Aragonese Orthography: Does a Spanish-based system work?

Dialectologia: revista electrònica, 2010

How much Aragonese is still spoken remains largely an unknown quantity. Naturally, establishing the number of speakers of any variety begs the question of what speaking a language actually means, and the picture is often clouded by the political interests of particular groups, as is the case in Aragon. The strong claim to the continued widespread use of Aragonese made by such associations as the Consello d'a Fabla in Huesca is counterbalanced by that of the more reactionary, sceptical academics at the University of Saragossa, who maintain that Aragonese varieties, ignoring the Catalan of Aragon spoken right down La Franja, the transition area between Aragon and Catalonia, now only survive in certain pockets of resistance across the north of Huesca. This paper will attempt to provide a summary of the available facts and report on some of the author's own findings during his more recent trips to Aragon.

2016

A Fala has never had a standardized orthography as it is a language of oral tradition and almost all written documents have always been produced only in Spanish. The few documents which exist in A Fala use orthographies that vary considerably, especially when indicating the phonemes which are absent in standard Spanish. However, in the past decades there have been signs of an increasing interest regarding the language and cultural identity in the three villages and there have also been attempts to establish organizations to promote the language, such as A Fala y Cultura, U Lagartu Verdi, and A Nosa Fala. This increase in language awareness leads inevitably to situations, when the speakers want to express their linguistic identity in written form and the lack of written standard makes this task rather difficult. The objective of this paper is to analyze the public inscriptions, direction signs and street names written in A Fala. The appearance of these signs expresses the willingness...

1999

This article summarizes the ways in which SIL has designed orthographies (alphabets) for modern indigenous languages in Mexico, in conjunction with other organizations and agencies. General linguistic issues and orthographic principles are discussed first, then three different periods of orthographic design.

Journal for Foreign Languages, 2014

The aim of the Regional dossiers series is to provide a concise description of European minority languages in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers, pupils, and financial investments. Because of this fixed structure the dossiers in the series are easy to compare.

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Hispania, 1998

This volume consists of five parts. Part I ('Basque', pp. 3-99) contains two chapters. This Iberian language has finally begun to receive the systematic scholarly

Intonation in Romance, 2015

AND MARIA DEL MAR VANRELL 2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 Geographical distribution of the Catalan language Catalan is a Romance language that is spoken by about 10 million people in a region that lies within four adjacent European states, Andorra, Italy, France, and Spain. 1 Fig. 2.1 shows a map of the geographical areas where Catalan is spoken, subdivided into its major and traditionally accepted dialects (Veny 1982): Central Catalan and Northwestern Catalan (spoken in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andorra), Valencian Catalan (Valencian region), Balearic Catalan (Balearic Islands), Northern Catalan (in the Roussillon region of southern France, roughly equivalent to the current département of Pyrénées-Orientales), and Algherese Catalan (in the city of l'Alguer, Sardinia). Breaking down the total number of roughly 10 million Catalan speakers by geographic area, Catalonia and the Valencian region provide the great majority, with 5,703,000 and 2,952,000 respectively, followed by the Balearic community with 735,000 speakers. The remaining territories provide much smaller figures, with 61,000 speakers in Andorra, 142,000 speakers in southern France, and 24,000 in the city of l'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) (data from Pons and Sorolla 2009). With respect to its legal status, Catalan is the official language in Andorra; within Spain it is co-official 1 The data comes from the Enquesta dels usos lingüístics a Catalunya 2003, coordinated by J. Torres and updated by Pons and Sorolla (2009) and Querol (2010).

Despite previous studies on Eastern Andalusian Spanish, interest in this geolect boomed only after the theory of vowel doubling was posited for this variety of Spanish. According to this theory, in Eastern Andalusian Spanish, vowels preceding /s/ aspiration or deletion change their quality and, as a result, carry the semantic function of /s/. Since then, many researchers have studied the vowel and consonant systems of this variety of Spanish and the phonetic-phonological debate is still ongoing. This article reviews the main studies on Eastern Andalusian Spanish pronunciation between 1881 and 2016, comparing the different findings in that period and summarising them chronologically. The article finishes with an outline of widely accepted and debated features of Eastern Andalusian Spanish in order to identify future lines of research.