Andalusi Romance

Andalusi Romance, also called Mozarabic, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance that were spoken in Al-Andalus, the parts of the medieval Iberian Peninsula under Islamic control. Romance, or vernacular Late Latin, was the common tongue for the great majority of the Iberian population at the time of the Umayyad conquest in the early eighth century, but over the following centuries, it was gradually superseded by Andalusi Arabic as the main spoken language in the Muslim-controlled south. At the same time, as the northern Christian kingdoms pushed south into Al-Andalus, their respective Romance varieties (especially Castilian) gained ground at the expense of Andalusi Romance as well as Arabic. The final extinction of the former may be estimated to 1300 AD.

Among the medieval Ibero-Romance languages, which were broadly similar to each other (with Castilian as something of an outlier), Andalusi Romance is distinguished not primarily by its linguistic features, but rather by its being written in the Arabic script (mainly, and Hebrew script otherwise). What is known or hypothesized about the particular linguistic features of Andalusi Romance is based on relatively sparse evidence, of which the kharjas, or closing lines of an Andalusi muwaššaḥ poem, are the most important.