The origins of the romance languages in the Iberian Peninsula and their first literary examples

The Iberian Peninsula, throughout its history, has witnessed processes that, sometimes resulted in the mixing of languages of the indigenous people with their own languages and the languages brought by the people that came to the Peninsula later, and sometimes resulted in the dominance of one language over other languages. When we look upon the present day, we can see that the majority of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula today are Romance Languages. Romance Languages were formed when the spoken Latin in the lands under the rule of the Roman Empire, evolve over time and became new languages. In the classification of Romance Languages, the subgroup that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula is called the Ibero-Romance Languages. Ibero-Romance Languages have been the subject of many studies in terms of their historical development. Research has shown that the first written examples of Ibero-Romance Languages began to emerge rapidly in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, especially during the warfare between the Andalusian Arabs and the Christian Kingdoms in the North of the Peninsula. When it comes to literature, it is seen that the first written examples of literature in Ibero-Romance Languages are pieces of lyric poetry. These pieces of lyric poetry were added to the last lines of some poems dating back to the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries which were written in Arabic or Hebrew by Arab or Jewish origin poets who lived in Andalusia. These last lines are called the kharjas. Some expressions observed in the kharjas are written in a kind of Ibero-Romance Language called Mozarabic or Andalusi Romance. According to many researchers, this situation is a kind of reflection of the multicultural and multilingual structure of the Andalusian society. The kharjas containing expressions in Romance Language were discovered in the middle of the 20th century. This discovery created a great excitement both in the field of language and literature. The reason for the excitement is that the language observed in the kharjas is a very old form of Ibero-Romance Language and the kharjas are the oldest known pieces of written lyric poetry in the Romance Languages. In consequence, many researchers with different fields of expertise have been interested in the kharjas. The fact that the kharjas were written using the Arabic or Hebrew Alphabet, like the whole of the poem at the end of which they were located, made it very difficult for the researchers to study. Issues such as the analysis, interpretation and classification of the kharjas have brought many still unsolved debates. In addition to these debates, another important ongoing debate is the position of the kharjas in the Western Literature and their relations with similar types of lyric poetry in Romance Languages. For the researchers of the Medieval Western Literature, many issues that were thought to have been concluded before were brought back to the agenda with the discovery of the kharjas. In the first part of our study, we primarily talk about the people that lived in the Iberian Peninsula throughout the history and the languages they spoke / wrote. Next, we examine the historical development of the Ibero-Romance Languages. We study the literature in the Ibero-Romance Languages up to the 13th century. In the second part, we introduce the kharjas containing expressions in Romance Language. We discuss the meanings, rhyme and form features of the types of poetry such as the muwashshah and the zajal at the end of which the kharjas were located. In the third part, we evaluate the main research and discussion topics which focus on the kharjas in Romance Language. With this master's tesis, we aim to introduce the kharjas containing expressions in the Romance Language, about which discussions are still ongoing, to the Turkish readers and to reveal the importance of these kharjas in terms of Spanish Language and Literature.