Speakers
In the 19th century, José Leite de Vasconcelos described it as "the language of the farms, of work, home, and love between the Mirandese". Since 1986–87 it has been taught to students between the ages of 10 and 11, and so is recovering.
Today Mirandese retains fewer than 5,000 speakers (but the number can be up to 15,000 if counting second language speakers) in the villages of the Municipality of Miranda do Douro and in some eastern villages (i.e. Vilar Seco & Angueira; in Caçarelhos, it is considered recently extinct) of the Municipality of Vimioso, and some linguistic influence can be observed at other villages of the municipality of Vimioso and the municipalities of Mogadouro, Macedo de Cavaleiros and Bragança.
Read more about this topic: Mirandese Language
Famous quotes containing the word speakers:
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
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