In the following notes I shall study the more important linguistic phenomena that are to be found in my Cuentos populares españoles, the most abundant and most important collection of Spanish folk-tales that has ever been collected and published. The three volumes that contain the folk-tales offer us 280 dialectic versions of some 200 different tales representative of 24 of the 49 provinces of Spain and collected from 88 different towns, villages, and localities from the following regions of north, central, and southern Spain: La Montaña, Asturias, León, Castilla la Vieja, Castilla la Nueva, Andalucía, La Mancha, and Estremadura. About one third of the materials are from Old Castile. All the folk-tales, with the exception of those from Asturias, were collected and taken down (frequently in phonetic script) by myself. The Asturian folk-tales (eleven in number) are the only materials in the entire collection that may be called non-Castilian and for that reason they will not enter into our present linguistic studies. The linguistic materials that are to be the object of our study are, therefore, fundamentally and essentially Castilian materials from Old and New Castile and from the southern Spanish regions that have been castilianized since the XIIth century when these regions began to be recaptured from the Arabs, and they do not, in general, represent any of the special linguistic characteristics of Asturian, Galician, Leonese, Aragonese, Valencian, Portuguese or Catalonian. Andalusian Spanish shows, to be sure, certain linguistic traits that appear to separate it from the Castilian of the northern and central regions, but many of these traits are after all developments of phenomena that had their beginnings in Castile.
Aurelio M. Espinosa (Thu,) studied this question.