Exploring the Etymology of Canary Island Speech with Philologist Marcial Morera

Languages ​​are alive, they are evolving and transforming with the use of the speakers, with borrowing from other languages ​​and even with fashions and trends. Despite all these changes the philologist Marcial Morera defends that “words are incombustible and tend to persevere” both in its form and in its meaning. Therefore, although the words may deviate from their etymological origin, there are always clues to travel further back in time and pull the thread that reveals the sources from which Canarian speech draws.

As author of Historical-etymological dictionary of Canarian speech, Marcial Morera is one of the experts with a broader vision of the Spanish we speak in the Archipelago. “Languages ​​are never used in a pure form, but rather each society adapts the code to its needs giving rise to dialects or modalities. In the Canary Islands we all have a similar pronunciation but there are differences in speech between islands,” says the philologist.

By way of synthesis, Morera affirms that “the most important sources of Canarian speech are the españolsecondly the Portuguese and thirdly, the Pre-Hispanic Canarian languages, although more in place names than in common vocabulary. Finally, small contributions from the Moorish or the Normansas well as adaptations of english voices“.

prehispanic heritage

Before the arrival of the conquerors, the Islands already had their own linguistic heritage whose legacy reaches our days, especially in the form of place names. “The language spoken by the pre-European Canarian population was Berber and we know it from the grammar of toponymy, since words like Tenerife, Tindaya o garajonay are of Berber etymology”, Morera reaffirms. Either to refer to the town or the sacred mountain of the majos, the word “Tindaya is made up of Of (plural feminine determiner), N (preposition ‘of’) and one (below), so it could be translated as ‘the ones below’ or some similar meaning,” says the specialist.

In order to compile the entries for the Dictionary, Marcial Morera had the advice of Arabists familiar with the philology of the different Berber languages ​​since, for example, “the tashelhit spoken in Agadir is different from the rifen which is spoken in the north of Morocco or kablio“. In this way he was able to establish the origin of words such as guayete (niño), I only have (dress), money (money), recognized (chola), a majal (camel), as well as collecting other voices from North Africa such as tabaiba, remember, baifo, tajorase (young billy goat) or take away (herbaceous plant).

cradle of guanchismos

Just as the common names spread throughout all the Islands, the proper names to designate specific places differ greatly from one island to another. “The difference in pre-Hispanic toponymy between islands is abysmal but then there is a almost complete coincidence in the Guanche common nameswhich shows that the languages ​​that were spoken were different or, at least, differentiated dialects”. Upon verifying this fact, Marcial Morera developed a hypothesis in which he argues that “guanchisms adapted to the Spanish language in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura” from the beginning of the 15th century in the period of seigneurial conquest.

Almost a century later, the Majoreros and Conejeros who participated in the conquest realenga -from Gran Canaria, La Palma and Tenerife- brought these new words to the western islands, defends the philologist in his hypothesis. In addition, in the following years, these adapted Guanchisms in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote dispersed throughout the Archipelago “through the palmeros, people from Tenerife and Gran Canaria who went to the eastern islands to collect grain, since Lanzarote and Fuerteventura were islands very rich in cereals, mainly barley and wheat, and they did not have enough labor,” he recounts.

Although they are scarce, there are still words exclusive to some islands, such as the word tafor in Tenerife to refer to the colostrum of some animal species, which in the rest of the Archipelago is called beleten. Also in La Gomera the term Pracan to refer to the perenquen.

A reunion in the Canary Islands

While in the peninsular territory Spanish and Portuguese were deviating from a common trunk, in the Canary Islands there was a reunion between both languages. “A large part of the traditional words of the Canary Islands have their origin in Spanish but there is also a lot of borrowing from the Portuguese, who arrived in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura from the beginning of the 15th century. This Portuguese immigration intensified in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries with the royal conquest and then the Portuguese influence fully entered into activities such as agriculture, fishing, crafts or commerce, which explains the survival of words such as mojo, corn o maresia“.

The Portuguese linguistic tradition landed in the Canary Islands and spread throughout the Archipelago because “there was no other vocabulary” to designate new realities or phenomena. “It was they who started the sugar mills and the vineyards,” says Morera, in addition to lending words to describe the peculiarities of navigation, fauna or climate in the Atlantic, a sea very different from the Mediterranean. In the same way that today languages ​​borrow English words to designate scientific or technological advances, Portuguese appeared in the Canary Islands to give a name to what did not yet have it.

matter of prestige

In more recent times, the Canarian dialect has continued to undergo an evolution influenced by the speech features of each island. With the exodus from the countryside to the cities, the characteristics of the urban speech of the bourgeoisie have been imposed, by imitation. “When they acquire social prestige, grammatical and lexical neologisms become popular”, says Morera and, for this reason, some features such as “the aspiration of the ‘S’ at the end of the word, typical of Gran Canaria, are expanding”.

This peculiarity originated in the countryside but “was later adopted by the Gran Canaria bourgeoisie in the cities and, later, expanded by Lanzarote and Fuerteventura”. The population weight of determined that many services were located in Gran Canaria, for which reason majoreros and conejeros had to travel “to fix papers or cure illnesses”, Morera points out. In addition, until very recent times, “liberal professionals, civil servants or teachers came from Gran Canaria”, exporting many of their products to Lanzarote and Fuerteventura phonetic features and, in general, linguistic.

In this way, the peculiarities of certain islands prevail over those of others in an unstoppable process. “Until the end of the 19th century the distinction between you y you was a general feature in the Archipelago while, to this day, only in La Gomera is the you“, affirms Morera. In a similar way, in El Hierro they keep the pronunciation of the ‘S’ at the end of the word, “which surely was a general trait throughout the Archipelago” although it was later changed “due to the influence and prestige of Andalusian speechas well as the proximity of the ports of Seville and Cádiz, the most immediate for the Canaries”.