Rasgos del romances riojano en el siglo XIV a través de sus documentos

Résumé

Several studies on the history of Spanish language and dialects seem to assume that from the XIII century on the language that was spoken in La Rioja was not different from the general Castilian, and thus it was not possible to talk about a specific Riojan dialect. This essay aims firstly at illustrating that some characteristics which ha¬ve been considered as specific to the area of La Rioja can still be found in so¬me XIV century documents, and secondly, at trying to demonstrate whether it is possible to distinguish two different areas by taking into accounts the peculiarities in written records in Rioja Alta and Rioja Baja. For these pur¬poses, a panoramic approach is offered, including diverse language areas, such as graphology, phonetics and morph syntax, and concluding with a brief lexicon sample. As a result, it can be concluded that there still existed some traits which are generally believed to be specific to the linguistic modality in La Rioja, and that these traits differed from the general Romance Castilian. Some of these linguistic peculiarities were shared by the nearby Romance varieties in Nava¬rre and Aragon. Nevertheless, it is not possible to state a clear division in di¬fferent areas within La Rioja, since these peculiarities were spread throughout the region. By means of this study, some of the recorded data offer a better and more accurate knowledge of the Romance language in that period.