Most forgotten minority languages of the Spanish State: Extremadura
- In the Spanish Congress you can speak more languages since last week: Basque, Galician and Catalan, with simultaneous interpretation in one direction. The Asturian and Aragonese have achieved a lesser status: they can be used by Members if they translate below. But there are other languages within the limits of the Spanish State which have not received a single mention.
For example, we saw this map in a survey of Congress languages.
This map shows the mention of Aranesa, variant of the Occitan that speaks in the Catalan Pyrenees, in the Garonne Valley. But there are more languages, like Occitan, coming from other "states," if Ceuta and Melilla are Spain, like Arabic and the same as Tarifit or Rif. And in Extremadura, on the border with Portugal, there are towns and regions that speak of Portuguese. And in Extremadura there are more, two Romanesque languages of their own, the indigenous languages: Fala and Extremadura. This map illustrates the linguistic regions originating in Extremadura.
Northeast of Extremadura, at one end is the valley of Xalima, where Fala is spoken, a very different variety from the Galician (in blue on the map). But the green region of its surroundings, which affects the regions of Hurdes in Cáceres and some of its surroundings, is the extreme language itself, the extremadura. The blue areas on the map are in Portuguese and are yellow-brown with variations in Spanish.
This is not, therefore, a dialect of Castilian, a Extremadura accent of the other regions. It's related to historical and philological links, eel lions. And in melody and lexicon, it's very different from Spanish. Listen to Anibal Martin's excerpt:
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