An Interview with Cristina Martins
Abstract
The Mirandese language is a Romance language and form of Astur-Leonese that is spoken in a border region of rural northeastern Portugal. Mirandese owes its existence to the southward expansion of the medieval kingdoms of Asturias and Leon into territory later incorporated into the Portuguese kingdom. For most of its history Mirandese has been an essentially oral language, though in recent decades this has changed, and in 1999 an Orthographic Convention for the Mirandese Language was published. That same year, the Portuguese parliament recognized the existence of Mirandese and the linguistic rights of the Mirandese community. Despite these advances, spoken Mirandese is in decline, and it currently has an estimated 3,500 active speakers. This decline is due to factors including language stigmatization, particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century, improved transportation links between the northeast and the rest of Portugal, and rural-to-urban migration. Mirandese may go extinct as a spoken language by the mid-twenty-first century. On September 8, 2023, Cristina Martins (Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra) gave a keynote address, “Mirandese, quo vadis?” at the 44th Annual Conference of the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, at the University of Porto. Professor Martins provided an overview of the history, present, and possible futures of Mirandese. She also described her linguistic research on and personal relationship with the language. I invited her to participate in this interview, conducted by email, to introduce Mirandese to a primarily North American academic audience, and to expand on the themes of her address.