Murcian Spanish

Murciano is a variant of the Peninsular Spanish, spoken mainly in autonomous region of Murcia and the adjacent Comarca of Vega Baja del Segura in the province of Alicante (especially in the rural areas) on the Mediterranean coast.

It is considered a southern dialect of the Spanish language, with influences from the Todmir dialect and from the Aragonese and Catalan languages.

History

Murcian is a dialect emerged from the mixture of several linguistics varieties that joined in the Kingdom of Murcia after the conquest of the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Castile between 13th and 14th centuries: these linguistics varieties were mainly Todmir's Romance, Arabic, Ancient Castilian, Catalan, Aragonese and Provençal.

This dialect is an Iberian Romance language with different linguistic elements from Prerroman and Latin substrates and also Todmir's Romance substrate as well as Arabic, Aragonese, Occitan and Provençal, Catalan and Ancient Ancient Castilian, and in the modern age French and also Caló.

It is considered an endangered language.

Study

There are a huge amount of works on Murcian Spanish:

Dialectal features

The Murcian dialectal features differ among areas, villages, social classes and individuals in accordance with the communicative situation in which they are involved, this is because of the influence of standard rule. This dialect has similarities and differences with Spanish, Aragonese, Catalan and Valencian languages.

Vowels

As Eastern Andalusian dialects, Murcian has 5 tense vowels (roughly the same as Castilian Spanish); [a], [e̞], [i], [o̞], [u] and 5 open vowels; [æ̞], [ɛ], [i̞], [ɔ], [u̞]. Vowels are lowered when in contact with an omitted /s/, /θ/ and /x/ in the coda, additionally a vowel harmony process may take place; e.g. la casa [la ˈkasa] ("the house") vs las casas [læ̞ ˈkæ̞sæ̞] ("the houses").

Consonants

In this dialect we can find linguistic phenomena that are (or were) usual in other linguistic varieties (Aragonese, Mozarabic, Catalan, Valencian, Andalusian, etc.).

Evolution of certain consonantic groups

See also