El romance del occidente de Vizcaya en su toponimia. Bosquejo histórico

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to characterize some linguistic aspects —lexical as well as phonetic— of the Castilian speech of the little known región of western Vizcaya. Our source and the foundation of our observations are minor placenames. Only Toponymy is able to provide the interesting and relevant data on two aspects concerning this región that are historically significant: its location with respect to the northwestern boundary of the Basque language área and the profile and features of the Castilian spoken there today. Place-names provide Information with which we can sketch speech traditions in the región and increase our knowledge of both northern Castilian and the history of the romance language spoken in Vizcaya.