UC Riverside

This dissertation examines the maintenance of Asturian, a minoritized Romance language of northern Spain, among a digitally engaged and largely diasporic community of speakers. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines an online survey of sixty-four participants with twenty-fi ve semi-structured follow-up interviews, the study characterizes a speaker profile it terms the Asturian Heritage Speaker (AHS). Its central argument is that the diasporic Asturian speaker resembles the heritage speaker of Spanish in the United States far more closely than the neofalante of Galician or the euskaldunberri of Basque, the new-speaker fi gures produced by the other minoritized languages of the Iberian Peninsula.The analysis advances through three interlocking questions. The first concerns the new speaker and literacy: because Asturian lacks the institutional infrastructure (standardization, co-official status, and systematic schooling) that has generated new speakers elsewhere, it produces speakers who acquire the language orally at home but rarely consolidate it in writing. Nearly sixty percent of participants placed themselves at the two lowest proficiency levels, and fewer than half had ever attended a formal Asturian class, which most described as an elective offered, when at all, at the contingent margins of a Spanish-centered curriculum. The second and analytical core addresses diaspora and semantic maintenance, arguing that the language is sustained lexically and affectively rather than systematically: it concentrates in the domains of family and intimacy, is carried by a semantically cohesive core of words reproduced with notable consistency across participants, and is conditioned by physical proximity to the region. The third examines co-officiality, where overwhelming support coexists with an internal structure in which opposition is confined to the lowest-proficiency participants. Reading quantitative distributions alongside open-ended justifications, the study concludes that attitudes toward the language are negotiated through competing conceptions of what Asturian is and what it is for, returning to the structural absence from which the analysis began.