5. The Curious Case of Castilian

ALMOST EVERYONE WHO LEARNS SPANISH as a second language faces the odd dilemma of being corrected about the very name of the language itself. No other European tongue has two names: some Spanish speakers call their language español, others call it castellano. And everyone seems to have a different reason for choosing one name over the other.

The root of the issue is the former dominion of Castile, the northern Christian kingdom that ended up leading the Christian Reconquista (Reconquest) of Spain.

Catalans, Basques, and Galicians are generally adamant about calling their tongue castellano, as this underlines the fact that their own languages are distinct from Spanish. Argentines use castellano to stress their independence from Spain. But Colombians use español to downplay the dominion of Castile and emphasize the equality of all Hispanics, united in language. Central Americans, Mexicans, and Caribbean Spanish speakers generally use español, but Salvadorans seem to prefer castellano.

The word Castilian generally evokes a sense of prestige, given its association with the powerful Kingdom of Castile, which is funny when you think about it, because at its origin, Castile was anything but prestigious.

We usually assume that major languages come from important places. But Spanish didn’t originate in Spain’s capital region, Madrid. The Roman vernacular that evolved into modern Spanish came from Burgos, the historical capital of Castile, now a small city famous as a meat-packaging center.

Castile began rather ingloriously, as a buffer zone between two other powerful kingdoms. When the Muslims conquered Spain in the eighth century, Christian Spain amounted to a strip of counties and kingdoms huddled along the Atlantic coast and the Pyrenees.

The leaders among these kingdoms were Asturias and Navarre.Located midway between the Pyrenees and the northwestern tip of the peninsula, Asturias has the kind of rugged terrain and wet, oceanic climate that makes aspiring invaders think twice. The Asturians were known for resisting everyone, including the Romans and the Visigoths. They would be the first to take on the Arabs. The first successful battle against the Reconquista was fought in the Asturian town of Covadonga by the last Visigothic king, Pelayo, in either 718 or 722 (sources disagree).

Navarre, northeast of Castile at the western foot of the Pyrenees, was the land of the Basques. Like the Asturians, the Basques were known for vigorously defending themselves, even from the Franks north of them, in Gaul. In 778, they defeated Charlemagne’s nephew Roland in the mountain pass of Roncesvalles (Ronceveaux), a battle that inspired the Song of Roland, one of the oldest surviving works of French literature, although the unknown poet adapted the story as an epic battle between Christians and Saracens (as the French called the Moriscos) during the Crusades.

Asturias spawned a number of other kingdoms, including León and Portugal, which both started out as counties of Asturias before they grew into independent kingdoms. Navarre spawned Aragón. Catalonia, at the time, was a buffer kingdom of France, established to protect France from Muslim Spain.

During this period, each of Spain’s northern kingdoms spoke a different variety of Ibero-Romance. The term “Romance” had appeared in eighth-century France, shortly after the Arab conquest of Spain. At the Council of Tours in 813, the clergy was encouraged to speak in the rusticam romanam lenguam (rustic Roman tongue). The fact that these learned bishops labeled the vernacular as Roman rather than Latin showed that the vernacular had evolved so far from Classical Latin that it needed a new label. (In the grammar of the time, Roman was written either Romanans or Romanz, which is why, in English, these Latin-based vernaculars are called “Romance” languages.)

Until roughly the turn of the first millennium, all the Romance dialects spoken in the peninsula were mutually intelligible. People from Galicia, León, Aragón, Catalonia, and Al-Andalus could hammer out a conversation between them with only few misunderstandings. For that matter, Iberians could easily understand the Romance spoken in the south of France. Jugglers, as the early French troubadours were called (their talents included juggling and poetry), circulated freely on both sides of the Pyrenees and entertained crowds and courts in any vernacular.

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Given the power and prestige that came to be attached to its name, it’s hard to grasp how modest Castile’s early origins were. Castile in 800 was nothing more than a series of outposts built by Asturias and Navarre. (Castile graduated from county to kingdom only in the eleventh century.) And contrary to popular belief, the name Castile does not come from the formidable castles built there. In Latin vernacular, castellum meant “hill fort.” These were the most outstanding features of Castile for centuries.

Some of the peculiarities of the language that would go on to become Modern Spanish can be traced back to the earliest days of Castile. Linguists describe the original dialect spoken in Castile as “very different” or even “abnormal” with respect to other Roman vernaculars spoken on the peninsula. That’s because Old Castilian developed features that were absent from other Ibero-Romances.

Linguists are certain that one explanation for the Castilian “anomaly” is the influence of the Basque language from the neighboring Navarre. In the galaxy of Ibero-Romances, the Basque spoke a completely different, non-Latin language. The Basque influence is thought to explain at least one striking feature of early Castilian: the disappearance of f at the beginning of hundreds of words. Old Basque did not have an f sound. Castilian was the only Romance language to transform the f of the Latin filius (son) into h, producing hijo. Portuguese, French, and Italian kept the f and say filho, fils, and figlio.

As the following examples show, the list of f-deprived Latinates in Castilian is remarkably long compared to French and Italian:

Basque probably influenced Castilian in another way. In the Basque language, the pronunciation of consonants tends to shift from generation to generation, but vowel pronunciations remain very stable (the opposite of English). Sure enough, Castilian consonants changed in ways distinct from other Hispano-Romance dialects:

The influx of immigrants to Castile also explains many of the language’s peculiarities.

The first documents that use the name Castile were written by Mozarabic Christians who had fled Muslim rule to settle in the north around the year 800. During the first century of the Arab period, Castile was repopulated by these refugees, as well as soldiers and shepherds from Asturias, León, and Navarre. According to the linguist Ralph Penny, the arrival of so many speakers of different dialects meant that people began speaking a koiné, a common language built on the features that all the dialects shared, and stripped of some of the nuances of each. In other words, early immigration simplified the dialect but added a twist. As a result of the Basque influence, the early Castilian speakers tended to blend their Romances in ways that made Castilian more distinct.

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When we visited Burgos and its splendid Gothic-style cathedral, one of the most well preserved in Europe, we met two types of travelers: smartly dressed tourists wielding cameras, mostly from Spain, and visitors hoisting backpacks, almost all French. In the two days we spent in Burgos, at least a dozen French hikers asked us if we knew “the Way.”

The Way of St. James, or the Camino de Santiago, is a pilgrimage route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, built over what’s believed to be the tomb of St. James, discovered around AD 820. A challenging five-hundred-mile trek across rugged territory in northern Spain, the route winds from Basque country to the westernmost tip of the peninsula. For twelve centuries, millions of pilgrims have walked the Camino. In 2010, 135,000 hikers made the trek. Most of them momentarily lost their way when they stopped in Burgos.

But that’s nothing new. Starting in the ninth century, thousands of pilgrims passed through Castile on their way to the Compostela. Ultimately, this influx would set off the transformation of what was an obscure northern march into a kingdom that controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula—and one that would spread its dialect across the peninsula.

In other words, Castile owes much of its early political ascendency to the French, who were responsible for developing the Camino de Santiago. The story of French involvement in northern Spain began in 795, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, also known as Charles I of France, created seventeen buffer counties between France and Spain, along the Pyrenees between Navarre and the Mediterranean Sea. His main motivation was to block the Saracens—as the French called the Moors—from moving north. Charlemagne called these counties the Marca Hispánica, or Spanish “March.” (The word refers to “frontier” or “buffer zone,” not “marching.”) They would go on to become the kingdoms of Aragón and Catalonia. (The tiny country of Andorra, about three times the size of the District of Columbia, is a remnant of the marches, as is the little-known Spanish enclave of Llívia on the French side of the border.)

French interest did not stretch beyond the marches until 813, the year the alleged burial site of the apostle St. James was discovered in Compostela, Galicia. The shrine, originally called Sanctus Jacobus, became Santi-Iago, then Santiago de Compostela (which means “field of the stars”). After its discovery, devout European Christians looking for pilgrimage sites realized that it was a lot easier to cross the Pyrenees than to voyage all the way to the Holy Land. They started flocking to Santiago de Compostela.

The sudden influx of foreigners, mostly French, boosted the self-confidence of Spain’s northern Christian kingdoms, which had suffered from being on the outskirts of the Christian world. The shrine in Compostela turned the northern kingdoms into a destination. French kings started to marry their offspring to princes and princesses of Spain’s north.

French culture was so influential that Iberians changed their script from Visigothic characters to the more compact French Carolingian script. The Spanish—including the Arabs in the south—also adopted the French feudal system, with its shared system of legal and military obligations for vassals and lords. French pilgrims came with merchants and juglares (jugglers), as the early troubadours were known.

The task of rendering sounds into writing is difficult, especially since all languages have more sounds than letters. The French added entirely new spellings. Previously, a Castilian notary who wrote the name pronounced Sánchez could have spelled it Sangiz or Sanggeç. After the French, spelling was rationalized into Sánchez.

Many French borrowings introduced into Catalan also spilled over into Castilian: mesón (from maison, house), vianda (from viande, meat), corajé (from courage, courage), jamón (from jambon, ham), monje (monk), linaje (lineage), homenaje (homage), mensaje (message), duc or duque (duke), hostal (hotel, inn).

The French even shaped the very name by which Spaniards called themselves and their language: español. Before the French, it would never have occurred to the inhabitants of Galicia, Navarre, Castile, or León that they had anything in common. It was the southern French, who spoke Occitan, also known as langue d’oc, who threw all the Iberians into the same basket and dubbed them espaínol or españón, a deformation of the Latin Hispaniolus. Linguists are certain of the French origin of the term because of the way the words evolved. The form espainol or españon is, simply put, more characteristic of old French than old Castilian or any of the Romance dialects spoken south of the Pyrenees. Although the French used this catchword for all the people of all the fringe kingdoms in the north of Spain, it took the Spanish three more centuries to adopt the name.

The French also introduced religious zeal, which would have an enormous impact on the Castilians. In the early Middle Ages, the French were the most fanatically religious people in Europe, practicing a deep, almost mystical form of Christianity. As pilgrims began flocking from Bayonne to Santiago de Compostela, the French built cathedrals, churches, and monasteries along the road. Some of these Romanesque-style buildings are still standing.

Gradually, through the increased contact, the French transmitted their religious fervor to the Spanish. The French introduced Cluniac monasticism, with its orthodox Roman liturgy and rites: the first Cluniac monastery was built by king Sancho of Navarre in 1022. The French also introduced soldier-monks to Spain, the most famous being the Knights Templars. The Templars then spawned a series of Spanish military religious orders (whose original purpose was to protect pilgrims) such as the Order of Santiago and the Order of Calatrava.

The French shaped the nature of the Spanish Reconquista from the outset. Before the arrival of the French, Christians and Arabs skirmished, but the battles were really just land grabs. The French gave the Spanish a religious motive for fighting the Arabs, imbuing the Spanish with the notion of holy warfare against the enemies of the church. Churchmen then added a political angle to the religious quest by propagating the myth that Spain had once been a “unified and indivisible” Visigothic kingdom.

All of this would justify a centuries-long campaign to “reconquer” Spain from the Muslim “occupiers.” The idea that the Muslims had stolen their kingdom gave northerners a common enemy and a moral claim for fighting the Muslims: they were getting back what was theirs. Although Santiago is still Spain’s patron saint, he was known in medieval Spain as Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor-Slayer.

In the eleventh century, the stakes of fighting the Muslims got even higher as the “Reconquista” (reconquest) took on the dimension of a quasi Crusade against the Moors to liberate the town of Barbastro, near Huesca. That summer, soldiers from Burgundy, Normandy, and Aquitaine, along with some Italians, joined in the Iberian fight against the Moors.

That the Castilian tongue came to dominate the other dialects in Spain over the next centuries was mostly because the once-obscure Kingdom of Castile took the lead in the Reconquista.