| West Iberian | |
|---|---|
| Western Iberian Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance[a] | |
| Geographic distribution | Iberian Peninsula,Latin America,Africa,Israel,Philippines,East Timor,Easter Island,Goa |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | west2838unsh1234 |
 Languages of the Iberian Peninsula West Iberian Romance:Occitano-Romance:Non-Indo-European: | |
West Iberian is a branch of theIbero-Romance languages that includes the Castilian languages (Spanish,Judaeo-Spanish),Astur-Leonese (Asturian,Leonese,Mirandese,Extremaduran (sometimes),Cantabrian),[1][2]Navarro-Aragonese and the descendants ofGalician-Portuguese.
Until a few centuries ago, they formed adialect continuum covering the western, central and southern parts of the Iberian Peninsula—excepting theBasque andCatalan-speaking territories. This is still the situation in a few regions, particularly in the northern part of the peninsula, but due to the differing sociopolitical histories of these languages (independence ofPortugal since the early 12th century, unification ofSpain in the late 15th century under theCatholic Monarchs, who privileged Castilian Spanish over the other Iberian languages), Spanish and Portuguese have tended to overtake and to a large extent absorb their sister languages while they kept diverging from each other.
There is controversy over whether the members of the modern Galician-Portuguese and Astur-Leonese sub-groups are languages or dialects. A common, though disputed, classification is to state that Portuguese and Galician are separate languages, as are Asturian, Leonese, and Mirandese. Cantabrian and Extremaduran are considered codialects of the Leonese language for UNESCO, whereas the latter is a Castilian dialect in the ISO codes.
Papiamento is a West Iberian creole language spoken in theDutch West Indies and believed to be derived fromPortuguese,Judaeo-Portuguese andSpanish.
Bold indicateslanguage families. Daggers indicate extinct languages.
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