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Language Contact Phenomena In Three Aljamiado Texts: Religion As A Sociolinguistic Factor, Juan Antonio Thomas, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Aljamiado literature, composed in Romance and recorded in Arabic script by Moriscos before their final expulsion from Spain, represents a valuable resource for the linguistic study of the contact situations between Arabic and Romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula. By examining Arabic insertions in Romance texts, we are able to probe the degree of bilingualism that these communities exhibited and the factors that led to a continued use of the Arabic language in the face of religious and linguistic persecution between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a previous work (Thomas 2015), occurrences of lexical insertions and instances of codeswitching …