<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#ff80c0"><P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><B>Greetings, Tom in snowy Edmonton from Sandra <BR>
in suddenly unsnowy and unseasonably warm New York:<BR>
<BR>
Aragonese and Asturian are basically considered "dialects"<BR>
by most Spaniards. Having a literature is one of the deciding factors when distinguishing between a language and a <BR>
dialect. You ask what is considered "literature"...well, <BR>
I think that answers itself...no? Literature constitutes a body <BR>
of writings by various authors on various topics and ranging over a variety of genres and over extended periods of a <BR>
nation's cultural history. Like England, France, the U.S., <BR>
Canada, Germany and Russia, Spain and her Latin American daughters, abound with great authors of every category, <BR>
as you well know. Gallego or Galaico-Portuguese and <BR>
Catalan are also rich in extraordinary writers. <BR>
But Aragonese and Asturian are not, and in addition, are <BR>
spoken by a small number of people in a very limited area. <BR>
They are thus usually considered dialects, or as you <BR>
call them, "minority languages".<BR>
Ciao for now,<BR>
Linguist and fellow language pedant,<BR>
Sandra<BR>
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