1. Introduction

Aljamiado literature, composed in Romance and recorded in Arabic script by Moriscos before their final expulsion from Spain, represents a valuable resource for the linguistic study of the contact situations between Arabic and Romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula. By examining Arabic insertions in Romance texts, we are able to probe the degree of bilingualism that these communities exhibited and the factors that led to a continued use of the Arabic language in the face of religious and linguistic persecution between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a previous work (Thomas 2015), occurrences of lexical insertions and instances of code-switching were extracted from 31 Aljamiado works collected in three different volumes: Menéndez Pidal's study of El poema de Yúçuf (1952), Manuscript 4953 from the Biblioteca Nacional de España analyzed by Hegyi in Cinco leyendas y otros relatos moriscos (1981), and a collection of stories about biblical characters compiled by Vespertino Rodríguez in Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes bíblicos (1983). In the great majority of the cases, it was shown that the use of Arabic was formulaic and consisted in the repetition of certain religious quotes and terms.

The present study will argue that in these Aljamiado texts, religion can indeed be considered a sociolinguistic factor driving the occurrence of lexical insertions and code-switching. In many studies, it has been shown that external factors that shape the speakers social and ethnic identity play a role in lexical borrowing and code-switching even in cases of rapid language shift (Haugen 1985; Thomason and Kaufman 1988; Winford 2003). Specifically, Weinreich (1963) showed that the need for expressing certain concepts is an important factor in lexical transfer across languages. In this case, both the need for religious terms which when translated lose their Islamic jurisprudential meaning, (1) and the need to conserve, albeit covertly, a strong ethnic and religious identity are reasons to insert Arabic terms and phrases. We will also look at the process of adaptation of the inserted terms to argue that given the significant morpho-phonological changes that these words show, the authors of the Aljamiado texts, as well as their readers, show a rapid language shift in progress at the time. In fact, the need for religious terms was only momentarily delaying the complete disappearance of Arabic in the Iberian Peninsula as its erosion was progressing very quickly.

The analysis carried out for this study is based on three texts that show a greater concentration of Arabic insertions than the other twenty-eight works in the corpus studied in Thomas (2015). These three stories come from Manuscript 4953 and have been dated to the late sixteenth century. They are "Annušra," "Addu'a puesto en rah," and "Los cinco preceptos fundamentales del islam." Furthermore, these three texts were chosen because their distinctive styles offer an opportunity to study and compare the outcome of language contact between Arabic and Romance in unique ways. Although all three are focused on Islamic themes, "Los cinco preceptos fundamentales del islam (henceforward Los preceptos)" directly deals with how...