Asturian belongs to the Ibero-Romance sub-group of the Italic-Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. The language is spoken by 100,000 to 450,000 speakers in the region of Asturia in the north of Spain and another 25,000 speakers in Portugal.
Asturian was developed out of the Latin that was spoken in Asturia between the rivers Asón in the west and Eo in the east and the southern foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains. Today it is considered as one of the five still existing primary dialect groups of Vulgar Latin on the Iberian Peninsula, next to Galician-Portuguese, Castilian-Spanish, Aragonese and Catalan.
Especially in the period of the dictatorship of Franco, Asturian was often classified as a “Spanish dialect”. Today people promoting regionalism in Asturia demand recognition for the language, which only had limited success so far (only in some municalities, and especially in schools). The only official language of the region of Asturia is Spanish.
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Asturian has three main dialects with different sub-groups: Western Asturian (having many similarities with Galician and Portuguese), Central Asturian and Eastern Asturian (which has many similarities with Castillian-Spanish). From the seventies and eighties a written standard for Asturian was developed that is based on the Central Asturian dialects.
Asturians in Spain (100.000 Speaker)
Asturians in Portugal (25.000 Speaker)