Author ORCID Identifier

Lotfi Sayahi: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1319-9306

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

Aljamiado literature, composed in Romance and recorded in Arabic script by Moriscos before their final expulsion from Spain, represents a valuable resource for the linguistic study of the contact situations between Arabic and Romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula. By examining Arabic insertions in Romance texts, we are able to probe the degree of bilingualism that these communities exhibited and the factors that led to a continued use of the Arabic language in the face of religious and linguistic persecution between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a previous work (Thomas 2015), occurrences of lexical insertions and instances of codeswitching were extracted from 31 Aljamiado works collected in three different volumes: Menéndez Pidal’s study of El poema de Yúçuf (1952), Manuscript 4953 from the Biblioteca Nacional de España analyzed by Hegyi in Cinco leyendas y otros relatos moriscos (1981), and a collection of stories about biblical characters compiled by Vespertino Rodríguez in Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes bíblicos (1983). In the great majority of the cases, it was shown that the use of Arabic was formulaic and consisted in the repetition of certain religious quotes and terms.

Comments

Publisher Acknowledgment:

This is the publisher's pdf. The version of record can be found here: Thomas, J. A. & Sayahi, L. (2019). Language contact phenomena in three Aljamiado texts: Religion as a sociolinguistic factor. EHumanista, 41, 142+.

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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