Mozarabic was a
continuum of closely related
Romance dialects spoken in
Muslim dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula during the early stages of the
Romance languages' development in Iberia. Mozarabic descends from
Late Latin and early Romance dialects spoken in the Iberian Peninsula from 5
th to 8
th centuries (
Hispania was the name of a group of three provinces of the Peninsula and the name more commonly used at Roman and
Visigothic times). This set of dialects came to be known as the
Mozarabic language, though there was never a common standard. (
Mozarab comes from the
Arabic word
مستعرب - musta'rab, i.e. "
Arabized").
Although the name Mozarabic is today used for this Romance language, the native name (autonym or endonym) of the language was not "muzarab" or "mozarab" but latinus or Latino. Mozarabs themselves never called their own language "mozarabic" but by the name that meant "Latin" (i.e. Romance language). They did not call themselves by the name "mozarabs".
At times Christian communities prospered in Muslim Spain; these Christians are now usually referred to as Mozárabes, although the term was not in use at the time (Hitchcock 1978)
It was only in the 19th century that Spanish historians started to use the words "mozarabs" and "mozarabic" to refer to those Christians who lived under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages and their language. Another very common Arab exonym for this language was al-ajamiya ("stranger/foreign") that had the meaning of Romance language in Al-Andalus. So the words "mozarabic" or "ajamiya" are exonyms and not an autonym of the language.
