Asturleonese language

Asturleonese is an Ibero-Romance language or language cluster spoken in northwestern Spain and northeastern Portugal, namely in the historical regions and Spain's modern-day autonomous communities of Asturias, northwestern Castile and León, Cantabria and Extremadura, and in Riudenore and Tierra de Miranda in Portugal. The name "Asturleonese" 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 their glossonyms – Asturian, Leonese, Cantabrian, Extremaduran, and Mirandese. Asturleonese has been classified by UNESCO as an endangered language, as the varieties are being increasingly replaced by Spanish and Portuguese.

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. Eastern Cantabrian and southern Extremaduran have transitional traits with the northern peninsular and Castúo dialects of Spanish respectively. 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.

Asturleonese was once regarded as an informal dialect (basilect) that developed from Castilian Spanish, but Ramón Menéndez Pidal's El dialecto leonés ('The Leonese dialect'), published in 1906, demonstrated that 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" as he sometimes described 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.