Lingüistic varieties of the North West area of the Iberian Peninsula: points of agreement and disagreement.

Aurélia Merlan

Abstract

In the North-West area of the Iberian Peninsula three linguistic varieties –considered as minoritarian in relation to Castilian and Portuguese– are spoken: Galician and Asturian in Spain and Mirandese in Portugal. This article analyses the main points of agreement and disagreement between these languages at a phonetic, morpho-syntactic and lexical level. Furthermore, it tries to determine to what extent is linguistic contact with Castilian and Portuguese reponsible for the current distance between Galician and Portuguese on the one hand and Mirandese and Asturian on the other. As each of the languages analysed has its own diatopic variations, the comparison is mainly (but not only) drawn between their standard varieties.

Key words

Galician, Asturian, Mirandese, standard varieties, points of agreement and disagreement.

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