By Sarah-Claire Jordan
If you know a bit about Spain and its history, you probably know that it used to be made up of different kingdoms that eventually united to become Spain. The Spanish government does a good job of allowing each of its autonomous communities to have a reasonable amount of power over how their own regional government will work while still keeping Spain as a nation unified. Each of these autonomous communities more or less corresponds with the different kingdoms that existed before the unification of Spain.
One such kingdom was the Kingdom of Asturias, which still exists, in a way, in the form of the Autonomous Community of Asturias. There, like in many other autonomous communities in Spain, Spanish is not the only language spoken there, and, in fact, wasn’t even the first language spoken there. In Asturias, Asturian is a recognized minority language with its own language academy to regulate it, its own dictionary, and is a language that schools can choose to teach.
Beyond that, here are some more interesting bits of information about Asturian that make it unique:
1. Latin coexisted with Asturian at one point
Like most Romance languages, Asturian can trace its roots back to a time when Vulgar Latin was more or less the language of the land. Many languages developed out of Latin that was then influenced by the languages of different pre-Roman languages, like those spoken by different Celtic and Germanic peoples. In the region that Asturias would come to inhabit, it took a long time for the Latin spoken there to disappear and be replaced by Asturian. During this process, there was a time when Latin and Asturian were both used and had a diglossic relationship, where Latin was the “upper class” language and Asturian was used only in certain circumstances.
2. Asturian nouns have three genders
One linguistic characteristic of Asturian that truly sets it apart from the rest of its Romance language relatives is the fact that its nouns can have three genders: feminine, masculine, or neuter. Masculine nouns tend to end in “u” or “e”, while feminine nouns usually end in “a”. Neuter nouns can have any ending, and generally are used to talk about uncountable, collective, or abstract nouns and generally can’t be pluralized. Adjectives can take on any of these three genders, with the most common endings being “u” for masculine, “a” for feminine, and “o” for neuter.
3. Asturian literature went “underground” for a time
We can trace written documents in Asturian back to the 10th century, but it wasn’t until the 13th century that a real abundance of Asturian literature was created. Most were simply legal documents, and by the 1550s Castilian had become the main legal language. Castilian soon replaced Asturian, which practically disappeared in its written form. It was finally revived in the 17th century, and more recently in 1974, which was a huge year for the Asturian language and culture in terms of going back to its roots and taking steps to preserve it.
As there are so many more languages used in Spain other than just Spanish, it is important to research ahead of time if you plan to try and work with anyone in Spain to make sure you know what their preferred language is. At Alpha Omega Translation, our translation team is fully equipped to translate in any language used in Spain.
For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our website translation and localization page.