The Lost Bridge: Mozarabic’s Linguistic History and Influence on Modern Spanish

During Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 CE to the early 11th century, many Iberian Christians adopted elements of Arabic culture and language. These people, known as “Mozarabs,” created their own dialect of language combining Arabic lexicon and writing script with a Romance-based grammatical skeleton called “Mozarabic.” This language eventually died away in the 13th-14th centuries due to northern Christian states taking control over the Iberian Peninsula and expelling Arabic and Islamic influence. This study integrates the methodologies of historical linguistics, philological analysis, and sociolinguistics to demonstrate how Mozarabic evolved out of Vulgar Latin under Arabic influence as a contact language. Additionally, this study incorporates orthographic insight and literary translation analysis of Mozarabic poetry - some of the only Mozarabic documents preserved today—to illustrate the language’s unique position as a linguistic bridge between classical Arabic and modern Spanish, despite the expulsion of Arabic influence. Through linguistic and poetic analysis, this study presents Mozarabic as a vital witness to medieval intercultural exchange and highlights its lasting and critically important imprint on the Spanish language.