A very nice documentary about the Leonese language spoken in Leon today. As you can see, in some towns there are still children speakers. In other places, most are middle aged or elderly.
If you can speak Spanish or Portuguese, see how much of this Leonese you can get. Cover up the subtitles to make it harder. Even after a full 30 minutes of this, I still could barely make out any of this language. Some speakers do not get subtitles. Their lect also sounded very strange, but then Castillian sounds odd to me. One middle aged tailor seems to be speaking Castillian with heavy Leonese influence. The professor is simply speaking Castillian, but I still had a hard time with her because Castillian Spanish is hard for me to hear. The young librarian from Astorga gets subtitles, but he is a lot easier to understand. I assume he is speaking some sort of Leonese with heavy Castillian influences.
If you can speak Spanish or Portuguese, see how much you can understand of:
Any of the Leonese speakers.
The tailor speaking Leonese-Castillian.
The professor speaking Standard Castillian.
The librarian speaking Castillianized Leonese.
I really enjoyed this video. The scenery is incredible. This is an area of high mountains and it gets quite cold in the winter. In fact, it is not unusual for it to snow here! The villages are ancient, located in steep mountains and hard to access. The houses look like the type of ancient homes they have been building here for hundreds of years. Clearly this is a very isolated area. The economic prospects in this area are not good, so many young people move away to make money. Nevertheless, there is a certain joyous and timeless way of life here that I found utterly charming. It sure would be a beautiful and wonderful place to visit just to see a rustic way of life.
