Mirandese language

Lack of protection measures

There are significant limitations in the protection of the Mirandese language:

• Portugal has not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
• There is no Mirandese law, its use in courts or public administration is not legal.
• The budget for the protection and promotion of Mirandese is not implemented.
• Lack of specialized teacher training, translations and media
• Education in Mirandese is not mandatory and discouraged
• Most software applications do not support Mirandese, with the exceptions of SwiftKey and Heliboard on mobile.

The following measures have been taken to protect and develop Mirandese:

• Allow primary teaching staff in the district of Miranda de l Douro to teach in Mirandese, since 1986/1987, thanks to the ministerial authorisation published on 9 September 1985.
• Publish books in Mirandese and about the Mirandese language, promoted by the Council of Miranda de l Douro.
• Facilitate annual celebrations in the city as well as a literary competition, promoted by the Council of Miranda do Douro.
• Use Mirandese in town celebrations, official commemorations and, occasionally, on social media.
• Publish two volumes of the Asterix comic books.
• Translate all the toponymic signs in Miranda do Douro, promoted by the Council of Miranda do Douro in 2006.
• Develop studies by research centres in Portugal, such as "Atlas Linguístico de Portugal", by the Centro de Linguística at University of Lisbon, and "Inquérito Linguístico Boléo", by the University of Coimbra.
• Create Biquipédia, a Mirandese-language Wikipedia.
• Make sites available in Mirandese, such as Photoblog and WordPress.
• Record Mirandese music, with singers including Roberto Leal in his albums Canto da Terra (2007) and Raiç/Raíz (2010).
• Integrated into the SwiftKey keyboard in 2018, with autocorrect and word suggestions.
• Participation in the European Language Equality project (2021–2022), which promotes digital equality by 2030.
• Create a GNOME Translation Team to help translate Linux distros into Mirandese.

Recognition

Mirandese, given its status as a recognised language in Portugal after Portuguese, has been the subject in recent years of some publicity and attention in other parts of Portugal. A monthly chronicle in Mirandese, by researcher and writer Amadeu Ferreira, appears in the daily Portuguese national newspaper Público. The first volume of the Adventures of Asterix, named Asterix, L Goulés (Asterix the Gaul), was published in a Mirandese translation by Amadeu Ferreira in 2005, and sold throughout Portugal. Amadeu Ferreira also translated into Mirandese the epic poem by Camões, Os Lusíadas (Ls Lusíadas), under his pseudonym Francisco Niebro, and published it in 2009. In 2011, the four Gospels of the Bible's New Testament were translated into Mirandese, and in 2013 the entire Bible was translated into the language by Domingos Augusto Ferreira.

Variants

Three primary variants of the Mirandese language exist: Border Mirandese (Mirandés Raiano), Central Mirandese (Mirandés Central) and Sendinese (Sendinés). Most speakers of Mirandese also speak Portuguese.

Despite there being a singular writing system for Mirandese, there is one phoneme that is written differently in different dialects. In the Sendinese dialect, many words that in other dialects are said with ⟨lh⟩, are said with /l/ ⟨l⟩: examples include alá for alhá 'over there'; lado for lhado 'side'; luç for lhuç 'light'.

The main orthographical differences between Mirandese in Portugal and the Asturleonese languages in Spain are caused by the dominant languages in each region. And while Mirandese has been influenced phonetically and in lexicon by Portuguese and the Asturleonese languages in Spain by Spanish, they retain more similarities among themselves than to the main languages of each country. Another difference is that Mirandese and Leonese remain very conservative, while Asturian has undergone a greater amount of change.

Phonology

Development

Some historical developments in Mirandese are the following:

• Mirandese maintains distinct reflexes of all seven Ibero-Romance sibilants:

and indicate apico-alveolar sibilants (as in modern Catalan, northern/central peninsular Spanish and coastal northern European Portuguese), while and are dentalized laminal alveolar sibilants (as in most modern Portuguese, French and English). The unrelated Basque language also maintains a distinction between and (Basque has no voiced sibilants), which suggests that the distinction originally was an areal feature across Iberia.

Portuguese spelling still distinguishes all seven sibilants and is identical to Mirandese spelling in this respect, but in pronunciation, Portuguese has reduced them to four except in northern hinterland European Portuguese dialects, including those in the area where Mirandese is also spoken. Northern/central Peninsular Spanish has also reduced them to four but in quite a different way: . Western Andalusian Spanish and Latin American Spanish have further reduced them to three: .

• Retention of the initial from Latin, like all of Western and Central Asturleonese and Galician-Portuguese.
• Development of the Latin initial consonant clusters , , evolve into , as in Leonese and Galician-Portuguese.
• Development of the medial clusters and as , like in Galician-Portuguese and various Western Asturleonese varieties.
• The cluster /-mb-/ is kept, like various Asturleonese varieties.
• Development of as : lūm'nem > lume.
• Preservation of the falling diphthongs and , like Western Asturleonese and Galician Portuguese, but not any other Asturleonese varieties nor Castilian.
• Raising of final to , as in Asturleonese and Galician-Portuguese.
• Retention of voiced sibilants, like Portuguese, but unlike most West-Iberian varieties of Spain.
• Retention of intervocalic , , like all West-Iberian varieties besides Galician-Portuguese
• Frequent diphthongization of Western Romance , to , , as in some Leonese varieties; this happens not only before palatals, as in Aragonese, but also before nasals.
• Word-initial palatalization of , as in other Asturleonese varieties and Catalan.

Consonants

• As stated above, the laminal dental sibilants correspond to Portuguese . These are spelled c/ç and z. The corresponding alveolar sibilants are apical and are spelled s(s) and s. Furthermore, there is an additional palatal affricate ch that is distinct from the fricative , spelled x. The voiced is spelled j or g, as in Portuguese. Standard Portuguese has reduced all these sounds to just four fricatives: .
• The "hard" or "long" R is an alveolar trill , as in other varieties of Asturleonese and in Spanish. The Portuguese uvular fricative is not found in Mirandese. The "soft" or "short" R is an ordinary alveolar tap commonly found in the Iberian Peninsula. As in other languages spoken in the region, the two contrast only in word-internal position.
• Voiced stops may be lenited as fricatives .

Vowels

Mirandese has the same basic phonemes as most Asturleonese varieties, but with some differences in allophones:

• has allophones of , of , of , of , and of .
• Vowels can become glides when preceding or following other vowels.
• All vowel phonemes have nasal counterparts, reflected in all its allophones.

Orthography

Mirandese is written using the Latin alphabet, and its orthography is based on that of Portuguese:

Superseded orthography

When Mirandese was first officially recognised and a writing system was established, it used ⟨ê⟩ and ⟨ô⟩ (like Portuguese) to represent and respectively in the diphthongs ⟨uô⟩ and ⟨iê⟩. These have since fallen in disuse because this rendering was only accurate in the Central and Raiano dialects, where these diphthongs read and , unlike in the Sendinese dialect, where they had been reduced to and .

In 2000, the "purmeira adenda" (''first addendum'') was made to the Mirandese orthography, quickly followed by a second one two years later, but only the first was put to use officially, removing the glyphs ⟨ê⟩ and ⟨ô⟩ and allowing Sendinese speakers to spell their unpalatalised pronunciation of words using ⟨l⟩ instead of ⟨lh⟩, among other small changes.

Controversy regarding the official orthography

When the idea for an official standardised Mirandese orthography was suggested in the late 1990’s, there was a lot of debate as to what to base it on, given Mirandese’s near nonexistent literary history. Many people defended basing Mirandese’s orthography on other Asturleonese varieties (notably Asturian, given its richer literary history), with the usage of ⟨ñ⟩ and ⟨ll⟩ instead of the Portuguese ⟨nh⟩ and ⟨lh⟩ for and respectively, or the usage of ⟨u⟩ instead of ⟨o⟩ for word-final , for example. While others defended basing it on Portuguese’s orthography to aid the older population who was only literate in Portuguese and not have them learn a new set of orthographical rules.

In the end, a mostly Portuguese-based orthography was chosen, but with some alterations to it to still cater to Mirandese’s phonetic inventory.

Morphology

As in Portuguese, Mirandese still uses the following synthetic tenses:

• Synthetic pluperfect in -ra.
• Future subjunctive in -r(e).
• Personal infinitive in -r(e), which has the same endings as the future subjunctive but often differs as the personal infinitive always uses the infinitive stem, whereas the future subjunctive uses the past.

Influence on Transmontano Portuguese

Mirandese was formerly spoken in the general area of the district of Bragança (Bergáncia in Mirandese), that speaks the Transmontano dialect of Portuguese. Although Mirandese has been lost in this region, it left some words and phonetic influences behind.

Words used in eastern Trás-os-Montes of (likely) Mirandese origin

Sample text

The following is a sample text of the Mirandese language, written by Amadeu Ferreira and published in the newspaper Público on 24 July 2007.

Then a comparison of the previous text in three modern languages of the Asturoleonese group:

Comparative table