Jump to content

Bercian dialect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bercian is the generic name of the linguistic varieties spoken in El Bierzo region, in the province of Leon, Spain. They belong to the dialect continuum of Romance languages in northern Spain, linking the Galician and Leonese languages. Many of these varieties are on the brink of disappearing.

Written references

[edit]

The first written references dealing with the local speech like Bercian dialect correspond to the middle of the 19th century in Isidoro Andres de Llano's work, Remembrance of Puentedeume in Bercian dialect, 1860, published in the Esla journal. In 1861, Antonio Fernandez Morales wrote upon Mariano Cubi's (co-author) request, in Bercian dialect: Ensaios Poeticos en Dialecto Berciano.

Nowadays it has almost disappeared, surviving in many expressions of daily use.[1] Local expressions and vocabulary have been gathered in several works, the most interesting ones being those made by Luis A. Pastrana and David Lopez, at the beginning of the 1970s, with a sketch of the morphology and syntax of the dialect and one interesting dictionary of expressions and words, and Manuel Gutierrez Tunon's doctoral thesis "The Speech of El Bierzo", published in 1975.

Classifications

[edit]

El Bierzo has always been considered a bridge between Galicia and Leon province; but with salient particular features,[2] which led to defining this speech of El Bierzo as Bercian dialect in the 19th century, being considered part of the Galician linguistic domain by Antonio Fernandez Morales in 1861 and part of the Leonese linguistic domain by Ramon Menendez Pidal, the latter stating that the dividing line between Leonese and Galician should be placed between the basins of the Cua and Sil rivers. In 1934, Verardo Garcia Rey gathered the vocabulary of the Bercian dialect in the publication: Vocabulario de El Bierzo, where the author makes clear that after his fieldwork, he would re-place the dividing line between the Asturleonese and the Galician-Portuguese linguistic groups, setting it strictly along the Sil river. Jesus Garcia y Garcia, in 1994, places the mentioned line from the high Cua river up to a place in Ponferrada's municipality (Dehesas, Fuentesnuevas).[2]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Alvarez Diaz, Alfredo. Cruce de dialectos en el habla de San Pedro de Olleros (Leon). Journal: Lletres Asturianes 61 (1996). ISSN 0212-0534.
  2. ^ a b Pueblos y rios bercianos: (significado e historia de sus nombres), Jesus Garcia y Garcia, 1994,ISBN 84-604-8787-3
[edit]