African Romance Information
African Romance is an extinct Romance language that was once spoken in the Africa Province during the Roman Empire. Little is known about this language that may have been spoken until the 17th century, possibly due to the weak presence of Latin in the region. It is believed that African Romance evolved from Latin as it was spoken in North Africa and it was subsequently supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest.
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History
After the Vandal conquest of the Roman Africa province, African Romance started a process of slow disappearance that was to last until the Spanish initiative to reconquer and convert to Christianity the populace of the coast of what is now Algeria and Tunisia. The most important testimony of the existence of the African Romance comes from the 12th century Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who wrote that the people of Gafsa (in south Tunisia) used a language that he called al-latini al-afriqi ("the Latin of Africa"). The Normans when conquering their Tunisian kingdom in the 13th century received help from the remaining Christian populations of Tunisia, and some historians like Vermondo Brugnatelli argue that those Christians still spoke African Romance.
Related languages
Other Romance languages spoken in North Africa before the European colonization were the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin with Arabic and Romance influences, and Ladino, a dialect of Spanish brought by Sephardic Jews.
See also
References
- Vermondo Brugnatelli, "I prestiti latini in berbero: un bilancio", in: M. Lamberti, L. Tonelli (eds.), Afroasiatica Tergestina. Papers from the 9th Italian Meeting of Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) Linguistics, Trieste, April 23–24, 1998, Padova, Unipress, 1999, pp. 325–332
- Franco Fanciullo, "Un capitolo della Romania submersa: il latino africano", in: D. Kremer (ed.), Actes du XVIIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romane - Universitè de Trèves (Trier) 1986, tome I, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1992,162-187 pp.
- Tadeusz Lewicki, "Une langue romane oubliée de l'Afrique du Nord. Observations d'un arabisant", Rocznik Orient. XVII (1958), pp. 415–480
- Hugo Schuchardt, Die romanischen Lehnwörter im Berberischen, Wien 1918 (82 pp.)
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Categories: Extinct Romance languages | Languages of Algeria | Languages of Morocco |
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