Article of the Month - January 2021
“The Languages of the Invaders of 711.
Invasion and Language Contact in Eighth-Century Northwestern Iberia”
(David Peterson: Faculty, History, Universidad de Burgos)
Peterson, David. “The Languages of the Invaders of 711. Invasion and Language Contact in Eighth-Century Northwestern Iberia.”
Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 1-4 (2020): 527–35.
Article Abstract:
A number of disparate onomastic phenomena occurring in northwestern Iberia have long puzzled scholars: the abundance of Arabic personal names in early medieval Christian communities, often fossilised as place-names; the extraordinarily profuse Romance toponym Quintana; and a surprisingly high number of hypothetical Amazigh (i.e. Berber) demonyms. In this paper we argue that these seem- ingly disparate onomastic phenomena can all be explained if it is accepted that following the Islamic invasion of Iberia in 711, the Amazigh settlers of the Northwest were at least partially latinophone. The internal history of the Maghreb suggests this would have been the case at least in the sense of Latin as a lingua franca, a situation which the speed and super]ciality of the Islamic conquest of said region would have been unlikely to have altered signi]cantly. In this context, all of the puzzling onomastic elements encountered in the Northwest fall into place as the result of the conquest and settlement of a Romance- speaking region by Romance-speaking incomers bearing Arabic personal names but retaining their in- digenous tribal a_liations and logically choosing to interact with the autochthonous population in the lan- guage they all shared.
Keywords: North West Iberia, Islamic invasion, 711, Amazigh, Berber, Quintana, toponymy, personal names, hybrid place-names, North African Romance, Arabic
Nomination Statement:
This article sets out to resolve the conundrum of the existence throughout the Middle Ages of Romance toponyms of apparently Arabo-Islamic origin in the north of Spain -- an area that was only briefy and super]cially under Muslim rule in the 8th century. Pointing out that the Berbers who settled in this area in the aftermath of the invasion were only recently and super]cially Islami]ed and acculturated to Arabic, he suggests the names originated with bilingual North African Berbers who were Romance/Latin speakers prior to coming to al-Andalus. While speculative this intriguing argument provides a potential solution to this problem, while reminding us that Berbers were integrated into the larger world of the western Mediterranean prior to the Arab conquest and had long been exposed to Latin language and culture.
Author’s Comment:
This is the text of a 15-minute conference presenta1on (Latín Vulgaire–Latín Tardif 13th International Conference, Budapest, September 2018) so the intention was to be thought-provoking while by necessity the format is very abbreviated. I am a historian rather than a linguist and rather stumbled across this problem when working on the distribu1on and historical context of Basque place-names in medieval Castile, and while the aftermath of the 711 invasion in northern Spain is a subject which I believe to be of great interest, it rather falls between different disciplines, and thus receives relatively little attention as toponymy is rather marginalised among early medievalists nowadays, while Arabists understandably tend to focus on the riches of al-Andalus rather than these meagre pickings. Quite why onomastics has become so marginal to most medievalists I find hard to understand, but it goes much further than Iberia, as a glance at the programme of Leeds Medieval Congress over the last few years demonstrates. My intention here then is to provoke a conversation, offer a hypothesis that I believe plausible but far from proven, and even, at the risk of sounding rather preten1ous perhaps, to breathe some life into a moribund discipline. One final point, I prefer the term Amazigh to Berber believing the latter to be not just an intrinsically offensive exonym (meaning ‘barbarian’, of course), but moreover one that potentially distorts our understanding of who the invaders were in the sense of their level of Romanisation.
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