Mozarabic

Mozarabic, or Andalusi Romance, was the language Latin became in the part of Spain that fell under Muslim rule. When the Arabs and Berbers conquered Iberia in 711, the everyday Romance speech of the Roman provincials did not disappear; it carried on in the streets and markets of al-Andalus for centuries, spoken by Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike, even as Arabic dominated writing, government, and prestige. Unusually for a Romance language, it was written in the Arabic alphabet rather than the Latin one, and it is preserved most vividly in the kharjas — the closing refrains, in Romance, of sophisticated Arabic and Hebrew poems — which count among the oldest lyric verses in any Romance tongue.

It died because it was squeezed from both sides. From within al-Andalus, Arabic steadily absorbed its speakers, a process that sharpened when the hardline Almohads arrived in the twelfth century and many Mozarab Christians fled north. From outside, the Reconquista pushed the frontier southward, and the conquering kingdoms brought their own Romance languages — Castilian, Portuguese, Leonese — that displaced the local speech in the reconquered lands. By about 1300 Mozarabic was effectively gone, neither preserved by the Arabic that had surrounded it nor continued by the northern Romance that replaced it. It was not, as is sometimes assumed, simply an early form of Spanish; it was a separate branch of Ibero-Romance that was extinguished, leaving behind the kharjas, a scatter of loanwords, and place-names like Guadalquivir as its only descendants.