Mozarabic: The Lost Romance Tongue

For centuries, the story of medieval Spain was a story of contact, conflict, and coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In this cultural crucible, languages mingled and evolved, creating a linguistic tapestry of incredible complexity. At its heart was Mozarabic, a testament to a world where “Christian” and “Arab” were not mutually exclusive identities.

A Tale of Two Worlds: Who Were the Mozarabs?

When Muslim forces from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711, they encountered a population speaking a form of Late Latin, often called Vulgar Latin. This was the spoken language that was already beginning to fracture into the various Romance languages we know today. As Islamic rule solidified over most of the peninsula, creating the state of Al-Andalus, the Christians who remained became known as Mozarabs.

The term comes from the Arabic musta’rib (مستعرب), meaning “Arabized” or “one who has adopted the ways of the Arabs”. These communities were granted dhimmi status—a protected, second-class standing under Islamic law that allowed them to practice their religion in exchange for a special tax. While Latin remained their liturgical language and Arabic became the language of government, science, and high culture, the Mozarabs continued to speak their native Romance vernacular at home. This everyday language was Mozarabic.

A Language of Fusion: The Features of Mozarabic

Mozarabic was, at its core, a Romance language. It was a direct descendant of the Latin spoken in Roman Hispania, making it a sister, not a daughter, of Castilian (what we now call Spanish), Catalan, and Portuguese. However, centuries of life within a dominant Arabic-speaking culture left an indelible mark.

Its unique character came from this blend:

• A Romance Skeleton: Its grammar, syntax, and basic vocabulary were overwhelmingly Latin-based. You can see this in its pronouns, verb conjugations, and core concepts, which clearly align with other Romance languages.
• Archaic Features: Compared to Castilian, Mozarabic was often more conservative. It preserved Latin consonant clusters that Castilian later simplified. For example, it kept sounds like PL, CL, and FL (like in Latin PLUS, “more”), whereas Castilian evolved them into ll (as in llorar from Latin PLORARE, “to cry”).
• An Arabic Lexical Overcoat: The most significant influence was in its vocabulary. Mozarabs borrowed thousands of words from Arabic to describe everything from administration (alcalde, “mayor”, from al-qāḍī, “the judge”) and agriculture (aceite, “oil”, from az-zayt) to everyday household items (almohada, “pillow”, from al-mukhaddah). Many of these words were later passed into Spanish and Portuguese, with Mozarabic acting as the linguistic bridge.

Written in a Foreign Hand: The Aljamiado Script

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Mozarabic is how it was written. While some religious texts were preserved in the Latin alphabet, the most vibrant evidence of the spoken language comes to us through a system known as Aljamiado.

Derived from the Arabic al-’ajamiyyah (العجمية), meaning “foreign” or “non-Arabic”, Aljamiado is the practice of writing a Romance language using the Arabic script. For the Mozarabs, who were often more literate in Arabic than in Latin, this was a natural choice. The Arabic script was the alphabet of prestige and daily life.

This system, however, posed challenges. The Arabic script is an abjad, meaning it primarily represents consonants. To represent Romance vowels, scribes had to get creative, using diacritical marks (ḥarakāt) or employing certain consonants as makeshift vowels. Furthermore, Romance had sounds that Arabic lacked, such as /p/ and /v/. Scribes innovated by modifying existing Arabic letters to represent these foreign sounds, creating a uniquely adapted script for a uniquely hybrid language.

Echoes from the Past: The Discovery of the Kharjas

For a long time, Mozarabic was a true ghost. Scholars knew it must have existed, but there was little direct evidence. That all changed in the mid-20th century with the full decipherment of the kharjas (from Arabic خرجة, meaning “final exit” or “envoi”).

The kharjas are short, lyrical refrains found at the end of longer, formal poems written in classical Arabic or Hebrew called muwashshahat. The brilliant twist was that while the main poem was in a high-register classical language, the final kharja was often a snippet of the local vernacular—Mozarabic. These stanzas, frequently voiced by a woman lamenting a lost lover, are our only direct window into the spoken language.

Consider this famous kharja, written in Aljamiado script but transliterated here into Romance:

Vayse meu corachón de mib.
Ya Rab, ¿si me tornarád?
¡Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib!
Enfermo yed, ¿cuánd sanarád?

(My heart is leaving me.
Oh Lord, will it ever return to me?
So great is my pain for my beloved!
It is sick, when will it heal?)

Even with its archaic spelling, the Romance soul of the language is unmistakable. We can see “corachón” (heart, modern Spanish corazón), “doler” (pain, modern Spanish dolor), and “enfermo” (sick, modern Spanish enfermo).

The Long Farewell: Decline and Extinction

The fate of Mozarabic was tied to the Reconquista, the centuries-long process of Christian kingdoms in the north expanding southward. As territories were reconquered, the Mozarabs were reabsorbed into a new Christian society. But their language was now in competition with the powerful and prestigious Romance tongues of the conquerors: Castilian, Aragonese, and Portuguese.

Speakers of Mozarabic slowly shifted to the dominant northern dialects. Their language, seen as a rustic patois corrupted by Arabic, was abandoned in favor of the language of the new courts and churches. By the 14th century, Mozarabic had effectively vanished as a living, breathing language, leaving only faint echoes behind.

The Lingering Ghost: Mozarabic’s Legacy Today

Though extinct, Mozarabic is far from gone. Its ghost lingers in the very fabric of modern Spain and Portugal, most notably in place names (toponyms).

• The Guad- Prefix: Hundreds of river and city names beginning with Guad- fuse the Arabic word for “river” (wādī) with a pre-existing Romance or Ibero-Roman name. Guadalupe is likely wādī al-lubb (“river of the wolf”), and Guadalajara is from wādī al-ḥijārah (“river of stones”).
• Arabic Roots: Cities like Algeciras (from al-jazīra, “the island”) and Medinaceli (from madīnat Sālim, “the city of Salim”) are direct descendants of their Andalusi-era names.
• A Bridge for Words: As mentioned, many of the 5,000+ Arabic loanwords in Spanish likely found their way into the language via Mozarabic-speaking communities integrating into Christian Spain.

The story of Mozarabic is a poignant reminder that languages are more than just words; they are living artifacts of history. It tells a tale of a people and a culture caught between two of the world’s great civilizations, creating something uniquely their own. It is the story of a lost tongue whose whispers can still be heard in the riverbeds and city squares of the Iberian Peninsula, if only you know where to listen.