Social remarks on the history of Spanish

Abstract

If one takes a birds-eye tour of the social history of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Antiquity to the present, there are several key features that can be clearly perceived. Latin, for instance, stands out in this timeline for its role as protagonist during a period of 2000 years. One can also note the importance of linguistic demography, the cycles of which determine the social presence of languages as well as how we view them, since it is these cycles that affect the configuration and extension of the geographic varieties of each language. Linguistically speaking, Spanish history demonstrates the influence that France has had in different times and diverse areas: the importance of Provencal literature, the arrival of European culture by way of the Camino de Santiago and through ecclesiastical reforms, the Medieval re-population movements, or the influence of the French model in linguistic politics of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, what stands out most clearly when considering the mosaic of languages that have come together in the Peninsula over the course of time is the naturalness and normality with which these languages have co-existed on an everyday basis, whether neighboring languages, co-offcial languages sharing the same territory, mixed languages, or languages that mutually influence each other. The case of the Basque Territory is particularly representative due to its secular bilingualism, with the co-existence of extremely different languages from Indo-European and other varieties in the Pre-Historic Age, to modern-day Basque and Castilian. We should not lose sight of the fact that it was a bilingual monk who penned what we consider some of the first testimonies of the Basque language. The aim of this article is to present some of the most important moments in the social history of the Spanish language as it relates to its neighboring languages.