Andalusian language movement

Andalusian is a dialect of Spanish spoken in Andalusia, Spain. However, a recent fringe movement has aimed at the differentiation of Andalusian from Spanish and at its standardization. Several groups and organizations have emerged attempting to defend the notion of Andalusian as a separate language from Spanish, such as the Society for the Study of Andalusian (ZEA), Er Prinçipito Andalûh (EPA) and AndaluGeeks.

Graffiti in Seville with text in EPA Andalusian. The text says Êccribe n'andalûh manque çea por molêttâh, "Write in Andalusian even if it is only to bother".

Êttandâ pal andalûh ("Standard for Andalusian"; EPA), a standardized orthographic norm for Andalusian, is one of the most impactful initiatives coming from the movement. The EPA has seen use by various users on the Internet, and a dictionary, a keyboard for Android, a Spanish–Andalusian transcriber and Andalusian versions of Minecraft, Telegram and Wikipedia have been created using this writing system. The EPA has also seen use from musical groups such as Califato ¾ and by politician and senator Pilar González.

Background

Andalusian is considered by linguistic publications such as Ethnologue a dialect of the Spanish language.[1] However, in recent times, there have been fringe efforts to promote the dialect of Andalusia as a language of its own, with its own orthographic norms. The newspaper Libertad Digital ("Digital Freedom") has accused the movement of only being promoted by the "Andalusian nationalist far-left" and its followers.[2]

History
Title page of Er Prinzipito, the Andalusian version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince by Juan Porras

Despite having informally started its activities four years earlier, in 2006, the Society for the Study of Andalusian (Sociedad para el Estudio del Andaluz, or Zoziedá' pal Ehtudio' el Andalú; ZEA) was established and drafted its "legal constitution". In a 2008 interview by 20 minutos ("20 minutes"), Guadalupe Vázquez (Guadalupe Bahkeh), member of the ZEA, explained that the members of the organization had been striving for years for "conserving our cultural legacy, something which the statute of autonomy recognizes and which we have absolute certainty that exists with an identity of its own, the Andalusian language". She also explained that the ZEA was integrated by anthropologists, linguists and writers who were "people who are very Andalusist culturally" and who "believe that we are being Castilianized since many years and that if we do not avoid it, Andalusian will end up disappearing". Juan Porras (Huan Porrah), a writer member of the ZEA, was working at the time on a proposal of orthographic norms for Andalusian.[3]

In 2017, Porras published his translation of The Little Prince in Andalusian, being titled Er Prinzipito. It was presented by the Andalusian Workers' Union (SAT) on 9 May of that year. Many users on Twitter mocked the book.[4] As a result of the controversy this book provoked, a Facebook page named after it, Er Prinçipito Andalûh (El Principito Andaluz, "The Andalusian Prince"; EPA), was created, becoming an online gathering point for several linguists, translators and regular Andalusian speakers. Afterwards, this group worked on the creation of an orthographic system aimed at the standardization of Andalusian, Êttandâ pal andalûh (Estándar para el andaluz, "Standard for Andalusian"; also EPA).[5][6] This later saw the development of a manual transcriber from Spanish to Andalusian, using the EPA system, in 2018.[5] The EPA gained some traction on the Internet, being used by some users in their social media profiles. It also started being used by some artistic and musical groups, such as Califato ¾.[6]

In the summer of 2018, Ksar Feui, a physicist with interests in linguistics, started developing an automatic algorithm for transcribing Spanish to EPA Andalusian. He has praised the EPA as a "historic milestone", and has declared on a 2021 interview by La Voz del Sur that when he found out about the EPA, he transcribed all his earlier literary works to this writing system and then asked a friend to download all words of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) to transcribe them to the EPA for developing this algorithm. Feui was joined by several other friends and collaborators, together with whom he started the project AndaluGeeks[6] in 2019,[7] and in February 2019, their algorithm for transcribing Spanish text to EPA Andalusian was published. Afterwards, AndaluGeeks started online courses for learning Andalusian[6] and involved itself in the creation of an Andalusian keyboard for Android with autocorrection and predictive text,[7] an Andalusian dictionary and Andalusian versions of Minecraft,[6] Telegram and Wikipedia, with the latter transcribing all Spanish Wikipedia articles into Andalusian;[7] all of these following the EPA.[6][7]

In 2021, senator and Adelante Andalucía ("Forward Andalusia") member Pilar González declared on the Senate of Spain that "Andalusian is our natural language. And it is not inferior to any other language of the State. We speak it without complexes." and that "we have, in addition, Andalusian linguists with proposals for an orthography". She later published the same statements on her Twitter account in EPA Andalusian.[7]

See also

References
  1. Spanish at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
  2. "La extrema izquierda andaluza reivindica el 'andalûh' en el Senado". Libertad Digital (in Spanish). 27 September 2021.
  3. García, Jorge (25 November 2008). ""Akí er kahteyano no lo ablamoh malamente, ze abla bien el andalú"". 20 minutos (in Spanish).
  4. "Cachondeo en Twitter con la edición en andaluz de "Er Prinzipito"". ElHuffPost (in Spanish). 9 May 2017.
  5. García, Mariángeles (8 November 2021). "Traductor andaluz: ¿Cómo se escribe en andaluz 'No sé escribir en andaluz'?". Yorokobu (in Spanish).
  6. Chilla, Sebastián (6 February 2021). "'Andalugeeks', la revolución digital del 'andalûh' que llega a Minecraft y Wikipedia". La Voz del Sur (in Spanish).
  7. Salvatierra, Miguel (24 September 2021). "Pilar González en el Senado: "Llegará el día en que se escriba en andalûh"". Sevilla Actualidad (in Spanish).
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