User:Lascorz
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I am Juan R. Lascorz, a sysop at Wikipedia:Aragonese language and partly a native speaker of that romance language. You can mainly contact me here.
Aragonese and problem
Sadly, it's common in Spain for a regional language to be used as a tool in politics, specially by those of nationalist thought, implying that their opponents will tend to downgrade or to undersestimate publically the language itself as a way to mine the regionalist arguments. And, obviouslly, for those who live in a region without a strong popular support to autoctonous regionalism or nationalism like others, just like Aragon is, an historical tendency to discredit the local language (a vulgar dialect, «rural» and «swear») is something probable to be expected, even permeating the speakers who would finally tend to abandon their vernacular speech in an attempt to reach the ellegance of Regular Spanish, benighteous of the cultural loose that would lead to.
In the case of aragonese, our language has suffered this phenomenon for long time, having been officially considered just a geographical and historical variety of castilian/spanish from Illustration to modern day, therefore deserving no public interest and receiving much lesser efforts to it's conservation and teaching (we should better say, it has never had a public promotion at all) if we compare with other regional languages of Spain, as basque or catalan, with local strong nationalisms backing them. The situation is paradoxical but simple to explain; we have in Spain a very few number of Autonomous Communities which, after relative struggle to have their vernaculars recognised after Francoism in Spain's transition to democracy, have reached the goal (and seem to permanently use their defference to maintain their privileged situation, and, more over, to increase the number of their privileges -some even call themselves a «nation» because of having a different language, and are starting to claim their own independence. So you can understand how delicate the sittuation is-), while some others did by various means not claim their pressumptive rights to and now find opposition from an hostigated central State who wants no more potential nationalisms to emerge, and from (I'd call them «rival») Communities with rights given during the Transition willing to impede any other to reach their same linguistic privilege degree.
As a consequence of this, Aragon (as of 2010) has a large majority of castilian speakers descending from former generations of aragonese speakers who did progressively adopt castilian as their language because they had been told their speech was vulgar, having relegated the aragonese romance language to the highest valleys in the Pyrenees, where life seemed to be tougher before the tourism arrival, and the very small number of their inhabitants somehow did continue to speak aragonese at least until modern days.
One of the possible explanations of this reductive conservation is, in my opinion, the not-well-studied phenomenon of dialectalisation of aragonese. In my opinion, in linguistic terms aragonese is a part of a pan-hispanic system of dialects which includes from aragonese in the eastern end to galician-portuguese to the westernmost, according to the current opinion that all of these languages/dialects should be included in a sub-romanic phylum called the west Ibero-romance, while differring from catalan which would constitute a different branch (east Ibero-romance). In practical terms, this means aragonese is objectivelly closer to castilian than it is to catalan, occitan or french, but it's not because of a flagrant castilianisation of the language (which has actually also occured, in different degrees depending on the geographical point) but because of the language has been closer to castilian from their spliting point in evolution, the same manner for example modern galician has, and still holding and having always held many similarities with castilian, asturleonese and galician-portuguese. This also means it was more susceptible of being treated as a local dialect to spanish as has also happened with asturleonese. Certainly, I believe that probably all these languages were once inter-intelligible, and with the exception of portuguese dialect of galician-portuguese which has had the particularity of the independence of its country from Spain allowing it to evolve more separatelly, the rest of them still are.
I am also convinced that, in a time in which there were no organisms trying to homogenize languages, or there was not a standard constructed, all languages tended to diverge more or less widely in through all the territory in which they were spoken, showing a more or less wide diversity of local varieties, being those which stood in territories bordering that of another (close) language more similar to it. In this line, what we call the aragonese language should also have counted with a number of these geographical varieties, some of which might have sounded closer to castilian (and, obviously, some from eastern Castille sounding closer to these of western Aragon) even reaching the point that they might have mixed in what we could nowadays call a gradient continuum, that could only exist before the rising of language standards and their academies, reaching the outmost of their difference in opposite ends of that imaginary line. In my opinion, in this line of thought the pyrenean varieties of aragonese should have always been more different to castilian than those varieties existing in the plains of Ebro depression and in steppes and semi-deserts of southern Aragon, very wide spaces in which people had to travel much longer distances than in mountain valleys if necessary, and would therefore speak a more similar way in settlements separed by much larger distances. This might give a possible explanation to the stronger resistance of pyrenean and estern varieties of aragonese in front of castilian: Speaking a more different way means to realize more easily about the personality of your own speech. A realization that is commonly called language consciousness.