December 14, 2023 (Updated July 16, 2024)
Andalusian Spanish has been claimed by various groups at times in recent history to be its own language, wholly distinct from Castilian. Not all linguists are in agreement about whether it constitutes an accent, a dialect, a number of variously-related varieties within the same dialect continuum, or even a separate language. While in some ways, Andalusian does indeed exhibit features that distinguish it markedly from Castilian Spanish (the standard variety of the Spanish language promoted by the nation of Spain), some reports of these differences are drastically exaggerated in order to create a narrative that Andalusian is indisputably a different language.
To this purpose, the Êttandâ pal andalûh (EPA) or “Standard for Andalusian” has been created. This standard orthography intends to promote a type of unified Andalusian dialect that encourages political solidarity between the disparate regions of the large autonomous community. It was developed after the 2017 publication of a translation of The Little Prince in academic Juan Porras Blanco’s own Andalusian orthography led to wider interest in the concept of the Andalusian variety as its own language, and Porras’ orthography drew criticism for its idiosyncrasy (“Er Prinzipito En Andalú”). Known as Huan Porrah Blanko in his own orthography, the author of this book is a member of the ZEA or Zoziedá pal Ehtudio'el Andalú, “Society for the Study of Andalusian”, which is a main driver in the Andalusian language movement for recognition of Andalusian as its own distinct language rather than merely a dialect or accent. The ZEA did not develop the EPA but influenced it. Political motivations underscore many of the attempts to classify Andalusian as its own language, which may explain why linguistically tenuous justifications are advanced to try to prove its difference from Castilian.
The Êttandâ pal andalûh hyper-focuses on the phonological differences between Castilian and Andalusian, and rather than retain letters that represent phonemes which are phonologically still “heard” in words but not phonetically present, the Êttandâ pal andalûh instead uses specific orthography to clarify the exact phonetic pronunciation of the variety they are attempting to catalog. While this may be technically accurate, it is not necessary for understanding. An example of this is any word that has a vowel followed by the phoneme /s/, such as asco. In the EPA, this is represented as âcco (Garcia). The vowel with the circumflex represents a vowel that phonologically comes before the phoneme /s/. This type of vowel has two realizations in Andalusian phonology. In Eastern Andalusian, the consonant is elided and the vowel is opened. Standard Spanish /a/ in asco becomes [æ]. In contrast, in the west of Andalusia, this combination of vowel and sibilant leads to an aspirated vowel [aʰ]. It is important to note that phonologically, these two types of vowel only occur where Standard Spanish would pronounce them as /as/ or /aθ/, meaning that there is no ambiguity removed by spelling them this way. This means that the Andalusian orthography has accomplished very little in removing the elided letter /s/, as while it is elided, it still has an influence on the vowel, and not the same one between the two varieties of Eastern and Western Andalusian it is attempting to unify. It also demonstrates that because Andalusian has no other cases of these aspirated or open vowels, it has not sufficiently changed from Castilian enough to even phonetically be considered its own language.
The Êttandâ pal andalûh ignores large regional differences within Andalusian varieties or intends to provide solutions for these that are no more clarifying than standard Castilian orthography. For example, the letter “ç” is used to represent the Spanish letters of c (before e and i), z, and s. The intention of this is to bring together the various provincial pronunciations of these letters, which range from distinción or pronunciation of c and z as /θ/ while s is pronounced as /s/, to seseo/ceceo or pronunciation of all of these sibilant letters as /s/ or /θ/ respectively, to the uncommon heheo which pronounces all of the sibilants as glottal /h/ (“EPA”). All of these pronunciations are represented within Andalusia. In fact, Andalusia has the most regional variation in all of Spain when it comes to the pronunciation of these coronal fricatives. Most of the rest of Spain practices distinción, which is what the standard Castilian variety espouses. But Andalusia has all these variations, which makes the idea of Andalusian as one single variety uniformly distinct from Castilian seem highly inaccurate. The fact that a novel letter had to be created to unify all these wildly different pronunciations shows that the people speaking Andalusian do indeed have differences within their own region, and in some ways this differences may be larger than the differences some varieties of Andalusian have with Castilian. And again with the vowels followed by sibilants, the difference between Eastern Andalusian [æ] and Western Andalusian [aʰ] is not delineated by the use of the vowel with circumflex â, which feels like another artificial attempt to equate all Andalusian varieties.
The Êttandâ pal andalûh provides no examples of differences in vocabulary between Andalusian and standard Castilian. However, there are indeed regionalisms that are present only in Andalusia, but this does not mean that Andalusian is distinct enough from Castilian that the two are separate languages or by any means not mutually intelligible due to vocabulary differences. Examples of specifically Andalusian words are scarce, but they indisputably exist. They often pertain to specific regional foods that are only found in Andalusia, such as gazpachuelo or salmorejo (Mackenzie) or are simply synonyms for objects that are more commonly known by another name in Standard Castilian. It’s not as if Andalusians would not understand the “standard” synonyms for these words, they simply favor the lesser-known or specifically Andalusian words. There is a specific type of doublet that Andalusian often has, which is a word of Arabic origin that is favored over the other word of Latin origin. Examples of this include azotea for roof (Mackenzie), which is of Arabic origin, as contrasted with standard Castilian techo for roof, of Romance derivation. Other examples of this type of doublet include alcoba for habitación or bedroom, and alhaja for joya or jewel. A concession can be made that Andalusian does have its own (small) lexicon, but this by no means vindicates the need for a whole separate orthography or proves Andalusian is truly its own language.
Finally, the Êttandâ pal andalûh, as an orthographic standard, also doesn’t attempt to prescribe grammatical features found in Andalusian. Much like its vocabulary, Andalusian does in fact have a distinct and characteristic grammatical structure that is in some respects different from the national standard of Spain, but these grammatical features are not unusual aberrations that are unique to Andalusian but in fact are found in various dialects of Spanish, including Asturleonese and Latin American varieties (Penny). Moreover, these grammatical features create no incomprehensibility or lack of understanding between any two speakers of Castilian and Andalusian, as they are hardly even grammatically incorrect in Castilian. An example of this is the use of the formal plural second-person pronoun ustedes with informal vosotros conjugations (Penny), which barely would inhibit understanding. It is only a slight irregularity, a negligible difference in conjugation. Another example in which Andalusian is actually more “correct” in its grammar than many varieties of Castilian is the continued use of lo instead of the novel, formerly indirect pronoun le for masculine direct objects. Andalusian’s conservation of the older pronoun is more prescriptively normative than the use of le (Penny). This makes it seem like a variety of Castilian that in some ways more rigidly upholds linguistic tradition, not its own language.
If we contrast the relative similarity of Andalusian phonology and especially its vocabulary and grammar with Castilian to the relative dissimilarity between Castilian and another regional language variety of Spain, Catalan, we find that Catalan and Castilian exhibit far, far more differences than Catalan and Andalusian. Whether it is phonological, in terms of lexicon, or grammatically, these two dialects spoken in Spain can almost certainly be classed as separate languages, and this underscores the relative closeness of Castilian and Andalusian.
Catalan’s phonology is very distinct from that of Castilian Spanish. Features that are not present in Spanish at all, in any variety of the language, include global devoicing of all final obstruents and affrication of final sibilant /ʒ/ as a consequence of this devoicing (Bonet et al.), a more complicated vowel system with contrast of open and close vowels (not the same phenomenon as the open vowels found before phonemic /s/ in Eastern Andalusian), vowel harmony, and vowel reduction. The orthography of Catalan also draws from very different traditions than Spanish and for this reason, seems a lot more legitimate than the EPA, which is simply modified Castilian. Catalan orthography dates back to medieval times and has similarities with the medieval orthographies of Occitan and Valencian, which are its closest relatives. It is based on the phonology of Catalan and aims to accurately and concisely represent the sounds of its language rather than exaggerate small, non-phonemic differences in phonetics. For example, the cluster tg/tj represents the phoneme /d͡ʒ/. This is because this affricate is parsed as a combination of a stop and a sibilant, and the irregularity of this attests to the natural formation of the orthography.
The lexicon of Catalan is somewhat similar to that of Spanish, and yet it is demonstrably far more distinct from Castilian than Andalusian is. According to Ethnologue, a publication of the world’s languages and some statistics on them, Catalan shares only 85% lexical similarity with Spanish. It actually has greater similarity of vocabulary with Italian, with a statistic of 87%. With Spanish dictionaries running about 100,000 words in length, this means that approximately 15,000 of Spanish lexical items have no Catalan cognate, and vice versa. Contrasting this with Andalusian, which seemingly has only a few dozen (at most) words that are not present in standard Castilian, it is clear that Catalan is far and away more distinct when it comes to vocabulary than Andalusian, and this cements that, lexically at least, Andalusian is certain a variety of Spanish that cannot qualify as its own discrete language. Qualitatively, Catalan words that differ with Spanish often derive from separate Latin roots, as well. An example of this is the Catalan word voler, which means “to want” (Spanish for this is querer, for reference), which comes from the Latin word velle (while the Spanish comes from the Latin quaero). Another example is the word formatge “cheese”, which is far more similar to the Italian formaggio in appearance and lexical origin than the Castilian queso. Andalusian has no such variation in which Latin roots its words come from, which is another strike against it qualifying as a separate language from Spanish. If almost all of a language’s vocabulary comes by way of Spanish and is left unmodified, is it Spanish? As stated before, only specific types of doublets tend to be unique to Andalusian. And as these doublets have commonly understood alternatives, there is no reason to distinguish the vocabularies of Andalusian and Castilian, but great reason to emphasize that by no means do Catalan and Castilian have the same vocabulary.
To summarize, Andalusian may have many distinguishing features, and it is a legitimate continuum of dialects with interesting phonological patterns, but the provincial differences within the region (primarily from East to West) and the lack of legitimate phonemic, let alone semantic or grammatical, difference between the Andalusian varieties and standard Castilian preclude it from being its own language or needing its own orthography. The EPA is an interesting experiment but can be chalked up more to political motivations than legitimate linguistic need. In contrast, Catalan has a rich history as a regional language of Spain that is not mutually intelligible with or at all the same language as Castilian, and serves as a good example of what it truly means to be a separate language.