Aranese: Spain's little-known language (and region) - BBC

Thanks Carlos. I like knowing about this kind of vestigial ethnic groups. The connection with Occitan and Troubadours is really cool. I came across a similar remnant in Italy - the Resians.

Thanks Stan! I had not heard of that group, time to do some research!

also check out Ladino, based on Old Castilian -- just as Yiddish is a germanic language that borrows some vocabulary from Hebrew and Aramaic, Ladino is a Spanish dialect that is written using Hebrew script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Spanish

There's a famous anecdote that I've forgotten most of about an early prime minister from Israel addressing the Spanish parliament and after the speech the Spanish hosts thanked him for speaking 'in the language of Cervantes', meaning he (the Israeli) didn't realize he was using such out-dated vocabulary and grammar.

My college Spanish professor warned us during the first class that he had done his dissertation on Ladino and might occasionally lapse into that language. Indeed he did.

Here in La Rioja, in San Millan, "the cradle of Castillano" also does a lot of work with Sephardis. Every year they have a big conference about Ladino.

A small curiosity, in the 1986 movie "Everytime we say goodbye" Tom Hanks falls in love with a Sephardi woman. I don't remember if he speaks it, but she and her family do.

I learned some Yiddish (and some Spanish but not Ladino). Max Weinreich was the linguist who decided that Yiddish must be "Germanic" because 80% or more of the words look like middle high German, possibly more specifically Bavaran. Yiddish is really a Slavic language because most of the grammar or structure of Yiddish (phonology, aspect, word order, and so on) is similar to and probably borrowed from Slavic languages; the grammar or structure of Yiddish is probably older than the Germanic vocabulary. It is easy for speech communities to borrow vocabulary or relexify their language but language commuities never borrow grammar (unless the original language is almost extinct, when a community is switching languages). The right way to decide what language family a language is part of is to look at the history if possible, and the structure or grammar, and not the vocabulary. For example English is considered Germanic even though 65% of the words in the dictionary were borrowed from Norman French which evolved from Latin - English was relexified with Norman- French vocabulary starting in 1066. The actual history of Yiddish is not fully known yet.

For now I'll assume Latino should be a Romance language unless I find evidence that, for example, a community(s) of Arabic and/or Berber speaking Jews relexified most of their original language with old Spanish vocabulary. My college degree before I got the master of library science degree, was in linguistics.

Back on the original topic, the BBC article points out the broad reach of Occitan,
and it reminds me that in Nimes, which is in the Gard and not actually in Provence,
a maitre d' proudly explained to me that his restaurant sourced their foie gras from Catalunya,
and I recall seeing panel vans and trucks with logos on their sides in what looked more Spanish than French to me.

It also reminds me that other coastal French towns that have been recommended here on the forum are within the language border of Catalan.

thanks for the link, Carlos!

re: the last comment, I agree that it's too simple an answer to say that Yiddish is germanic and thereby under-appreciate the slavic elements at its core, and I also agree that insisting on English as germanic even though all the good parts of it come from French is also a mistake. I feel similarly about Japanese - pre-continental contact Jomon culture is nothing to boast about; only after they incorporated (to put it kindly) Korean and Chinese cultural elements did Japan start to be worthy of attention. I shouldn't go on in that vein, so I won't.