The lexical impact of language contact with Arabic on Spanish and Catalan

Abstract

During the nine centuries of Arab presence in the Iberian Peninsula (from the conquest in 711 to the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1610), the Ibero-Romance languages received hundreds of Arabic loanwords. This lexicon is distributed in specific notional fields that reflect the cultural exchange that Christian Spain benefitted from in its contact with Al-Andalus, and is often characterized by a limited diatopic, diastratic and diachronic diffusion that reveals that the transfer of lexical material occurred in ve…