern Spanish", and then you acknowledge that in fact many "Andalusian traits" cover an area that is like 3-4 times the size of Andalusia. A little more of accuracy in the definitions would help.


In my OP I was just pointing out Andalusian traits that are different from the supposedly standard characterstics, regardless of whether they cover an area which goes way beyond Andalusia's limits. S-aspiration does, and apparently r-dropping is also found in Extremadura.


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## merquiades

I won't attempt to say from what region of Northern Spain Castilian originated. Perhaps it is a hodgepodge with every area contributing something from Palencia, Burgos to La Rioja with Leonese and Aragonese also chiming in a bit. 
However, it seems clear to me that northern Spanish was transmitted to the southern half of Spain by means of (re)conquest, resettlement, colonization, and assimilation, in the same way as it later spread to the Canary Islands and Latin America.  The smothered local vernacular obviously has added a dimension to language and accent.

Most of the quintessential Andalusian phonetic differences you talk about in the original post came about some time after reconquest, but non-existing before.
An interesting theory I have read proposes that original Andalusian had ʃ and ʒ, as well as laminal s and z, which were transposed onto Castilian.  Later changes introduced from northern migration brought about devoicing of ʒ and z, so merger into ʃ and s.  As there was no difference between apical and dental as in Castilian, seseo came into being.  Afterwards realignment of the sibilants which brought people from the north speaking with θ and x, caused ʃ to move back slightly to h, and the unified s to move forward to θ in some areas. That accounts for ceceo developing. As end of syllable -s was pronounced -ʃ originally in Andalusia it also moved to -h when  ʃ moved backwards.  All show a hybrid of action and reaction as ways of speaking from the north moved southward.
Latin (-tt-)> -t- > -d- > -ð- > 0  is an active process in all western Romance languages and has reached the next to last stage in Spanish.  Sometimes Spanish even reaches last position for example cantatis>cantades>cantáis. It's finished in French:  compare la vie/ la vida, la mère/ la madre.  Andalusian has simply gone a bit farther in the race: la via/ la mare.  (By the way it is also interesting that syllable final -s in French also became -h, then later silent with the vowel lengthened then shortened and opened:   Les forests > Leh forehth >Le: fore: > Le forè now written Les forêts.  I'm not saying this has anything to do with Andalusian, just a curiosity of a similar process which happened earlier in French.  A second coincidence is the weakening of tʃ to ʃ  which occurred a long time ago in French but recently in Andalusian and Portuguese)
_Ustedes < vuestra merced _as a verb form came about in the sixteenth century when vos(otros) became more informal.  When _vos_ became the equivalent of _tú_, it was eliminated in Spain.  With _vos_, _vosotros_ was also eliminated in southwest Andalusia leaving _ustedes _as the only plural form.


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## Hulalessar

Dymn said:


> Why do people in Burgos and Seville speak the same language?



That is the key question. If you travel from Seville to Burgos via Madrid there is a smooth dialect continuum. There are no "gaps" as there are between Castilian and Galician or Catalan.

If there were parts of Al-Andalus where no one spoke a Romance language it surely has to follow (given that the Reconquest progressed from north to south) that a Romance variety moved in from the north. If on the other hand Romance varieties were spoken they would have been distinct varieties. If those varieties had not been quickly replaced by a variety from the north they would have survived, if not as strongly as Galician and Catalan, then just have Aragonese and Asturian have. I think the point probably is that the Reconqest was accompanied by significant migration from the north so that that Castilian (and in other areas Catalan) began to dominate.

You can argue about where Castilian was born and indeed that asking where Castilian was born is a meaningless or unanswerable question. However, it is a different question from asking how they speak the same language in Seville and Burgos. Whilst one can argue about detail, it surely has to be the case that there was significant language movement from north to south


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## merquiades

Hulalessar said:


> That is the key question. If you travel from Seville to Burgos via Madrid there is a smooth dialect continuum. There are no "gaps" as there are between Castilian and Galician or
> Catalan.


 I think there is dialect continuum in the North too going from eastern Galician, western Galician, Asturian, Leonese, Castilian, Navarrese, Aragonese, Western Catalan, Eastern Catalan. It's quite comfortable actually. It's just that Castilian has been slowly swallowing up languages/dialects to its right and left. That surely happened southward too we just don't have any record of these Mozarabic languages. Just maybe Ladino.


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## Hulalessar

merquiades said:


> I think there is dialect continuum in the North too going from eastern Galician, western Galician, Asturian, Leonese, Castilian, Navarrese, Aragonese, Western Catalan, Eastern Catalan.



The extremes of this continuum, the constituents of which are historically dialects of Latin, are much further apart than the extremes of the Seville to Burgos continuum, the constituents of which are dialects of Castilian. Indeed, the differences along the latter continuum are mainly phonological and only affect a small range of sounds. That shows that the variety of Romance language spoken in southern Al-Andalus only developed recently and cannot have orignated in the area.

[QUOTE="merquiades, post: 17827318, member: 158270"It's just that Castilian has been slowly swallowing up languages/dialects to its right and left. That surely happened southward too we just don't have any record of these Mozarabic languages. Just maybe Ladino.[/QUOTE]

The question is when the swallowing up took place. The varieties you list did not start to succomb to Castillian until comparatively recently. Castillian moved in but co-existed with them. In southern Al-Andalus Castilian obviously ousted Arabic (expelling the Moors helped that) but it also seems to have replaced Andalusi Romance fairly quickly.

We know a Romance variety or varieties emerged in Southern Spain. They must have been different from the varities in the north. Today there is no trace of them. Either they were replaced by Arabic or Castilian.


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## merquiades

Have a look at some Jarchas, poems written in Romance vernacular in Al-Andalus before the Castilian reconquest.


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## Penyafort

merquiades said:


> I won't attempt to say from what region of Northern Spain Castilian originated. Perhaps it is a hodgepodge with every area contributing something from Palencia, Burgos to La Rioja with Leonese and Aragonese also chiming in a bit



This is what linguists such as Manuel Alvar would write. But he did because he was unwilling to consider Aragonese a language, and regarded the Glosas Emilianenses as one of the first texts in Spanish. The only thing he could do -since as a linguist he noticed that the forms were Aragonese, not Castilian- was saying that Aragonese and Leonese -which he called "dialectos históricos" (a euphemism not to call them languages)- mixed with Castilian to form Spanish. Which is unsustainable, as we know today.  



merquiades said:


> However, it seems clear to me that northern Spanish was transmitted to the southern half of Spain by means of (re)conquest, resettlement, colonization, and assimilation, in the same way as it later spread to the Canary Islands and Latin America.  The smothered local vernacular obviously has added a dimension to language and accent.



Indeed. But everybody is free to have an opinion. I guess there must be some who might also postulate that Spanish was actually born in the Americas.


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## Hulalessar

The development of languages in a given area is complex. It is not simply a case that variety A subdivides into varieties X, Y and Z each of which are self-contained as the tree model suggests, but rather that at various times in different places the varieties will influence each other to different extents and that each variety may be subject to other influences. Accordingly, when trying to work out what has happened it can be difficult to sort it all out, especially when the historical records are scanty and, when available, may not actually be recording the way people are speaking when the record was made. Even so, general trends can be identified and they often coincide with known history. If a language variety is spoken by a large number of people over a wide area with little local variation it oftens indicates that the language spread comparatively recently.

All the available information suggests very strongly that the variety of Spanish spoken in southern Spain is, historically, a northern variety. To reach that conclusion it is not necessary to consider the status of Aragonese. Any old southern varieties have simply failed to survive in the same way that varieties such as Asturian and Aragonese have, even if they are now on the verge of extinction.


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## merquiades

Penyafort said:


> This is what linguists such as Manuel Alvar would write. But he did because he was unwilling to consider Aragonese a language, and regarded the Glosas Emilianenses as one of the first texts in Spanish. The only thing he could do -since as a linguist he noticed that the forms were Aragonese, not Castilian- was saying that Aragonese and Leonese -which he called "dialectos históricos" (a euphemism not to call them languages)- mixed with Castilian to form Spanish. Which is unsustainable, as we know today.


 From reading El Mio Cid and Fernán González and other very old literature, I got the idea that people were travelling around Spain quite a bit in ancient times, from León to Aragón, down to Valencia with soldiers from Palencia and Muslim mercenaries from Al-Andalus.  I can see very easily how a central simplified language with some mixing from everywhere to different extents could develop.  Even admitting Aragonese, Navarese, Leonese, as full-fledged Romance languages doesn't need to discount that.  I remember a professor commenting the language, saying comments about structures being more Aragonese than Castilian, or other words from Galician, influence from Leonese etc.
Sometimes common sense and logic is right.

@Dymn There is more information on Mozarabic than I had imagined.  This wikipedia page  gives good information.  Besides Arabic influence it seems much closer to Latin (or Italian) than Castilian.  It also shows that current "Andalusian" is certainly Castilian, pronunciation traits and all.  For example, Latin c was palatalized to tʃ  before frontal vowels and g to dʒ, intervocalic t,d,k weren't voiced and weakened, initial f- was retained, initial pl didn't become ll, and intervocalic kt didn't become it or tʃ.  However, b and v had the same pronunciation, and s and ʃ often alternated as allophones, ʃ as plural.


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## Penyafort

merquiades said:


> From reading El Mio Cid and Fernán González and other very old literature, I got the idea that people were travelling around Spain quite a bit in ancient times, from León to Aragón, down to Valencia with soldiers from Palencia and Muslim mercenaries from Al-Andalus.  I can see very easily how a central simplified language with some mixing from everywhere to different extents could develop.  Even admitting Aragonese, Navarese, Leonese, as full-fledged Romance languages doesn't need to discount that.  I remember a professor commenting the language, saying comments about structures being more Aragonese than Castilian, or other words from Galician, influence from Leonese etc.



Navarrese and Aragonese are/were the same language.

Personally I don't consider the idea of a central language with mixing from everywhere a logical one, rather an attempt appearing every now and then to justify the expansion of the language spoken in a capital city (or a national court). For Old Castilian, Old Leonese and Old Navarrese/Aragonese to be subsumed into one central Spanish language, we should see traits from the three at an approximately even level, which is not the case at all, specially when comparing Spanish to genuine Aragonese_, _which has got some structures clearly more akin to Catalan and French.

This said, the bond between Castilian and Leonese is a much stronger one than that with Aragonese, which only had a certain continuum aspect in La Rioja.

I agree with a great deal of influence being logical, though. Not only between those three, but with Galician, Catalan, Mozarabic, Arabic and Basque, of course. And Occitan (important transpyrenean migrations) or even Old French too (via St James Way).



merquiades said:


> For example, Latin c was palatalized to tʃ  before frontal vowels and g to dʒ, intervocalic t,d,k weren't voiced and weakened, initial f- was retained, initial pl didn't become ll, and intervocalic kt didn't become it or tʃ.  However, b and v had the same pronunciation, and s and ʃ often alternated as allophones, ʃ as plural.



One thing must always be taken into account with Mozarabic. Most of the Mozarabic we know, if not almost everything, was written in the Arabic script, which poses several difficulties on interpreting how some of those sound were transliterated, specially when it comes to vowels.


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