Aragonese

Aragonese is a Romance language spoken by about 12,000 people in the northern part of Aragón, in Spain. It is usually classified as an Ibero-Rom­ance language (like Spanish) but may also be understood as an intermediate language variety between that and the Occitano-Rom­ance languages (particularly Catalan, with which Aragonese shares a dialectal transition zone).

Some of the phonetic characteristics of Aragonese include:

• retaining word-initial f-, not losing it like in Spanish
• the Romance palatal approximant in ge-/gi- became [dʒ] in Mediaeval Aragonese, as it did in Catalan and Portuguese in the same era.
• Aragonese later devoiced its sibilants, so [z] became [s] and [dʒ] became [tʃ].
• Proto-Romance -lt- and -ct- became [jt], like in Portuguese (e.g. feito from Latin “factum”, muito from Latin “multum”)
• tends to have -ix- [ʃ] and -ll- [ʎ] in the same contexts that Catalan does
• loss of unstressed final -e, but retention of unstressed final -o
• voiced stops /b, d, g/ often lenited to [β, ð, ɣ]
• Romance open O and E consistently result in [we] and [je] in modern Aragonese (in more contexts than Spanish does)
• Latin -b- is retained in the imperfect conjugations of -er and -ir verbs (so e.g. teneba or teniba compared to SP tenía/CA tenia, dormiba compared to SP dormía/CA dormia)
• many dialects did not voice intervocalic stop consonants, unlike Spanish and Catalan

Multiple sets of articles are used in Aragonese:

• In eastern dialects, generally el, la, els/es, las/les
• In western dialects, lo/ro/o, la/ra/a, los/ros/os, las/ras/as (not sure what determines which of these is used)

Like in Catalan, Occitan and French, Aragonese uses partitive (en/ne) and locative (bi/i/ie) clitics.

There are three rival orthographies that Aragonese can be written in:

• The grafia de Uesca (1987) places the most importance on how words are actually pronounced, and the least on historical convention. By this standard:
  • b/v always written “b”
  • /tʃ/ always written “ch”
  • historic but silent “h” not written
  • historic word-final “t” (silent in modern Aragonese) not written
  • /θ/ always spelt “z”
  • /ɲ/ spelt “ñ”
  • /ʃ/ (/jʃ/ in eastern dialects) always spelt “x”
  • /kw/ spelt “cu”
  • learned Greco-Roman words respelled according to their modern pronunciation
  • accent marks for stress placed as in Spanish
• The grafia SLA (2004) places the most emphasis on how mediaeval Aragonese (and Catalan and Occitan) were spelled. As such:
  • b/v spelt according to what was used in the mediaeval era
  • g/j/ch spelt according to what was used in the mediaeval era
  • historic “h” still written
  • historic word-final “t” still written
  • /θ/ spelt “c” before e/i, “ç” before a/o/i if not at the start of a word, “z” elsewhere or in borrowed words that used “z”
  • /ɲ/ spelt “ny”
  • /ʃ/ spelt “x” in western dialects, /jʃ/ spelt “ix” in eastern dialects
  • /kw/ spelt “qu” or “qü”
  • learned Greco-Roman words kept written as in Greco-Roman form
  • accent marks for stress placed as in Catalan/Portuguese
• Finally, the Academia de l’Aragonés (2006) came up with a standard which is more influenced by mediaeval norms, but aims to reform them to be more phonetic. By this standard:
  • b/v spelt according to what appeared in Latin
  • /tʃ/ always written “ch”
  • historic “h” still written
  • historic word-final “t” still written
  • /θ/ spelt “c” before e/i, “z” before a/o/u, “z” word-finally except sometimes it’s “tz” because Benasquese dialect pronounces it like that
  • /ɲ/ spelt “ny”
  • /ʃ/ (/jʃ/ in eastern dialects) always spelt “ix”
  • /kw/ spelt “qu” or “qü”
  • learned Greco-Roman words kept written as in Greco-Roman form
  • accent marks for stress placed as in Spanish except that sometimes word-final stress doesn’t need to be accented when it would have to be in Spanish (?)

According to a 1997 Ara­gon­ese law, students have a right to access education in their own language (e.g. Ara­gon­ese, or even Catalan in the Catalan-speaking “fringe” of Aragón), but Ara­gon­ese is still not used as the language of instruction anywhere except in one university summer course in Ara­gon­ese Philology. There is a Ara­gon­ese curriculum available for pre-schools and primary schools, but only seven registered teachers (none of which hold permanent positions) and only a few hundred students in total are enrolled in these courses. At least, according to Wikipedia based on 2013/2014 information 😜