Cantabrian (, in Cantabrian) is a group of dialects belonging to Astur-Leonese. It is indigenous to the territories in and surrounding the Autonomous Community of Cantabria, in Northern Spain.
Traditionally, some dialects of this group have been further grouped by the name ('from the Mountain'), ('the Mountain') being a traditional name for Cantabria due to its mountainous topography.
Distribution
These dialects belong to the Northwestern Iberian dialect continuum and have been classified as belonging to the Astur-Leonese domain by successive research works carried out through the 20th century, the first of them, the famous work , by Ramón Menéndez Pidal.
This dialect group spans the whole territory of Cantabria. In addition, there is historical evidence of traits (such as toponyms, or certain constructions) linking the speech of some nearby areas to the Cantabrian Astur-Leonese group: The western part of Las Encartaciones, in Biscay. Bordering areas with Burgos: especially the upper valleys of Espinosa de los Monteros, where Pasiegu dialect was spoken. Bordering areas with Palencia Valleys of Peñamellera Baja, Peñamellera Alta, eastern Llanes and Ribadedeva, in the easternmost part of Asturias.
Some of this areas had historically been linked to Cantabria before the 1833 territorial division of Spain, and the creation of the Province of Santander (with the same territory as the modern-day Autonomous Community).
Dialects
Based on the location where dialects are spoken, we find a traditional dialectal division of Cantabria, which normally corresponds to the different valleys or territories:
However, based on linguistic evidence, R. Molleda proposed what is today the usual division of dialectal areas in Cantabria. Molleda proposed to take the isogloss of the masculine plural gender morphology, which seems to surround a large portion of Eastern Cantabria, running from the mouth of the Besaya River in the North, and along the Pas-Besaya watershed. He then proceeded to name the resulting areas Western and Eastern, depending on the location to the West or East of the isogloss. This division has gained support due to the fact that, although masculine morphology by itself is not a very important difference, many other isoglosses draw the same line.
Linguistic description
There are many features in common with Spanish. Cantabrian's set of consonants is nearly identical to that of Northern Iberian Spanish. In the Valles Pasiegos, becomes before voiced consonants. This has also occurred in the names of the rivers Arlanza and Arlanzón in Burgos. This type of change is also the source of the Spanish word , from earlier .
Also in the Valles Pasiegos, syllable-final word-internal and are frequently confused.
In Tudanca and neighboring zones, can be aspirated, that is, pronounced as , when before consonants, or at the end of a word and before another word which begins with a vowel, as in 'the ears'. That said, cannot be aspirated before a pause in this zone. Similar patterns of -aspiration have been found in some other Astur-leonese zones as well.
An important difference is preservation of the voiceless glottal fricative (/h/) as an evolution of Latin's word initial f- as well as the [x-h] mergers; both features are common in many Spanish dialects, especially those from Southern Spain and parts of Latin America.
The preservation of the voiceless glottal fricative was usual in Middle Spanish, before the /h/ in words like /humo/, from Latin fumus, resulted in Modern Spanish /umo/. Every Cantabrian dialect keeps /f/ before consonants such as in /'fɾi.u/ (cold), just as Spanish and Astur-Leonese do.
The [x - h] merger is typical in most Western and Eastern Coastal dialects, where [x] merges into [h]. However, the Eastern dialects from the Inner Valleys have merged [h] into [x]; moreover, there are older speakers that lack any kind of merger, fully distinguishing the minimal pair /huegu/ - /xuegu/ (fire - game).
Other features are common to most Astur-Leonese dialects; some of these are: