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129-498: Leonese ( Leonese : llionés , Asturian : lleonés ) is a set of vernacular Romance language varieties currently spoken in northern and western portions of the historical region of León in Spain (the modern provinces of León , Zamora , and Salamanca ), the village of Riudenore (in both Spain and Portugal ) and Guadramil in Portugal , sometimes considered another language. In

258-456: A dialect continuum with Cantabrian in the east and Eonavian in the west. While this dialect continuum is for the most part smooth, a number of isoglosses cluster together parallel to the River Purón, linking the dialects of eastern Llanes , Ribadedeva , Peñamellera Alta , and Peñamellera Baja with those of Cantabria and separating them from the rest of Asturias. Cantabrian was listed in

387-625: A "Leonese language" descending from Latin and encompassing two groups: the Asturian dialects on one hand, and dialects spoken in the provinces of León and Zamora in Spain and a related dialect in Trás-os-Montes ( Portugal ), on the other hand. The Asturleonese dialect (considered part of the Leonese dialects) of Miranda do Douro ( Portugal ), Mirandese , is most certainly a dialect on its own, considering

516-549: A determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) //D// . Further mergers in English are plosives after /s/ , where /p, t, k/ conflate with /b, d, ɡ/ , as suggested by the alternative spellings sketti and sghetti . That is, there is no particular reason to transcribe spin as /ˈspɪn/ rather than as /ˈsbɪn/ , other than its historical development, and it might be less ambiguously transcribed //ˈsBɪn// . A morphophoneme

645-462: A given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example. The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence . A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters ( digraph , trigraph , etc. ), like ⟨sh⟩ in English or ⟨sch⟩ in German (both representing

774-594: A government agency to promote minority languages and a nongovernmental agency in an advisory capacity in matters pertaining to minority languages. The Academy of the Asturian Language has sponsored linguistic and sociolinguistic research, which encompasses the non-Asturian dialects of Asturian-Leonese. Two congresses about Leonese have been held, at which the following measures were proposed to move towards language standardization: For about 15 years cultural associations have offered Leonese-language courses, sometimes with

903-502: A large copy of rare languages, as Portuguese, Galician, Asturian, Catalan, Valencian, French, Tuscan..." Modern Asturian literature began in 1605 with the clergyman Antón González Reguera and continued until the 18th century (when it produced, according to Ruiz de la Peña in 1981, a literature comparable to that in Asturias in Castilian). In 1744, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos wrote about

1032-563: A malo. Amen Although Spanish is the official language of all schools in Asturias, in many schools children are allowed to take Asturian-language classes from age 6 to 16. Elective classes are also offered from 16 to 19. Central Asturias ( Nalón and Caudal comarcas ) has the largest percentage of Asturian-language students, with almost 80 percent of primary-school students and 30 percent of secondary-school students in Asturian classes. Xixón , Uviéu , Eo-Navia and Oriente also have an increased number of students. According to article six of

1161-814: A movement for the language's acceptance and use began in Asturias. Based on ideas of the Asturian association Conceyu Bable about Asturian language and culture, a plan was developed for the acceptance and modernization of the language that led to the 1980 creation of the Academy of the Asturian Language with the approval of the Asturias regional council. El Surdimientu (the Awakening) authors such as Manuel Asur (Cancios y poemes pa un riscar) , Xuan Bello (El llibru vieyu) , Adolfo Camilo Díaz (Añada pa un güeyu muertu) , Pablo Antón Marín Estrada (Les hores) , Xandru Fernández (Les ruines) , Lourdes Álvarez , Martín López-Vega , Miguel Rojo and Lluis Antón González broke from

1290-406: A near minimal pair. The reason why this is still acceptable proof of phonemehood is that there is nothing about the additional difference (/r/ vs. /l/) that can be expected to somehow condition a voicing difference for a single underlying postalveolar fricative. One can, however, find true minimal pairs for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ if less common words are considered. For example, ' Confucian ' and 'confusion' are

1419-506: A north-south axis (thus encompassing lands both north and south of the mountains , both in Asturias and in Castile and León ). In the west of Asturias and Leon, dialects of Asturo-Leonese begin to transition into the closely related Galician language , with the westernmost variants effectively constituting dialects of Galician. On the other hand, Menéndez Pidal and fellow scholars discussed

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1548-538: A nós o teu reino e fágase a túa vontade aquí na terra coma no ceo. O noso pan cotián dánolo hoxe; e perdóanos as nosas ofensas como tamén perdoamos nós a quen nos ten ofendido; e non nos deixes caer na tentación, mais líbranos do mal. Amén. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, Sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, Sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem: Sed libera nos

1677-483: A phoneme has more than one allophone , the one actually heard at a given occurrence of that phoneme may be dependent on the phonetic environment (surrounding sounds). Allophones that normally cannot appear in the same environment are said to be in complementary distribution . In other cases, the choice of allophone may be dependent on the individual speaker or other unpredictable factors. Such allophones are said to be in free variation , but allophones are still selected in

1806-401: A set (or equivalence class ) of spoken sound variations that are nevertheless perceived as a single basic unit of sound by the ordinary native speakers of a given language. While phonemes are considered an abstract underlying representation for sound segments within words, the corresponding phonetic realizations of those phonemes—each phoneme with its various allophones—constitute

1935-417: A set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes". The linguist F. W. Householder referred to this argument within linguistics as "God's Truth" (i.e. the stance that a given language has an intrinsic structure to be discovered) vs. "hocus-pocus" (i.e. the stance that any proposed, coherent structure

2064-456: A simple /k/ , colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/ , while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and /n/ . During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century, phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. These were central concerns of phonology . Some writers took

2193-435: A single morphophoneme, which might be transcribed (for example) //z// or |z| , and which is realized phonemically as /s/ after most voiceless consonants (as in cat s ) and as /z/ in other cases (as in dog s ). All known languages use only a small subset of the many possible sounds that the human speech organs can produce, and, because of allophony , the number of distinct phonemes will generally be smaller than

2322-512: A single phoneme: the one traditionally represented in the IPA as /t/ . For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters. However, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. For languages whose writing systems employ the phonemic principle , ordinary letters may be used to denote phonemes, although this approach

2451-411: A speaker pronounces /p/ are phonetic and written between brackets, like [p] for the p in spit versus [pʰ] for the p in pit , which in English is an aspirated allophone of /p/ (i.e., pronounced with an extra burst of air). There are many views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of

2580-542: A specific phonetic context, not the other way around. The term phonème (from Ancient Greek : φώνημα , romanized :  phōnēma , "sound made, utterance, thing spoken, speech, language" ) was reportedly first used by A. Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it referred only to a speech sound. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895. The term used by these two

2709-582: A system of metaphony . The phenomenon of -u metaphony is uncommon, as are the falling diphthongs /ei, ou/ , usually in the west. Asturian has always been written in the Latin alphabet. Although the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana published orthographic rules in 1981, different spelling rules are used in Terra de Miranda ( Portugal ). Although they can be written, ḷḷ ( che vaqueira , formerly written " ts ") and

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2838-436: A third, neuter gender, a phenomenon known as matter-neutrality. Verbs agree with their subjects in person (first, second, or third) and number, and are conjugated to indicate mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional or imperative; some others include "potential" in place of future and conditional), tense (often present or past; different moods allow different tenses), and aspect (perfective or imperfective). Asturian

2967-467: A unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification . An archiphoneme is an object sometimes used to represent an underspecified phoneme. An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/ . These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables

3096-452: A valid minimal pair. Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation (such as tone and stress , syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture , nasalization and vowel harmony ), which, in many languages, change the meaning of words and so are phonemic. Phonemic stress is encountered in languages such as English. For example, there are two words spelled invite , one

3225-625: Is a comprehensive manual that can be used in schools to facilitate learning. Additionally, a translator that can translate English, French, Portuguese and Italian, among a few other languages, into Asturian and vice versa is offered online. This software is funded and maintained by members of the University of Oviedo. As with other Romance languages, most Asturian words come from Latin : ablana, agua, falar, güeyu, home, llibru, muyer, pesllar, pexe, prau, suañar . In addition to this Latin basis are words which entered Asturian from languages spoken before

3354-418: Is a purely articulatory system apart from the use of the acoustic term 'sibilant'. In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes. In languages in which tones are phonemic, the tone phonemes may be called tonemes . Though not all scholars working on such languages use these terms, they are by no means obsolete. By analogy with

3483-414: Is a theoretical unit at a deeper level of abstraction than traditional phonemes, and is taken to be a unit from which morphemes are built up. A morphophoneme within a morpheme can be expressed in different ways in different allomorphs of that morpheme (according to morphophonological rules). For example, the English plural morpheme -s appearing in words such as cats and dogs can be considered to be

3612-439: Is a verb and is stressed on the second syllable, the other is a noun and stressed on the first syllable (without changing any of the individual sounds). The position of the stress distinguishes the words and so a full phonemic specification would include indication of the position of the stress: /ɪnˈvaɪt/ for the verb, /ˈɪnvaɪt/ for the noun. In other languages, such as French , word stress cannot have this function (its position

3741-420: Is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of English does not strictly conform to its phonemes, so that the words knot , nut , and gnat , regardless of spelling, all share the consonant phonemes /n/ and /t/ , differing only by their internal vowel phonemes: /ɒ/ , /ʌ/ , and /æ/ , respectively. Similarly, /pʊʃt/ is the notation for a sequence of four phonemes, /p/ , /ʊ/ , /ʃ/ , and /t/ , that together constitute

3870-483: Is an inflecting , fusional , head-initial and dependent-marking language . Its word order is subject–verb–object (in declarative sentences without topicalization ). Asturian distinguishes five vowel phonemes (these same ones are found in Spanish , Aragonese , Sardinian and Basque ), according to three degrees of vowel openness (close, mid and open) and backness (front, central and back). Many Asturian dialects have

3999-641: Is as good as any other). Different analyses of the English vowel system may be used to illustrate this. The article English phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English". Although these figures are often quoted as fact, they actually reflect just one of many possible analyses, and later in

Leonese language - Misplaced Pages Continue

4128-534: Is basically the same as the Asturian spoken in Asturias. The Asturian-Leonese linguistic domain covers most of the principality of Asturias, the northern and western province of León , the northeastern province of Zamora (both in Castile and León), western Cantabria and the Miranda do Douro region in the eastern Bragança District of Portugal. Traditional, popular place names of the principality's towns are supported by

4257-411: Is called a minimal pair for the two alternative phones in question (in this case, [kʰ] and [k] ). The existence of minimal pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. To take another example, the minimal pair t ip and d ip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/ ; since

4386-461: Is fading: " ... It is extended to the regions between the interior area and the Ribera del Órbigo ( Maragatería , Cepeda , Omaña ... ). In Zamora, the region of La Carballeda – with the subregion La Requejada – and Aliste , with at least a part of its adjacent lands ( Alba  [ es ] and Tábara ). This area is characterized by a blur and progressive disappearance, greater as we move to

4515-500: Is generally predictable) and so it is not phonemic (and therefore not usually indicated in dictionaries). Phonemic tones are found in languages such as Mandarin Chinese in which a given syllable can have five different tonal pronunciations: The tone "phonemes" in such languages are sometimes called tonemes . Languages such as English do not have phonemic tone, but they use intonation for functions such as emphasis and attitude. When

4644-417: Is neuter, but Tien un pel u rox u (He has a red hair) is masculine; note the noun's change in ending. Plural formation is complex: Their forms are: Only before words beginning with a- : l’aigla (the eagle), l’alma (the soul). Compare la entrada (the entry) and la islla (the island). The Academy of the Asturian Language has published a grammar describing the Asturian language. It

4773-430: Is notoriously a fire in a wooden stove." This approach was opposed to that of Edward Sapir , who gave an important role to native speakers' intuitions about where a particular sound or group of sounds fitted into a pattern. Using English [ŋ] as an example, Sapir argued that, despite the superficial appearance that this sound belongs to a group of three nasal consonant phonemes (/m/, /n/ and /ŋ/), native speakers feel that

4902-408: Is often imperfect, as pronunciations naturally shift in a language over time, rendering previous spelling systems outdated or no longer closely representative of the sounds of the language (see § Correspondence between letters and phonemes below). A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example

5031-492: Is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments. Referring to mentalistic definitions of the phoneme, Twaddell (1935) stated "Such a definition is invalid because (1) we have no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible 'mind', and (2) we can secure no advantage from such guesses. The linguistic processes of the 'mind' as such are quite simply unobservable; and introspection about linguistic processes

5160-849: Is regulated by the Academy of the Asturian Language (ALLA) and promoted by the Asturian Government and local legislation, the Leonese dialects are not officially promoted or regulated. In Leonese, any of five vowel phonemes, /a, e, i, o, u/ , may occur in stressed position. In the unstressed positions, the distinction between close and mid vowels is neutralized in favor of the archiphonemes /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ . Leonese has two genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers (singular and plural ). The main masculine noun and adjective endings are -u for singular and -os for plural. Typical feminine endings are -a for singular and -as for plural. Masculine and feminine nouns ending in -e in

5289-412: Is that the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with a glottal stop [ʔ] (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat , an alveolar flap [ɾ] in dating , an alveolar plosive [t] in stick , and an aspirated alveolar plosive [tʰ] in tie ; however, American speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds (usually with no conscious effort) as merely being allophones of

Leonese language - Misplaced Pages Continue

5418-603: Is the Nodicia de kesos , written between 974 and 980 AD, an inventory of cheeses owned by a monastery written in the margin of the reverse of a document written in Latin. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Leonese reached its territorial zenith as the administrative language of the Kingdom of León , a literary language ( Poema de Elena y María  [ es ] and the Libro de Alexandre ), in

5547-497: Is the English phoneme /k/ , which occurs in words such as c at , k it , s c at , s k it . Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in kit [kʰɪt] , the sound is aspirated, but in skill [skɪl] , it is unaspirated. The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds , or phones , transcribed [kʰ] for

5676-597: Is the only western Romance language with three genders: masculine , feminine and neuter . Adjectives are modified by gender. Most adjectives have three endings: -u (masculine), -a (feminine) and -o (neuter): El vasu ta frí u (the glass is cold), tengo la mano frí a (my hand is cold), l’agua ta frí o (the water is cold) Neuter nouns are abstract, collective and uncountable nouns. They have no plural, except when they are used metaphorically or concretised and lose this gender: l es agü es tán frí es (Waters are cold). Tien el pel o rox o (He has red hair)

5805-765: The Kam–Sui languages have six to nine tones (depending on how they are counted), and the Kam-Sui Dong language has nine to 15 tones by the same measure. One of the Kru languages , Wobé , has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed. The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/ . The most common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/ . Relatively few languages lack any of these consonants, although it does happen: for example, Arabic lacks /p/ , standard Hawaiian lacks /t/ , Mohawk and Tlingit lack /p/ and /m/ , Hupa lacks both /p/ and

5934-520: The Prague school . Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter within double virgules or pipes, as with the examples //A// and //N// given above. Other ways the second of these has been notated include |m-n-ŋ| , {m, n, ŋ} and //n*// . Another example from English, but this time involving complete phonetic convergence as in the Russian example, is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in some American English (described above under Biuniqueness ). Here

6063-660: The University of Oviedo charter, "The Asturian language will be the object of study, teaching and research in the corresponding fields. Likewise, its use will have the treatment established by the Statute of Autonomy and complementary legislation, guaranteeing non-discrimination of those who use it." Asturian can be used at the university in accordance with the Use of Asturian Act. University records indicate an increased number of courses and amount of scientific work using Asturian, with courses in

6192-411: The debuccalization of word-initial /f/ to [ h ] , written ⟨ ḥ ⟩ ( ḥoguera , ḥacer , ḥigos and ḥornu instead of foguera , facer , figos and fornu ; feminine plurals ending in -as ( ḥab a s , ḥormig a s , ḥiy a s , except in eastern towns, where -es is kept: ḥabes , ḥormigues , ḥiyes ); the shifting of word-final -e to -i ( xenti , tardi , ḥuenti ); retention of

6321-682: The 1155 Fueru d'Avilés ) had Asturian sources. Castilian Spanish arrived in the area during the 14th century, when the central administration sent emissaries and functionaries to political and ecclesiastical offices. Asturian codification of the Astur-Leonese spoken in the Asturian Autonomous Community became a modern language with the founding of the Academy of the Asturian Language ( Academia Asturiana de la Llingua ) in 1980. The Leonese dialects and Mirandese are linguistically close to Asturian. Efforts have been made since

6450-690: The 2009 UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger . The inclusion of Eonavian (spoken in western Asturias, bordering Galicia) in the Galician language is controversial, since it has traits in common with western Asturian. Asturian is one of the Astur-Leonese languages which form part of the Iberian Romance languages , close to Galician-Portuguese and Castilian and further removed from Navarro-Aragonese . It

6579-867: The ASL signs for father and mother differ minimally with respect to location while handshape and movement are identical; location is thus contrastive. Stokoe's terminology and notation system are no longer used by researchers to describe the phonemes of sign languages; William Stokoe 's research, while still considered seminal, has been found not to characterize American Sign Language or other sign languages sufficiently. For instance, non-manual features are not included in Stokoe's classification. More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Brentari , Sandler , and Van der Kooij. Cherology and chereme (from Ancient Greek : χείρ "hand") are synonyms of phonology and phoneme previously used in

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6708-422: The Asturian population) and 250,000 who could speak or understand Asturian as a second language. A similar survey in 1991 found that 44 percent of the population (about 450,000 people) could speak Asturian, with from 60,000 to 80,000 able to read and write it. An additional 24 percent of the Asturian population said that they understood the language, making a total of about 68 percent of the Asturian population. At

6837-537: The Asturian-Leonese tradition of rural themes, moral messages and dialogue-style writing. Currently, the Asturian language has about 150 annual publications. The Bible into the Asturian language was completed in 2021 after over 30 years of translation work, beginning in September 1988. Astur-Leonese's geographic area exceeds Asturias, and the language known as Leonese in the autonomous community of Castile and León

6966-466: The Asturleonese complex are between eastern and western varieties, rather than between varieties spoken in Asturias and Leon. Menéndez Pidal used "Leonese" for the entire linguistic area, including Asturias. This designation has been replaced by Ibero-Romance scholars with "Asturian-Leonese", but "Leonese" is still often used to denote Asturian-Leonese by non-speakers of Asturian or Mirandese. Sometimes

7095-563: The Department of Philology and Educational Sciences. In accordance with the Bologna Process , Asturian philology will be available for study and teachers will be able to specialise in the Asturian language at the University of Oviedo. Asturian government websites, council webpages, blogs, and entertainment webpages exist. Free software is offered in Asturian, and Ubuntu offers Asturian as an operating-system language. Free software in

7224-502: The East, of the features still clearly seen in the previous area. The gradual and negative character of this characteristic explains how vague the limits are". A "speaker of Leonese" is defined here as a person who knows (and can speak) a variety of Leonese. There is no linguistic census of the number of Leonese speakers in the provinces of León and Zamora, and estimates vary from 5,000 to 50,000. Two sociolinguistic studies, in northern Leon and

7353-592: The English Phonology article an alternative analysis is suggested in which some diphthongs and long vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to either / j / or / w / . The fullest exposition of this approach is found in Trager and Smith (1951), where all long vowels and diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/ , /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for rhotic accents), each comprising two phonemes. The transcription for

7482-767: The Iberian Peninsula, especially the Visigoths and the Suevi , added words such as blancu, esquila, estaca, mofu, serón, espetar, gadañu and tosquilar . Arabisms could reach Asturian directly, through contacts with Arabs or al-Andalus , or through the Castilian language. Examples include acebache, alfaya, altafarra, bañal, ferre, galbana, mandil, safase, xabalín, zuna and zucre . Asturian has also received much of its lexicon from other languages, such as Spanish , French , Occitan and Galician . In number of loanwords, Spanish leads

7611-508: The Kingdom of Asturias and later in that of Asturias and Leon. During the 12th, 13th and part of the 14th centuries Astur-Leonese was used in the kingdom's official documents, with many examples of agreements, donations, wills and commercial contracts from that period onwards. Although there are no extant literary works written in Asturian from this period, some books (such as the Llibru d'Alexandre and

7740-490: The Leonese court, judiciary (with the translation of the Visigothic Liber Iudicum or Liber Iudiciorum into Leonese), administration, and organization. After the 1230 union of Leon and Castile, Leonese had greater written and institutional use, although at the end of the 13th century Castilian began to replace it as a written language. Leonese became an oral, rural language with little literary development. At

7869-524: The River Nalón in Asturias and north of León. The model for the written language, it is characterized by feminine plurals ending in -es , the monophthongization of /ou/ and /ei/ into /o/ and /e/ and the neuter gender in adjectives modifying uncountable nouns ( lleche frío , carne tienro ). East Asturian is spoken between the River Sella, Llanes and Cabrales . The dialect is characterized by

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7998-403: The alphabet. Asturian has several digraphs , some of which have their own names. The letter h and the digraph ll can take an under-dot to indicate additional sounds, for ḥ and digraph ḷḷ Asturian grammar is similar to that of other Romance languages. Nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural) and no cases . Adjectives may have

8127-462: The approach of underspecification would not attempt to assign [ə] to a specific phoneme in some or all of these cases, although it might be assigned to an archiphoneme, written something like //A// , which reflects the two neutralized phonemes in this position, or {a|o} , reflecting its unmerged values. A somewhat different example is found in English, with the three nasal phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ . In word-final position these all contrast, as shown by

8256-477: The appropriate environments) to be realized with the phone [ɾ] (an alveolar flap ). For example, the same flap sound may be heard in the words hi tt ing and bi dd ing , although it is intended to realize the phoneme /t/ in the first word and /d/ in the second. This appears to contradict biuniqueness. For further discussion of such cases, see the next section. Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In

8385-782: The arrival of Latin (its substratum ), afterwards (its superstratum) and loanwords from other languages. Although little is known about the language of the ancient Astures , it may have been related to two Indo-European languages : Celtic and Lusitanian . Words from this language and the pre–Indo-European languages spoken in the region are known as the prelatinian substratum; examples include bedul, boroña, brincar, bruxa, cándanu, cantu, carrascu, comba, cuetu, güelga, llamuerga, llastra, llócara, matu, peñera, riega, tapín and zucar . Many Celtic words (such as bragues, camisa, carru, cerveza and sayu ) were integrated into Latin and, later, into Asturian. Asturian's superstratum consists primarily of Germanisms and Arabisms. The Germanic peoples in

8514-436: The aspirated form and [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other sounds would cause a change in meaning if substituted: for example, substitution of

8643-487: The autonomous communities. The ambiguity of the Statute of Autonomy, which recognises the existence of Asturian but does not give it the same status as Spanish, leaves the door open to benign neglect. However, since 1 August 2001 Asturian has been covered under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages ' "safeguard and promote" clause. A 1983 survey indicated 100,000 native Asturian speakers (12 percent of

8772-406: The beginning of the 20th century, it survived in oral form only in mid-western León and western Zamora provinces. Its scientific study and a nascent cultural movement began in the province of Leon in 1906. During the 1950s and 60s, the number of Leonese speakers and the area in which it was spoken decreased. Although the Astur-Leonese linguistic domain covers most of the principality of Asturias,

8901-578: The centre of Romanization for the indigenous tribes). The city of Astorga was sacked by the Visigoths in the 5th century, and never regained its former prominence. The region remained unified until the eighth-century Islamic invasion. Around the 11th century, it began to be defined as Leonese territory roughly corresponding to the southern conventus . In medieval León, the Romance Galician , Asturian-Leonese , and Castilian languages evolved and spread south. The first known text in Asturian-Leonese

9030-459: The contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə] (for details, see vowel reduction in Russian ). In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/ , it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed). In some cases even this may not provide an unambiguous answer. A description using

9159-428: The devisers of the alphabet chose not to represent the phonemic effect of vowel length. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords ), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in

9288-410: The division between Leonese and Asturian is due to the distinctly different identities of both areas, separated by a mighty mountain range, while the dialects have enough common traits to consider them part of a single language, Astur-Leonese or Asturian-Leonese. The principle isoglosses in this region do not divide Asturias and Leon, dialectal areas (western, central, eastern) are in fact shaped along

9417-444: The eastern ḥ aspiration (also written " h. " and cooccurring with ll and f ) are absent from this model. Asturian has triple gender distinction in the adjective , feminine plurals with -es , verb endings with -es, -en, -íes, íen and lacks compound tenses (or periphrasis constructed with " tener "). (*) also zeda , ceda The letters K (ka), J (jota) and W (uve doble) are only used in loanwords and are not part of

9546-452: The end of the Francoist period in 1975 to protect and promote Asturian. In 1994 there were 100,000 native speakers and 450,000 second-language speakers able to speak (or understand) Asturian. However, the language is endangered: there has been a steep decline in the number of speakers over the last century. Law 1/93 of 23 March 1993 on the Use and Promotion of the Asturian Language addressed

9675-535: The end of the 20th century the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (Academy of the Asturian Language) attempted to provide the language with tools needed to promote its survival: a grammar , a dictionary and periodicals . In addition a new generation of Asturian writers has championed the language. In 2021 the first complete translation of the Bible into Asturian was published. Although some 10th-century documents have

9804-412: The entire province analysed the prevalence of Leonese and the linguistic attitudes of its speakers. According to the latter, maintenance of the language is the primary wish but opinions differ about how to do so. Almost 37 per cent think that the language should be kept for nonofficial uses, and about 30 per cent believe it should be on a par with Spanish. Twenty-two per cent favour its disappearance. Nearly

9933-544: The environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized . In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents. Absolute neutralization is a phenomenon in which a segment of the underlying representation is not realized in any of its phonetic representations (surface forms). The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments. Some phonologists prefer not to specify

10062-499: The exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, /sɛl/ versus /sɛt/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since /l/ and /t/ alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with /s/ , while /ɛ/

10191-434: The following: Some phonotactic restrictions can alternatively be analyzed as cases of neutralization. See Neutralization and archiphonemes below, particularly the example of the occurrence of the three English nasals before stops. Biuniqueness is a requirement of classic structuralist phonemics. It means that a given phone , wherever it occurs, must unambiguously be assigned to one and only one phoneme. In other words,

10320-539: The historic and cultural value of Asturian, urging the compilation of a dictionary and a grammar and the creation of a language academy . Notable writers included Francisco Bernaldo de Quirós Benavides (1675), Xosefa Xovellanos (1745), Xuan González Villar y Fuertes (1746), Xosé Caveda y Nava (1796), Xuan María Acebal (1815), Teodoro Cuesta (1829), Xosé Benigno García González, Marcos del Torniello (1853), Bernardo Acevedo y Huelves (1849), Pin de Pría (1864), Galo Fernández and Fernán Coronas (1884). In 1974,

10449-516: The idea of a cognitive or psycholinguistic function for the phoneme. Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics , most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle , and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology . As a theoretical concept or model, though, it has been supplemented and even replaced by others. Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle ) proposed that phonemes may be further decomposable into features , such features being

10578-485: The issue, and according to article four of the Asturias Statute of Autonomy: "The Asturian language will enjoy protection. Its use, teaching and diffusion in the media will be furthered, whilst its local dialects and voluntary apprenticeship will always be respected." However, Asturian is in a legally hazy position. The Spanish Constitution has not been fully applied regarding the official recognition of languages in

10707-526: The language as a whole is simply called "Asturian" for several reasons, such as the Leonese dialects being on the brink of extinction, or the widespread ignorance of its very existence (even in León), as well as their lack of recognition and institutional support (as opposed to their Asturias counterparts). In a narrow geographical sense, Leonese is distinct from the dialects grouped under the Asturian language . However,

10836-411: The language is available from Debian , Fedora , Firefox , Thunderbird , LibreOffice , VLC , GNOME , Chromium and KDE . Minecraft also has an Asturian translation. Misplaced Pages offers an Asturian version of itself, with 136,000+ pages as of November 2024. Archiphoneme A phoneme ( / ˈ f oʊ n iː m / ) is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by

10965-400: The language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is challenging to find a minimal pair to distinguish English / ʃ / from / ʒ / , yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' / ˈ p r ɛ ʃ ər / and 'pleasure' / ˈ p l ɛ ʒ ər / can serve as

11094-467: The law on usage of Asturian, the principality's 2003–07 plan for establishing the language and the work of the Xunta Asesora de Toponimia , which researches and confirms the Asturian names of requesting villages, towns, conceyos and cities (50 of 78 conceyos as of 2012). Asturian has several dialects. They are regulated by the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana and mainly spoken in Asturias (except in

11223-566: The linguistic features of Asturian, numerous examples (such as writings by notaries , contracts and wills ) begin in the 13th century. Early examples are the 1085 Fuero de Avilés (the oldest parchment preserved in Asturias) and the 13th-century Fuero de Oviedo and the Leonese version of the Fueru Xulgu . The 13th-century documents were the laws for towns, cities and the general population. By

11352-628: The list. However, due to the close relationship between Castilian and Asturian, it is often unclear if a word is borrowed from Castilian, common to both languages from Latin, or a loanword from Asturian to Castilian. Some Castilian forms in Asturian are: Pá nuesu que tas nel cielu, santificáu seya'l to nome. Amiye'l to reinu, fágase la to voluntá, lo mesmo na tierra que'n cielu. El nuesu pan cotidianu dánoslu güei ya perdónanos les nueses ofenses, lo mesmo que nós facemos colos que nos faltaron. Nun nos dexes cayer na tentación, ya llíbranos del mal. Amén. Noso Pai que estás no ceo: santificado sexa o teu nome, veña

11481-532: The mapping between phones and phonemes is required to be many-to-one rather than many-to-many . The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre- generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English . This may cause either /t/ or /d/ (in

11610-457: The meaning of a word. In those languages, therefore, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, in Icelandic , [kʰ] is the first sound of kátur , meaning "cheerful", but [k] is the first sound of gátur , meaning "riddles". Icelandic, therefore, has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/ . A pair of words like kátur and gátur (above) that differ only in one phone

11739-489: The minimal triplet sum /sʌm/ , sun /sʌn/ , sung /sʌŋ/ . However, before a stop such as /p, t, k/ (provided there is no morpheme boundary between them), only one of the nasals is possible in any given position: /m/ before /p/ , /n/ before /t/ or /d/ , and /ŋ/ before /k/ , as in limp, lint, link ( /lɪmp/ , /lɪnt/ , /lɪŋk/ ). The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign

11868-415: The nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous). Instead they may analyze these phonemes as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like //N// , and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be //lɪNp//, //lɪNt//, //lɪNk// . This latter type of analysis is often associated with Nikolai Trubetzkoy of

11997-495: The neuter gender in some areas, with the ending -u instead of -o ( agua friu , xenti güenu , ropa tendíu , carne guisáu ), and a distinction between direct and indirect objects in first- and second-person singular pronouns (direct me and te v. indirect mi and ti ) in some municipalities bordering the Sella: busquéte (a ti) y alcontréte/busquéti les llaves y alcontrétiles , llévame (a mi) la fesoria en carru . Asturian forms

12126-696: The north and west of the province of Leon, the northeast of Zamora, both provinces in Castile and León, and the region of Miranda do Douro in the east of the Portuguese district of Bragança , this article focuses on the autonomous community of Castile and León. Borrego Nieto wrote that the area in where Leonese is best preserved, defined as "area 1", consists of the regions of Babia and Laciana , part of Los Argüellos , eastern Bierzo and La Cabrera ; in Zamora, non-Galician Sanabria . Borrego Nieto describes another geographical circle, which he calls "area 2", where Leonese

12255-636: The number of identifiably different sounds. Different languages vary considerably in the number of phonemes they have in their systems (although apparent variation may sometimes result from the different approaches taken by the linguists doing the analysis). The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 9–11 in Pirahã and 11 in Rotokas to as many as 141 in ǃXũ . The number of phonemically distinct vowels can be as low as two, as in Ubykh and Arrernte . At

12384-585: The numerous differences it has when compared to dialects in the Spanish side. In fact, it is often considered as a separate language, especially in Portugal , where it has been granted official recognition, and is regulated by the Institute of the Mirandese Language . Thus, Asturleonese is sometimes considered a group of two languages, Asturian or Asturleonese proper , and Mirandese . Unlike Asturian , which

12513-556: The other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation . As regards consonant phonemes, Puinave and the Papuan language Tauade each have just seven, and Rotokas has only six. !Xóõ , on

12642-461: The other hand, has somewhere around 77, and Ubykh 81. The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. Across all languages, the average number of consonant phonemes per language is about 22, while the average number of vowel phonemes is about 8. Some languages, such as French , have no phonemic tone or stress , while Cantonese and several of

12771-458: The past, it was spoken in a wider area, including most of the historical region of Leon. The current number of Leonese speakers is estimated at 20,000 to 50,000. Spanish is now the predominant language in the area. Leonese forms part of the Asturleonese linguistic group along with dialects of Asturian . The division between Asturian and Leonese is extra-linguistic, as the main divisions within

12900-449: The phoneme /ʃ/ ). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as in English ⟨x⟩ representing /gz/ or /ks/ . There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of ⟨c⟩ in Italian ) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from

13029-785: The phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme , such as morpheme and grapheme . These are sometimes called emic units . The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike , who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics. Languages do not generally allow words or syllables to be built of any arbitrary sequences of phonemes. There are phonotactic restrictions on which sequences of phonemes are possible and in which environments certain phonemes can occur. Phonemes that are significantly limited by such restrictions may be called restricted phonemes . In English, examples of such restrictions include

13158-516: The population supports granting official status to Leonese by amending the Statute of Autonomy. About 70 per cent favour linguistic coordination between León and Asturias, with 20 per cent opposing. Leonese in education is favoured by more than 63 per cent of the population, and opposed by about 34 per cent. Institutional promotion of the dialect, especially by town councils, was favoured by more than 83 per cent of respondents. The Statute of Autonomy of Castile and León, amended 30 November 2007, addresses

13287-418: The position expressed by Kenneth Pike : "There is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data", while others believed that different analyses, equally valid, could be made for the same data. Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems" stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to

13416-425: The same period there was disagreement about the correct basis for a phonemic analysis. The structuralist position was that the analysis should be made purely on the basis of the sound elements and their distribution, with no reference to extraneous factors such as grammar, morphology or the intuitions of the native speaker; this position is strongly associated with Leonard Bloomfield . Zellig Harris claimed that it

13545-501: The same phoneme. However, they are so dissimilar phonetically that they are considered separate phonemes. A case like this shows that sometimes it is the systemic distinctions and not the lexical context which are decisive in establishing phonemes. This implies that the phoneme should be defined as the smallest phonological unit which is contrastive at a lexical level or distinctive at a systemic level. Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of

13674-563: The same word ( pan : the Spanish word for "bread"). Such spoken variations of a single phoneme are known by linguists as allophones . Linguists use slashes in the IPA to transcribe phonemes but square brackets to transcribe more precise pronunciation details, including allophones; they describe this basic distinction as phonemic versus phonetic . Thus, the pronunciation patterns of tap versus tab , or pat versus bat , can be represented phonemically and are written between slashes (including /p/ , /b/ , etc.), while nuances of exactly how

13803-513: The same, but one of the parameters changes. However, the absence of minimal pairs for a given pair of phones does not always mean that they belong to the same phoneme: they may be so dissimilar phonetically that it is unlikely for speakers to perceive them as the same sound. For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in h at ) and [ŋ] (as in ba ng ), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of

13932-481: The second half of the 16th century, documents were written in Castilian, backed by the Trastámara dynasty and making the civil and ecclesiastical arms of the principality Castilian. Although the Asturian language disappeared from written texts during the sieglos escuros (dark centuries), it survived orally. The only written mention during this time is from a 1555 work by Hernán Núñez about proverbs and adages : "...in

14061-568: The singular take -es for the plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in number and gender. The native languages of Leon, Zamora, Asturias, and the Terra de Miranda in Portugal are the result of the evolution of Latin introduced by Roman conquerors in the region. Their colonization and organization led to the Conventus Asturum , with its capital at Asturica Augusta (present-day Astorga, Spain ,

14190-412: The sound [t] would produce the different word s t ill , and that sound must therefore be considered to represent a different phoneme (the phoneme /t/ ). The above shows that in English, [k] and [kʰ] are allophones of a single phoneme /k/ . In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as significantly different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change

14319-438: The speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contains phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages ), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology . The English words cell and set have

14448-641: The spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are consistent. Sign language phonemes are bundles of articulation features. Stokoe was the first scholar to describe the phonemic system of ASL . He identified the bundles tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula ), dez (the handshape, from designator ), and sig (the motion, from signation ). Some researchers also discern ori (orientation), facial expression or mouthing . Just as with spoken languages, when features are combined, they create phonemes. As in spoken languages, sign languages have minimal pairs which differ in only one phoneme. For instance,

14577-590: The status of Spanish, Leonese, and Galician. According to Section 5.2, "Leonese will be specifically protected by the institutions for its particular value within the linguistic patrimony of the Community. Its protection, usage and promotion will be regulated". On 24 February 2010, a parliamentary group from the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party presented a proposition to the Cortes of Castile and León to recognize

14706-442: The study of sign languages . A chereme , as the basic unit of signed communication, is functionally and psychologically equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature. Cherology , as the study of cheremes in language, is thus equivalent to phonology. The terms are not in use anymore. Instead, the terms phonology and phoneme (or distinctive feature ) are used to stress

14835-548: The support of local administrations in the provinces of Leon and Zamora. In 2001, the Universidad de León (University of León) created a course for teachers of Leonese. The dialect can be studied in the larger villages of León , Zamora and Salamanca provinces as El Fueyu courses, following an agreement between the Leonese provincial government and the organization. The Leonese Language Teachers and Monitors Association ( Asociación de Profesores y Monitores de Llingua Llïonesa )

14964-499: The surface form that is actually uttered and heard. Allophones each have technically different articulations inside particular words or particular environments within words , yet these differences do not create any meaningful distinctions. Alternatively, at least one of those articulations could be feasibly used in all such words with these words still being recognized as such by users of the language. An example in American English

15093-405: The true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be characterized in different ways: Jakobson and colleagues defined them in acoustic terms, Chomsky and Halle used a predominantly articulatory basis, though retaining some acoustic features, while Ladefoged 's system

15222-425: The value of Leonese and implement a plan to protect and promote it. Although the proposition was approved unanimously by the plenary session of the parliament of Castile and León on 26 May, the government's position has not changed. UNESCO , in its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger , listed Leonese in the most at-risk category. The category's criteria are: The Autonomous Community of Castile and León lacks

15351-403: The velar nasal is really the sequence [ŋɡ]/. The theory of generative phonology which emerged in the 1960s explicitly rejected the structuralist approach to phonology and favoured the mentalistic or cognitive view of Sapir. These topics are discussed further in English phonology#Controversial issues . Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems

15480-554: The vowel normally transcribed /aɪ/ would instead be /aj/ , /aʊ/ would be /aw/ and /ɑː/ would be /ah/ , or /ar/ in a rhotic accent if there is an ⟨r⟩ in the spelling. It is also possible to treat English long vowels and diphthongs as combinations of two vowel phonemes, with long vowels treated as a sequence of two short vowels, so that 'palm' would be represented as /paam/. English can thus be said to have around seven vowel phonemes, or even six if schwa were treated as an allophone of /ʌ/ or of other short vowels. In

15609-489: The west, where Galician-Asturian is spoken). The dialect spoken in the adjoining area of Castile and León is known as Leonese . Asturian is traditionally divided into three dialectal areas, sharing traits with the dialect spoken in León: western, central and eastern. The dialects are mutually intelligible. Central Asturian, with the most speakers (more than 80 percent), is the basis for standard Asturian. The first Asturian grammar

15738-478: The word pushed . Sounds that are perceived as phonemes vary by languages and dialects, so that [ n ] and [ ŋ ] are separate phonemes in English since they distinguish words like sin from sing ( /sɪn/ versus /sɪŋ/ ), yet they comprise a single phoneme in some other languages, such as Spanish, in which [pan] and [paŋ] for instance are merely interpreted by Spanish speakers as regional or dialect-specific ways of pronouncing

15867-417: The words betting and bedding might both be pronounced [ˈbɛɾɪŋ] . Under the generative grammar theory of linguistics, if a speaker applies such flapping consistently, morphological evidence (the pronunciation of the related forms bet and bed , for example) would reveal which phoneme the flap represents, once it is known which morpheme is being used. However, other theorists would prefer not to make such

15996-410: The words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), also have minimal pairs, differing only in (exactly) one of the signs' parameters: handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and nonmanual signal or marker. A minimal pair may exist in the signed language if the basic sign stays

16125-399: The written symbols ( graphemes ) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. This is most obviously the case when the alphabet was invented with a particular language in mind; for example, the Latin alphabet was devised for Classical Latin, and therefore the Latin of that period enjoyed a near one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in most cases, though

16254-679: Was fonema , the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics . Daniel Jones became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language". The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoy and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure , Edward Sapir , and Leonard Bloomfield . Some structuralists (though not Sapir) rejected

16383-455: Was closely linked with the Kingdom of Asturias (718–910) and the ensuing Leonese kingdom. The language had contributions from pre-Roman languages spoken by the Astures , an Iberian Celtic tribe, and the post-Roman Germanic languages of the Visigoths and Suevi . The transition from Latin to Asturian was slow and gradual; for a long time they co-existed in a diglossic relationship, first in

16512-478: Was created in 2008 to promote Leonese-language activities. Leonese literature includes: Asturian language Asturian is the historical language of Asturias, portions of the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora and the area surrounding Miranda do Douro in northeastern Portugal. Like the other Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula, it evolved from Vulgar Latin during the early Middle Ages . Asturian

16641-459: Was published in 1998 and the first dictionary in 2000. Western Asturian is spoken between the rivers Navia and Nalón , in the west of the province of León (where it is known as Leonese) and in the provinces of Zamora and Salamanca . Feminine plurals end in -as and the falling diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ are maintained. Central Asturian is spoken between the Sella River and the mouth of

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