Analysis of the current situation of the Asturian language in El Mazucu (Llanes) through an old informant’s speech.

Abstract

In the last generations, the Asturian language has suffered a constant loss of the characteristics that define it, especially due to an increasing process of castilianization. It is interesting to keep record and analyse this process of degradation. In this work, it is gathered the way of speaking of a ninety-year-old woman from El Mazucu (Llanes), studying its morphological, syntactical and phonetical characteristics. Through this interviewed manner of speech, some examples of this active process of hybridization will be evidenced. It will be highlighted the Asturian aspects that have been better preserved as well as other in-between forms which are suffering an alteration process because of the influence of the Spanish language, and even some Spanish forms which have substituted completely the original Asturian forms gathered in the area in previous studies. The result of the contact of the two languages is not only a mixture or hybridization of Asturian and Spanish, but a complex process which includes the emergence of in-between forms which is not exactly the Spanish in which it is moving towards but either the original Asturian.