eurocentrism

[gusl]

The distance between Portuguese and Spanish is equivalence to the distance between Arabic "dialects"
For comparison, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are even closer to each other (at least, as far as mutual comprehension goes). I'd like to throw Dutch and German somewhere, but I don't know enough German. I guess it's about the same as Portuguese-Spanish. In comparison, English really is a linguistic isolate.

The local variants of Latin that became Spanish and Portuguese developed in the frontier regions on the northern fringe of the Arab conquest, during the early middle ages. It is likely that some of the peoples involved had continued to speak Celtic dialects until they were converted to Christianity, which in some cases did not occur until after the Arab invasion. Certainly many of the people who became Castilians were originally Basque speakers. In any case, it is not until the 10th or 11th century that we begin to see the crystallization of what became Spanish and Portuguese, out of local variants of Vulgar Latin, with Basque and perhaps Celtic substrates, and a substantial influence from Arabic. The forms of speech that became Spanish and Portuguese were not separated and isolated, but were part of a larger continuum of Latin-derived dialects called Ibero-Romance, with a largely shared vocabulary, similar sound changes, and so on. It was not until considerably later that particular dialects, associated with royal courts and later with modern nation-states, were given a clearly separate identity and a separate line of formal development as Spanish and Portuguese. It is an accident of history that these particular forms -- as opposed to Aragonese, Leonese, or other local variants -- became national languages.

Thus to sum up the history, Spanish and Portuguese developed as separate Ibero-Romance dialects over roughly the same historical period -- the past 1300 years -- that the various variants of colloquial Arabic developed. Spanish and Portuguese became established as national languages and spread (via colonization) around the world. The colloquial variants of Arabic remain, to this day, unwritten vernacular forms, in a context where "Modern Standard Arabic" -- a modern approximation to the language of the Koran -- remains the medium of formal discourse. The result in each case is a sort of family tree, of which relevant portions are given below:

Ibero-Romance language family
Catalan
Provencal
Aragonese
Asturian
Castilian ("Spanish")
Galician
Portuguese
. . .



Arabic language family
Moroccan
Algerian
Tunisian
Libyan
Egyptian
Palestinian
Lebanese
. . .

From the point of view of internal linguistic description, the different varieties of Arabic are at least as different as the different varieties of Romance. From the point of view of linguistic attitudes, however, the situation is very different. Spanish speakers certainly feel themselves to be members of a different linguistic community from Portuguese speakers -- and speakers of Catalan or Galician feel equally separate, although these are minority languages of Spain rather than languages associated with their own nation-state. By contrast, speakers of different varieties of Arabic generally feel themselves to be members of the same linguistic community, tied together by their common language of formal discourse, which is essentially the language of the Quran.