Only 15,000 in Portugal Use Language : Academics Speak Up for Mirandes, Win Recognition for Rare Tongue

Mirandes, the everyday language spoken by only 15,000 people in a remote mountain region of Portugal, has won official recognition.

Although it may sound like Portuguese spoken by a Spaniard or vice versa, experts say Mirandes is a distinct language in its own right.

The Latin-based tongue developed around Miranda do Douro in the northeastern Tras-os-Montes region of Portugal after the Moors were driven out of the Iberian peninsula in the 15th Century.

But formal recognition came only last October when Portugal’s Ministry of Education, under pressure from Mirandes academics, agreed to its inclusion as an optional course in a few local schools.

“The government rightly preserves monuments to maintain our awareness of Portugal’s history, so why should it not do the same with Mirandes, a living link with the past,” said Domingos Raposo, one of two professors chosen to start the classes.

So far only around 20 pupils have enrolled for the course, which shows them how to read and spell the language they use in the playground but not normally in the classroom.

“But this figure is sure to rise when more parents become involved and the reluctant ones accept that studying Mirandes will not harm their children’s Portuguese,” Raposo said.

Only in the past 100 years have books and parts of the Bible been translated into Mirandes, which the Portuguese in general regard as a rustic dialect fit only for farm life. There is no noteworthy literature originally written in the language.

“We should not be ashamed to speak and defend the tongue we learned from the cradle . . . and we can only gain from being able to speak two languages,” said Antonio Fernandes of Cicouro, one of 20 towns where Mirandes is still spoken.

In fact, many people here are trilingual, speaking Mirandes, Portuguese and Spanish.

Spain lies just across the Douro River, and its influence is strongly felt through tourism as well as Madrid television and radio, often picked up more clearly than Lisbon programs.

Since the turn of the century, Portuguese and a few foreign linguists have tried to establish the pedigree of Mirandes as a language, arguing that its vocabulary and grammar are sufficiently distinct from Portuguese and Spanish.

“Mirandes is not an offshoot of the bigger languages. It is directly descended from a common Latin root in the same way as Catalan or Provencal,” said Raposo, a native speaker, referring to the languages spoken in the Spanish province of Cataluna and the French region of Provence, respectively.

He explained that Mirandes, though probably spoken by no more than 30,000 people at its peak, survived through the centuries because of the mountainous region’s isolation.

When spoken quickly, Mirandes cannot be understood by Spaniards or Portuguese. It sounds much softer than Castilian Spanish, with fewer of the marked nasal sounds of Portuguese.

But it contains few entirely unrelated words, an association summed up for example in the word for rabbit, which is coneilho , a combination of conejo (Spanish) and coelho (Portuguese).