Summary

The Romance varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula fall into three major groups: Galician-Portuguese, Central Ibero-Romance and Catalan. All these varieties have their origins in the evolution of Latin in the northern fringe of the Iberian Peninsula and spread southward in the Middle Ages. One of the main features that distinguish the Central Ibero-Romance group from its neighbors to the west and east is the diphthongization of /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ from Latin short ĕ and ŏ in stressed syllables (as in tierra ‘land’, puerta ‘door’ vs. Pt. and Cat. terra, porta). Besides Spanish, which historically derives from the evolution of Latin in the original territory of the Kingdom of Castile, the other main Central Ibero-Romance varieties are Astur-Leonese (including Mirandese, in Portugal) and Aragonese. For the medieval period, Old Navarrese Romance is well documented, as is, to a lesser extent, the transitional variety of La Rioja. There are no documents entirely written in Andalusi Romance, the set of Romance varieties spoken in Islamic Spain in medieval times, but we can infer some of its features from short texts and several other sources.