Language Interaction in Spain and France

How exactly does the language change in Southwestern Europe, specifically by contact with other languages? And if such languages arose from the same first language, or "Ur-language," why does contact matter at all? The resources for this project are also quite fascinating, and if this piece somewhat piqued your interest, you will find them more so... just ask for the Works Cited list!

Lexical Contact and Linguistic Evolution in Southwestern Europe

         Two hundred miles around you right now, whether you’re in the heart of the Beijing metropolis or the desolate tundra of Northern Canada, are millions of things you’ve never seen or cared about before. Things tangible and intangible, people and ideas, perhaps never-before explored oceans or mountaintops are, relative to the other side of the world, incredibly near to you. There is almost certainly something within your two hundred mile radius that is extremely precious and unique - a language or dialect different from your own. In the Pyrenees mountains of Spain and France, two hundred miles around is a garden home to more than a dozen of these linguistic treasures, five of which - Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French, and Basque - constitute the fecund soil in this region. From this grows a vast diversity of dialects, grammatical hybrids, and sprouts of fortuitous individualism, undoubtedly making it one of the most lexically bountiful regions in Europe. The question to be answered about this orchard is the way in which it grows; how and why does lexical interference occur? It happens because of conquest, ancestry, and unique cultural features; its effects are in the dictionaries, phonemes, and conversational slang of its populace; and the result is Eden.


         Lexical contact advances the social development of humans in several ways, but the most prevalent is by communication. Words, grammar, and syntax of one language have been changed by the interference of a foreign one, creating an entirely new language or dialect. The diversity of these new languages and dialects create oddities in speech. For example, several languages in Europe ask age differently: “how old are you?”, “how many years do you have?”, and “how many winters/Christmas’s have you seen?” are all examples of how contact can change one phrase into various forms of the same phrase. From an anthropological point of view, it would be very odd to ask an Englishman how many years he has, as it would be to ask a Spaniard how old he is; a language barrier exists because of lexical contact, yet there are blatant similarities. Humans interpret phrases differently across any kind of geographical ranges, which provides for diverse development of language.

         The five important languages of the region share several similarities induced by contact, but the most common four - Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, and French - are similar in part because they evolved from Latin, making them part of the Romance language family. The Romans in their conquest of Europe brought with them their ancient Latin language, then in a family called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. As they pushed forward into the Iberian Peninsula, more ancient languages such as Etruscan and Iberian are believed to have been eradicated. Basque, however, is a unique and separate language that remained spoken in parts of Spain and France. Its ways of life, unfortunately, are often smothered by those of the surrounding Indo-European cultures, most notably Spanish and Occitan.

         Spain, one of three countries that share the glorious mountain range, is home to Spanish and Catalan of the Indo-European group. Spanish is obviously the most widely spoken and most useful language in Spain. What is spoken here is an “original dialect,” or the father dialect from which others evolved, known as Castilian Spanish. Its name is derived from the province Castile, which no longer exists independently. Castilian Spanish is different from South and Central American dialects because it is more directly in contact with languages like Greek and Arabic, whereas Western Hemisphere dialects are formed largely by the influence of American Indian languages. The resulting interactions make phonemes less common between the multiple dialects. For example, the Greek letter Theta (θ) was transliterated into Castilian Spanish and has replaced the “s” sound in spoken language, creating a different dialect from Latin American ones.

         Another prominent linguistic influence in Spain is Catalan. It is spoken in the Balearic Islands and an autonomous region in Eastern Spain known as Catalonia. Andorra, another of the three countries in the region, proclaims Catalan as its official language. In total, over ten million people speak it as their first language. Many groups, partially due to Francisco Franco’s authoritarian rule in the Iberian Peninsula, regard Catalan as a mere dialect of Spanish. In fact, Catalan was a fully formed language by the 11th century, clearly distinguishable from its Latin roots. It went through various stages of dialect and language status as declared by the governments of Spain, but it was regardless a descendant of Latin rather than Spanish. A more individualistic Catalonia emerged from the 1992 Barcelona Olympic games, at which rules were given in English, Spanish, French, and the noticeably unique Catalan.

         Occitan is an extremely obscure language spoken in the Southern half of France. It is divided into six dialects: Gascon, Languedocian, Provençal, Alpine Provençal, Limousin, and Auvergnat. The former three are in the Southern quarter of France, making them the most easily accessed by Spanish influences (Map 1). The word “dialect” as it is used can be challenged here since each of its parts is quite different from the next. There is no defined “Occitan language,” but is instead divided into these six sub-parts. It would be analogous to say there is no English language, but British, Texan, Scottish, and Australian “dialects.” Occitan constitutes the “Langues d’Oc,” or “languages of ‘Oc,’” a classification made by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century. Alighieri divided the languages of France into “oil” and “oc, ” based on the word for “yes” in the North and South. Occitan is remarkably similar to Catalan, and is often assumed to have a common ancestor between it and Latin. This writer doubts this theory, however, because of the time frame in which the surrounding languages were formed. If both Occitan and Catalan were fully formed by the Middle Ages yet had an ancestor preceding them, that language would have had to be formed before the Romans conquered Spain, which is highly illogical. The French consider Occitan only a “patois,” or distorted dialect, of French. This is of course untrue because they formed themselves independently from one another. Moreover, characteristics of each show that Occitan remained closer to Latin than did French (OccitaNet, 2).

         A completely separate language from all the others that is not even in the Indo-European family is Basque. With the expansion of the Roman Empire, “Basque country” was confined to a small region on the Bay of Biscay. Although it is not an exception to the rule that languages borrow from and converge with each other, it is “a rare example of a European language unrelated to any other known language” (Macaulay, 149). Though it is far from similar to another specific language, it is in a family called Dene-Caucasian (Fig.1), which consists of only a few extremely odd lexicons. Based on the cave paintings in their country, the unrelated primitive-sounding tongue, and being physiologically distinguished by a “high incidence of Rh Negative factor in the blood” (U. Nevada, 1) of the population, Basques have been considered as possible descendants of Cro-Magnon Man. Estimates of their habitation of the area range from 10,000 to 75,000 years, and are possibly the original inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. Basque’s extreme inimitability and its interaction with other languages makes it an integral component in the Iberian language foundation.

         Many similarities exist among all the languages in the region. Similarities in language are derived from three mechanisms: common origin, convergence, and borrowing. The former is a cause of linguistic evolution; the latter two are results of lexical contact. To explain how lexical contact occurs, it is first important to discuss innate relationships of the larger languages. Most similarities between Italic languages are a result of their Latin origin. For example, Spanish and French are quite different in pronunciation and phonetics because this is a result of geography and culture - Spanish and French vowels differ significantly from each other and some consonant sounds do not exist in the other. In Spanish, the “ch,” “y,” and “ny” sounds as in “cherry,” “yell,” and “onion” are alphabetical letters (“ch,” “ll,” and “Z”) instead of simply a combination of consonants. Nasals and the “zh” sound as in “measure” do not exist in Spanish like they do in French, and the “ch” sound in Spanish is almost never heard in French. Word order, vocabulary, grammar, and verb tense formation are nearly identical despite phonological differences. Both have SVO word order (Subject-Verb-Object) and words that come from the same root (Fig. 2). Conditional and future verbs tenses are formed by adding present tense endings onto an infinitive of the verb in both languages. In addition, some of these verbs carry over to the other language (Fig. 3).

         French shares many characteristics with Spanish as well as Occitan, which is one step closer to Latin in terms of linguistic evolution. In the formation of French, Latin’s a’s were dropped for e’s, e’s changed into “wa,” o’s changed to “eu,” and French dropped harder sounds for softer ones. Occitan retained these sounds, in turn making Occitan to have more phonology in common with Latin. Oddly enough, Languedocian, spoken in the province most engulfed in the Pyrenees, has more in common with Latin than its neighbors on either side, Gascon and Provençal. This author believes that part of the explanation for this is that the heavy influence of Basque on Gascon adds several irregularities, and the strong cultural pride of Provençal’s ancient literature, the poetry and songs of European troubadours, keeps it more immune to language change. Languedocian remains the most unchanged, as it is the least in contact with foreign influence. Like French, Languedocian uses the word “pas” after the verb and before the object to indicate a negative phrase. Much of its vocabulary is French i.e. “Aver” is like French’s “avoir” meaning “to have,” in contrast with Spanish’s “Tener”; “Parl-” is a root in Languedocian and French meaning “to speak,” whereas Spanish has the verb “hablar.” Languedocian is pronounced much like Spanish and Catalan, however, interchanging b’s and v’s and voicing consonants. The endings for a verb are similar to Latin and Spanish rather than French (Fig. 4). Languedocian is a very interesting language because it is a metaphorical and geographical center of gravity between Spanish, Latin, French, and Catalan and their respective locations. The reason it is so important is that it is a connecting piece between Spanish and French. It also serves as a prime example of contact across a geographical line of demarcation that separates two dialects, called an isogloss, because of its relationship with Catalan. How is it possible to know that Occitan’s close relationship with Catalan is a result of lexical contact instead of common origin? The answer, this writer thinks, is inherent - the close relationship explains its own formation. Spanish and Catalan were both fully-formed around the same time, and the reason that Languedocian is closer to Catalan is because it shares more boundaries with Andorra and Catalonia than Castilian Spain does.

         Napoleon Bonaparte had probably one of the most influential actions on preserving and calling attention to the languages of Occitan when he sent out a census in 1806 of all the tongues spoken in the French Empire. All “dialects” were to reply to the census by translating into their native tongue the “prodigal son” parable in Luke 15:11-32 of the Bible. Luke 15:21 is given here in English, French, Gascon, Provençal, and Catalan:


         “And the son said unto him, [My] Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” - English (Batzarov, 1)

         “Et son fils lui dit alors: Mon pere, j’ai péché contre le ciel et contre vous; je ne merité plus d’etre appelé votre fils.” - French (Batzarov, 1)

         “E soun hil qu’eou digoue: Moun pay, qu’ey peccat cost’oou ceo é daouant bous: nou souy pas mes deou noum de boste hii.” - Gascon (Batzarov, 2)

         “Et soun fieou li diguet: Moun paVré, aV peccat contro lou ciel et contro de vous; noun siou pas digné d’estre appelat vouestre fieou.” - Provençal (Batzarov, 2)

         “Llavors el seu fill li digué: Pare, he pecat contra el cel I contra tu; ja no sóc digne que em diguin fill teu.” - Catalan


         Vocabulary similarities between all four include “son,” “said,” “my,” “father,” “sinned,” “against,” “heaven,” and “you.” Gascon seems to stray the most from the other four, which suggests the influence of a different language. This other language is Basque; the contact between the two explains a number of Gascon’s oddities. It is easy to see the relationship between French and Gascon in the above translations, but higher frequency of velar sounds (k, c, g) and vowel diphthongs suggests the presence of harsh-sounding Basque. One reason that Gascon is so diverse (besides its geographical location) is the existence of shepherds and nomads, who in search for good pasture come across many people of different tongues. Basque, French, Spanish, a dialect called Aragonese, and “black Spanish” (a form of shepherd jargon), combine and come back to Gascon to make it such an odd language.

         The two means besides common origin by which similarities can appear in language - convergence and borrowing - fall into the category of lexical contact. Convergence is an accidental process caused by two languages just being in close proximity. Convergence is when two objects that were originally different come to resemble each other and therefore two words connote one thing. In biology, for example, people often confuse dolphins as being fish or bats as birds because of the similar characteristics of the two. In language, an example of this is the auxiliary verb “have,” as in “I have eaten.” French’s “avoir” turned into Languedocian’s “aver” (both are used as auxiliaries and noting of possession, similar to English), and the convergence occurs where Languedocian meets Spanish. This created the verb “haber,” even though the verb “to have” is “tener” in Spanish. Languedocian’s “aver” converged with a lack of auxiliary verb in Spanish to make it have two verbs that resemble one. A more basic example is the French word “glace,” for “mirror” and “ice.” Both connote smoothness and coolness, and ice often reflects images like a mirror. The similarity in connotation caused convergence - both meanings became the same word. Therefore this writer can determine that most homographs, words that are spelled the same but with different meanings, exist by means of convergence. Onomatopoeia, written words that represent actual sounds i.e. “buzz” and “clank,” disobey convergence laws because they occur in all languages. A wailing baby makes the same sound everywhere, and is the same sound regardless of the way it is spelled, be it “oil,” “wa,” or “uaa.”

         The second method of contact is a more popular and more effective one - borrowing. Middle English borrowed close to ten thousand words from Old French following the Norman conquest of England in 1066 A.D., many of which have survived to today: people, beef, crime, religion, virgin, nature, art, sport, beauty, and table are several words of French origin (Ruhlen, 31). This kind of borrowing is an inevitable result of mixing words and grammar of the French and the Anglo-Saxons. Another type of linguistic borrowing is when a material or belief native to one region is presented to a culture without that specific product. Coffee and tobacco were not words before explorers brought them from the Americas to Europe, but were transliterated into each language to fit a similar pronunciation of the original. “Café” and “Tábaco” are the words in Spanish for coffee and tobacco - it can be expected to have almost identical spellings and pronunciations with newly introduced words. Borrowing also increases a language’s vocabulary as does creating new words, called neologisms. Borrowing partially explains why English has such a large lexicon - German, Dutch, French, Latin, and Greek are all ubiquitous in its words’ origins.

         It has now been explained how lexical contact occurs, but why? As explained before, convergence is accidental or coincidental. Borrowing, however, happens because of either need or prestige. “Speakers of a language must refer to some object or concept for which they have no word. This is cultural borrowing” (McMahon, 1). Religious beliefs play a large part in need because of the large vocabulary that accompanies them. Christianity brought words like “minister,” “angel,” “devil,” “apostle,” “bishop,” “priest,” and “mass;” other religions did the same. Recently, business and technology have shaped the lexicons of languages. Words like “electricity,” “computer,” and “technological” have no equivalent in Spanish or French and must become transliterated directly. Thus, French has the words “l’électricité,” “l’ordinateur” (Literally “organizer,” an alternate word for “computer”), and “tecnologique.” Business and financial matters also inspire new words - the following is a phrase translated into Basque:
“Espainiaren kasuan, euroak alde estatal bat edukitzeak aukera historikoa eskaintzen de katalana, euskera eta gailegoa erabilera lealeko monetaren barruan sartzeko;” and its English equivalent:

         “In the case of Spain, the existence of a state face on the Euro offers an historic occasion to incorporate Catalan, Basque and Galician on the coin of legal tender.”

         Case, Spain, Euro, state, occasion, historic, Catalan, Galician, legal, and coin may originally have had no equivalent in Basque because there was no need for them. With the issuance of legal tender, the labeling of neighboring places, and recording history in Basque country comes a new addition to its lexicon. If contact had not occurred, the specific words like Spain, Catalan, Euro and Galician would not have existed altogether. The other words’ existence depends on the evolution of the Basque society, whether it is in environment, government or academics. Another possible explanation for such a high occurrence of borrowed words in the Basque language is simply because they are there and are dominant. For example, a hypothetical situation can be considered to parallel this theory: Assume that the Basque language had a word for “case” (as it is a common word in any language), called “matxu.” When the Romans invaded, they brought along a word similar to “case,” which could have been used a synonym for “matxu.” Eventually, both words would be acceptable, but one would dominate from a more common usage. To pose a contemporary example, many times teenagers “invent” new words, or neologisms, to indicate their approval. “Neat,” “cool,” “rad,” “bad,” and “awesome” are all neologisms of the past fifty years, some of which have lasted longer than others. As the succession indicates, some words are newer, catchier or more flowing than the one before or after it. “Cool” and “awesome” have remained up to this day rather than “rad,” “bad,” or “neat,” similar to the way “case” won over “matxu.”

         Conversational slang is the most important subculture of language, and is extremely important in describing the social anthropological effects of language change. Colloquialisms, regionalisms, and idioms all comprise “slang.” Often times its creation is purposeful. The American Revolution, in hopes of separating from Britain linguistically as well as politically, caused dozens of words such as “jeweller,” “shoppe,” and “maneouvre” to be changed from the British spelling to a different spelling that still implied the same meaning. “Jeweler,” “shop,” and “maneuver” became the American spelling.

         This writer believes that the effect of the Roman invasion on language is infinite, in negative and positive respects. The Roman conquest erased thousands of years of history, thousands of people, several languages that could have developed into modern ones, and colorful cultures. Basque fortunately survives, but Etruscan and Iberian as its ancestors or sisters, which undoubtedly had their own particular anomalies, similarities and differences between each other, no longer exist. Italic culture smothered other ones, causing them to be unnoticed or eradicated entirely. Historically, the Roman conquest was detrimental to progress in France and Spain.

         Although linguistically it destroyed several important Dene-Caucasian languages, the Roman conquest opened the way to lexical contact, which this author thinks has had an immeasurable positive effect on all languages of Europe. Had the Roman conquest not occurred in this region, English words with Arabic roots such as “algebra” or “sheriff” would not have existed. Words that come from Spanish and French would have been significantly less in number; although many similar words derive from common origin, several words like “paella,” “avocado,” and “siesta,” which were created as a result of lexical contact, would not be in English.

         Gascon exists today as a mixture between French and Basque; Languedocian is a result of Latin and French evolution; Provencal is a Latin, French and Spanish mixture, with a flair of PIE languages; Catalan is the result of Spanish, Latin, and PIE Mediterranean combining; and Basque is a unique combination of PIE languages and Latin, Spanish, and French influences. All of them are results of linguistic interaction, making the Pyrenees region one of the most diverse in the world. The effects of language contact on social anthropology - communication, culture, geographical location, education, politics, history, and all ways of life - are innumerable and extremely important in its development. The conclusion that can be drawn from all the facts of language contact is that, by all the means it occurs, across any range of distance or time and either in times of platitude or subjugation, it develops the human race further, more uniquely, and more influentially than anyone would have supposed at a single glance. Linguistic interference is the most intriguing and subtle aspect of human interaction; and in the Pyrenees Mountains of Southwestern Europe, the explanation it gives about macrocosmic language is worth more than the land in which it occurs.