West Iberian languages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

West Iberian languages is a subcategory of Romance languages, which includes Spanish, the languages derived from Galician-Portuguese (Galician, Portuguese, and the Fala language), the languages in the Astur-Leonese branch (Asturian, Leonese and Mirandese), Extremaduran, Aragonese, Ladino, and their dialects or codialects. By most linguistic criteria, these languages are significantly closer to each other than to any other living language — including Catalan, the other major language of the Iberian Peninsula.

Speakers of the West Iberian languages generally claim that they are all mutually intelligible to some extent. It is certainly true that a speaker of any of them can learn to read any other just by practicing, without formal study of the grammar. Bilingualism is quite common along the internal language boundaries of this group.

There is controversy over whether the members of Galician-Portuguese and Astur-Leonese are languages or dialects. A common classification is to state that Portuguese and Galician are different languages, while Asturian, Leonese and Mirandese are dialects of the Astur-Leonese family.