On 01/09/05, Juanma Barranquero lekktu@gmail.com wrote:
I must say, I would dispute the claim about the 300,000 people, as not a single murcian I know ever talked that language, or even *about* that language, to me. I'd be most linguistics experts would not classify "murcian" as a language, but as local variant of Spanish (but I assume this is gonna cause some friction :)
Well, why would they talk to you in Murcian, unless they thought you spoke it? And why would they talk to you about Murcian, unless you indicated an interest?
I speak English, but if I'm in Germany I don't tell everybody I meet "HEY!!! I speak English!! English is a language spoken by this many people in these countries, and here's an English lesson...", likewise I doubt a Murcian speaker will do the same, or a Catalan speaker, or a Basque or Spanish or French or German or Chinese or Arabic speaker.
People don't walk around advertising their language to everyone they talk to.
And it's only the rare person or the monolingual who talks to someone in a language they won't understand -- there's no point for me to talk to a monolingual Japanese speaker in English, when I can use Japanese instead, so why would they speak Murcian to you rather than Castellano?
Mark