# Mirandese (`mwl`) and its sub-dialects

Mirandese (*mirandés*, *lhéngua mirandesa*) is an **Asturleonese** language
spoken in the Miranda do Douro municipality of north-eastern Portugal, and
recognised as a co-official regional language of Portugal since 1999. It is
**not** a dialect of Portuguese: its parent in this library is
`ast-PT-x-medieval` (Medieval Asturian-Leonese of Portugal), and its features
are West Iberian / Leonese, not imported Portuguese allophony. Modern
Mirandese does, however, carry a heavy Portuguese **adstrate** (schooling,
administration), visible chiefly in unstressed-vowel reduction.

Codes covered here:

| Code | Name | Sub-dialect | Tier |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| `mwl` | Mirandese (Central) | Central / normal | research |
| `mwl-x-sendim` | Sendinês | Southern (Vila de Sendim) | research |
| `mwl-x-ifanes` | Ifanês | Northern / Raiano (border) | research |

The three sub-dialects are the classical division (Vasconcelos 1900): the
**Central** norm on which the orthography is built, the **Northern/Raiano**
speech of the plateau border, and the **Southern Sendinês** of Vila de Sendim.

## The sibilant system — the hallmark

Mirandese preserves the medieval Ibero-Romance sibilant richness that
standard Portuguese and Spanish collapsed. The library models a **four-way+
contrast**:

| Orthography | Phoneme | Description |
|:--|:--|:--|
| ⟨s⟩, ⟨ss⟩ | /s̺/ | voiceless **apico-alveolar** fricative |
| intervocalic ⟨-s-⟩ | /z̺/ | voiced apico-alveolar |
| ⟨c⟩ (before e/i), ⟨ç⟩ | /s/ | voiceless **dorso-dental** fricative |
| ⟨z⟩ | /z/ | voiced dorso-dental |
| ⟨x⟩ | /ʃ/ | voiceless postalveolar |
| ⟨j⟩, ⟨g⟩ (before e/i) | /ʒ/ | voiced postalveolar |
| ⟨ch⟩ | /t͡ʃ/ | voiceless postalveolar **affricate** (still an affricate, unlike modern European Portuguese, which deaffricated it to /ʃ/) |

**Notation convention.** The crucial phonemic opposition is *apical*
(⟨s⟩) versus *dorso-dental* (⟨c, ç, z⟩). The library writes only the apical
series with the IPA retracted diacritic (`s̺`, `z̺`) and leaves the
dorso-dental series **plain** (`s`, `z`). This is IPA-standard, keeps the
contrast fully explicit, and matches the convention of the expert
`TigreGotico/mirandese_g2p` gold (which never uses the over-narrow laminal
`◌̻` diacritic). ⟨ç⟩ is a fricative, not the Asturian affricate /t͡s/, and it
occurs word-finally (`rapaç`, `lhuç`) where Portuguese would spell `-z`.

⟨j⟩ is always /ʒ/ (West Iberian) — never the Asturian palatal /ʝ/. The letter
⟨y⟩, by contrast, is the glide /j/ (`ye` → [je]).

## Leonese features

- **Initial-l palatalisation.** Word-initial ⟨l⟩ before a vowel is /ʎ/
  (`luç` → [ˈʎus]), per Convenção § L. Bare /l/ survives word-initially only
  in loanwords, proper nouns and the article — a documented residual limit,
  not modelled positionally.
- **⟨lh⟩ = /ʎ/, ⟨nh⟩ = /ɲ/** in all positions.
- **Leonese diphthongs.** Latin short Ĕ → ⟨iê/ie⟩ = [jɛ] (stressed),
  Latin short Ŏ → ⟨uô/uo⟩ = [wɔ]~[wo] (`tierra` → [ˈtjɛrɐ], `puorta` →
  [ˈpwoɾtɐ]).
- **Intervocalic /l/ and /n/ preserved** (inherited from the parent) — the
  defining Leonese retention that distinguishes the group from Portuguese.

### The ⟨Vnh⟩ trigraphs

Because ⟨an, en, in, on, un⟩ are nasal-vowel digraphs, a naive greedy
tokenizer would parse `danho` as `an` + `ho` and lose the /ɲ/. The spec
therefore lists the trigraphs ⟨anh, enh, inh, onh, unh⟩ explicitly (oral
vowel + /ɲ/), so `danho` → [ˈdaɲu] and `canhona` → [kaˈɲonɐ].

## Vowels, nasality and stress

The Portuguese adstrate shows up as **unstressed-vowel reduction**:
unstressed /a/ → [ɐ], pretonic/final /e/ → [ɨ], unstressed /o/ → [u]
(`abandono` → [ɐbɐ̃ˈdonu]). Nasal-vowel digraphs realise /ɐ̃ ẽ ĩ õ ũ/ before
a consonant or at a word boundary; before a vowel they are oral vowel + /n/.
Stress follows the Convenção § Acento: paroxytone by default, with the
oxytone-attracting endings `-r -l -z -ç -in -un -on -is -us -ns -ão` and any
written accent overriding.

## Allophony (post-lexical)

The spec declares two cited [allophone rules](../allophony.md):
coda /n/ assimilates in place to a following **labial** ([m]) or **velar**
([ŋ]) stop (Mateus & d'Andrade 2000).

Ibero-Romance **intervocalic voiced-stop spirantisation** (⟨b d g⟩ →
[β ð ɣ]) is a genuine native process, but in the expert gold it is
**lexically variable and stop-dominant** (b:54 / β:13; d:41 / ð:12) because
the attested wordlist is loan-heavy and conservatively transcribed. A blanket
spirantisation rule *regresses* this gold, so the spirants are declared in the
`allophones` inventory (available to the lattice and downstream engines) but
are **not** applied as a default rewrite — realising them is left to the
downstream `mwl_phonemizer`, where lexical conditioning is available.

## Sub-dialects

Sub-dialect specs inherit the full Central system (`graphemes_base = mwl`) and
declare only their **deltas**:

- **Sendinês (`mwl-x-sendim`)** — two documented changes:
  1. **Monophthongisation**: ⟨iê/ie⟩ → /i/, ⟨uô/uo⟩ → /u/ (`puorta` →
     [ˈpuɾtɐ]).
  2. **Depalatalisation**: /ʎ/ → /l/ — words other dialects say with ⟨lh⟩ are
     said with /l/ (`lhobo` → [ˈlobu], `alhá` → [ɐˈla]); word-initial ⟨l⟩ is
     likewise plain /l/. The Primeiro Aditamento (2000) permits Sendinese
     writers to spell word-initial ⟨l-⟩.
- **Ifanês (`mwl-x-ifanes`)** — the Northern/Raiano speech of Ifanes. The
  published descriptions record **no** segmental orthography→phoneme
  divergence from Central: both keep the diphthongs [je]/[wo] and /ʎ/ (only
  Sendinês diverges), corroborated by the Raiano gold (`fuogo` → [ˈfwo.ʊ],
  diphthong retained). Its distinctives are morphosyntactic/lexical (article
  forms, some nasalisation) and out of scope for a grapheme→IPA spec, so it
  inherits Central unchanged; the ⟨iê⟩ diphthong is preserved rather than
  monophthongised to [e], for which no source records a divergence.

## Input contract

Input is Mirandese text in the **official orthography** (Convenção 1999).
Feed written ⟨lh⟩, ⟨nh⟩, ⟨iê/uô⟩, ⟨ç⟩ as spelled; the accents that mark stress
(´) and the nasal tilde (˜) are respected.

## Benchmarks

Measured against `TigreGotico/mirandese_g2p` (expert-human, small-`n`):

| Code | n | PER |
|:--|--:|--:|
| `mwl` | 205 | ≈0.20 |
| `mwl-x-sendim` | 11 | ≈0.37 (wide CI — do not over-read) |

Residual error is dominated by gold-notation choices the rules cannot and
should not chase: the transcriber's centralised final vowel [ʉ] for
unstressed final ⟨-o⟩, and lexically variable spirantisation (see above).

## Sources

- **Ferreira, M. B. & Raposo, D. (coords.) (1999).** *Convenção Ortográfica
  da Língua Mirandesa.* Câmara Municipal de Miranda do Douro / Centro de
  Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. — the official orthography (§ L,
  § Sibilantes, § Ditongos, § Nasalidade, § Acento).
- **Ferreira, M. B. & Raposo, D. (coords.) (2000).** *Primeiro Aditamento à
  Convenção Ortográfica da Língua Mirandesa.* — Sendinês provisions.
- **Vasconcelos, J. Leite de (1900).** *Estudos de Philologia Mirandesa
  (Vol. I).* Imprensa Nacional, Lisboa. — foundational description of the
  sibilant system and the sub-dialect division.
- **Mateus, M. H. M. & d'Andrade, E. (2000).** *The Phonology of Portuguese.*
  Oxford University Press. — reference for the shared Ibero-Romance processes
  (nasal place assimilation, spirantisation) and the adstrate reduction.

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*Related: [romance](romance.md), [pt-PT](pt-PT.md), [ext-PT-x-barrancos](ext-PT-x-barrancos.md)*
