Talk:Riu d'Archent

I presume this is here's Argentinia? What's the adjective pertaining to the nation, still Argentine? I need that for the Tango entry. ;o) The Jervan 04:01, 20 May 2005 (PDT)

QSS!!!

Hey Zahir, We've forgotten Nea Illenicia; that should figure in the borders...I'm not sure where, precisely, but the map that's there is from Carlos before we adopted Nea Illenicia. I'll research it and find the exact locale. BoArthur 21:34, 21 March 2006 (PST)

Okay, well you have a template to put work from then. Zahir 21:50, 21 March 2006 (PST)

Um, why are two dates listed for autonomy? --Sikulu 04:02, 22 March 2006 (PST)

The City with too many Names

Are we all fine with expanding on the reason why the international community uses the Catalan form and not the Aragonese form? I was thinking that the city could be founded as "Buen Ayre" and known in Aragonese as that, and perhaps even officially in the country as "Buen Ayre" and also in both languages when referring specifically to this city, but the Catalan form for some reason pluralized in a kind of game of telephone (that happened in real life, certainly) and that form caught on the world over to the point where the English, Brithenig, French, Castilian, German, etc news stations refer to it usually just as "Bons Aires." Misterxeight 18:30, 24 May 2017 (PDT)

Immigration to RdlA (Proposal)

Riu de L'Argent is one of the most multiethnic, multilingual, & multi-confessional countries in the world. The Guiacaran & Guaraní peoples are the biggest (surviving) native groups in the country, dominating mostly up north but there are plenty of indigenous people in Buen Ayre. The first Europeans in the area were not native to Iberia but instead from the former Roman Empire regions (mostly Constantinople & Asia Minor but also many from southern Italy) and their descendants who might have been born in exile in Iberia. The Constanopolitanos (later shortened to 'Costanicos') went to the New World at the behest of their host king who wanted to experiment with colonizing the New World after the immense material wealth the crowns of Castile-Leon and Portugal were extracting from it. They set up shantytowns and eventually crude settlements along the coast of the so-called Silver River, even recruiting the help of natives and engaging in missions to them. The Roman refugees thrived at the ends of the earth and indeed their success made the Jesuits up north in the Guarani state and proper Aragonese back home jealous. They were evicted from the opening of the river region and conquistadores from Portugal operating in nearby Brazil helped the Aragonese crown pick the best spot for a city. That city is now known as Buen Ayre, "Good Air." The first Spaniards were the urban poor and convicts who were pressed ganged into building a recognizably European city. At first, mortality rates were high. It was only after they plateaued and the state stopped sending convicts that waves of settlers came. Aragonese and Catalan immigration poured in and whole groups of settlers from the same towns and hamlet across inland Aragon. Many were sent on further north so that their settlements could act as a bulwark against native attacks coming in from the north. While Roman-Native relations were peaceful and mutually beneficial, the Aragonese conquistadors treated them with contempt and gained their enmity. The reputation that the Romans built was marred by the violent actions of the newcomers and so free and unsubjugated native peoples stopped associating with the ex-Byzantines and by and large, conversion to Orthodoxy and intermarriage ceased. The Orthodox lacked the resources and desire to use force to convert the indigenous, but the Zaragoza chapter of the Inquisition did not.

Aragonese and Catalan in the New World sort of blended together, at first in Buen Ayre and then across the entire region claimed by Aragon. In fact, Catalans in Europe claim certain accents of the dominion in fact as their own and not an evolved mix of Aragonese-Catalan. The granting of dominionship in 1823 guaranteed all laws maybe be written in Aragonese, but by then it was too late; most Catalan-speakers shifted to (a highly eccentric form of) Aragonese within three-four generations' time. There are however speakers of an older and less Aragonese-influenced Catalan do exist in more isolated towns on the Patagonian border.

Immigration to the country didn't pick up until the 1860's. The first biggest waves brought Germans & Italians. People from the Italian peninsula had more or less always been in Buen Ayre since its founding (and before although they spoke their own, distinct dialect of Greek), although the second, biggest wave came from the port cities of northern Italy. Italian sailors from Genoa & Venice ferried goods to and from the New World & the Old and many, if not most, decided to stay. The Italian population of RdlA is primarily an urban one, with Buen Ayre being the city with the biggest population of people of Italian ancestry in the world. Because they came from all over the north in the 1860's all the way to the 1970's, there was never linguistic unity amongst the immigrants because their dialects were just as unintelligible to each other as Aragonese was to them all. Thus, Aragones was a unifying factor to these Italians, but they made it their own, forever changing both the slang of Buen Ayre and the way that Aragones was spoken across the entire country from the vineyards of Mendoza at the end of the Andes all the way down to the Pampas. "Lunfardo" as the slang is known, comes from the city's way of pronouncing the word for "Lombard." It was only during the dawning of the 20th Century that the people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (who share the same king as Aragon) and the loosening up of control of the much poorer southern half of Italy did southern Italians overtake the numbers of immigrants from Italy's north. Still, to this day, Sicilians are moving to the metropolis of Buen Ayre to find work and to settle down, although the eras with the biggest number of immigrants came after the First and Second Great Wars.

The Germans are the next biggest group after the Aragonese/Catalans & Italians. Unlike the Italians, however, they came to farm. Whole, entire communities uprooted themselves in Germany and recreated their previous residences exactly in RdlA. Agricultural output skyrocketed with the advent of the Germans. They outnumbered the Kemrese & Catalans in the southern Pampas by far; even their urban population in Buen Ayre gave the Italians some competition. They entered all walks of life and both Catholics, Lutherans, & Calvinists proselytized to the remaining natives and expanded their missionary presence into Patagonie-et-Aruacanie much to the annoyance to its activist king.

Relatively smaller communities of English, Kemrese, Irish, & Dutch moved to the country as well. The English mostly were recruited from the industrial north to become the country's technical advisors and bump up its industrial output. The engineers and foremen responsible for building Riu's railroad network (one of the biggest in the New World) were by in large Englishmen while the labor were Costanicos, Italians, natives, & Germans. The Irish were more or less purely an urban populace although many did work on the building of the railroads. Any Irish who wanted to found settlements kept going north to Paraguay. The Irish in both countries were integral in the socialist movement. Lunfardo, the Argentine argot, has around 37 words of Gailge origin. The Kemrese were mostly rural farmers from the northeast who like the Germans completely refounded their hometowns in the New World. They were followed by the Dutch. English and Kemrese have more or less died out (although Kemrese tourists still flock to visit the Nueva Cambria region in order to see what their own homeland might have looked like 150 years ago), while Dutch has survived better tucked away in the far southwest corner near Chile and in the Tres Ramblas region on the Nea Illenician border. Rather surprisingly, following the 1901 Second Boer War, Afrikaners (Boers) fled their new homeland of the Gauteng Republic to flee English rule. They founded 3 towns inland from Bahía Blanca right next to each other and they retain their Afrikaans tongue and Calvinism rather well. Frenchmen from both the north and south of the country came in equal numbers and were instrumental in setting up Riu's luxury wine industry (before the 1850's, there were only Asia Minor varietals brought by the Costanicos in the late 1400's and vines brought by the Catalans. The French looked down as these nativized crops immensely although modern Argentine sommeliers are reexamining their roots). Malbec & Cahors are the most famous grapes that did the best in the country. Mendoza in the far north is the country's wine capital. The Jovians followed suit with the French and chose to move into the extreme northern wine regions of Salta, Tecumán, & Rioja. Contrary to their reputation on the Continent, these Jovians are known in South America for making decent and perfectly drinkable wines. It might have helped that they used Francien varietals that were bred with more nativized Catalan varieties instead of utilizing vines they themselves brought over from Jervaine. A significant amount of Norwegian and Danish mariners also ended up calling Buen Ayre and the Argentine coast home during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Although from the same country, the Norwegians and Danish had different immigration patterns. The Norwegians tended to simply jump ship in Buen Ayre's harbor and then marry local women or women from different immigrant groups, raising their children as Aragonese-speaking Catholics. The lasting contributions of the Norwegians are merely (hispanized) surnames and a boost to the country's gene pool. The Danes however tended to send for them women and children and use the Lutheran Church as a vehicle to maintain their history and traditions. Buen Ayre and the town of Tres Ramblas both have Lutheran congregations and in the latter town, it's possible that one might still here Danish spoken in the cafés and on the banks of the river by fishermen.

Perhaps rather coincidentally because of the inadvertent creation of Nea Illenicia or perhaps not, Riu de L'Argent has always been a haven for easterners. Arabs from the Levant, Armenians, Greeks from the artificial nationstate of the Kingdom of Greece, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians all poured into the dominion, the former two especially. Many Catholics of the Armenian Rite in the Ottoman Empire did not feel comfortable being pitted against their confessional counterparts by the Sublime Porte, nor did they feel like their religion & Latinized culture was valued by their Oriental Orthodox counterparts and the blossoming Dashnak party of socialists. Although many had already moved around (to Western Europe & the Levant mostly), Riu became the Catholics' number one destination. Unlike the Italians and Germans, though, Armenian immigrants came from the same area and had the same dialect and identity. Because they left before the Ottoman Civil War of 1918-1924, their identity has stayed Armenian instead of becoming "Cilician," Catholic or not (and there are plenty of Oriental Orthodox there as well). Their numbers have always been bolstered by Armenians of both denominations moving in from Levanon, Syria, the RTC, Ukraine, Russia, & Romania. Likewise, Levantines dominated the immigration figures, primarily from northern Lebanon and southern Syria. Unlike the Armenians, many were not Catholics and were instead Druze, Orthodox Christian, and both Sunni & Shia Muslim (although many Orthodox continued on to the recently independent Nea Illenicia, not all did). However, because the Druze are comfortable operating publicly as other religions whilst maintaining their religious rites at home and the Muslims reveived no funding from the Ottoman Empire for religious purposes, the Arabs tended to convert to Latin Rite Catholicism within two or three generations' time. Riu de l'Argent has had two prime minisyers of Arab ancestry: one a convert to Catholicism from Shia Islam a Maronite born in Venezola. Ashkenazi Jews from the RTC & Russian Empire first came over in 1891, and in time they would be joined by regular Russians and Veneds. By far most of the Russians were Orthodox Christians although some were the ever-elusive Spiritualists (Doukhoubors) and some were the Subbotniks, Russian converts to Judaism. The Veneds were almost entirely Catholic.

Approximately 11.82% of Riu de L'Argent has some kind of African ancestry, with nearby Paraguai having a bit less and Uruguai having a bit more. Slavery was highly banned in the Greek-refugee area of what became Nea Illenicia and at first Aragon had no need for it, but this thinking was reversed and slaves were transported directly across the Atlantic at first from the Cabo Verde islands off Africa's west coast (now England's Cape Green) and then from the Kongo region. Many thousands of Afro-Brazilians were also purchased and moved south. These Lusitanized slaves formed the plurality of the slave base in RdlA but not its majority. Portuguese and English middlemen brought captives from West Africa to the Aragonese colony and Buen Ayre became a import slavers' depot. The Aragonese bought slaves and either used them as house slaves in an urban setting in Buen Ayre or brought them inland to work as agricultural laborers and miners in such regions as Murcia (real life's Cordoba), Mendoça (Mendoza), Tucumán, Salta, & Chuchuy (Jujuy). The English also made contacts with the suffering empire of the Inca and sold them many thousands of slaves to replete their depleted labor pool after the diseases brought by the Europeans killed off 90% of all citizens in some parts of the empire. Regions in Tawantinsuyu such as Charcas have people of mostly African descent, as does Paraguai, where the Guaraní were eager to purchase slaves to harvest yerba mate for them while they waged war with the ethnic groups in the west. There are least seven towns on the Paraguaian-Argentine border and around Asumpción that are populated mostly by people of African descent. Uruguai also had a thriving agricultural economy worked by slaves until 1853 when the Corts do Uruguai banned the institution there and emancipated all slaves without compensation to masters, a highly radical act for its day. Riu followed suit in 1856 but emancipation came in waves and there was a token monetary payment to masters. All slaves were free by 1876. Buen Ayre has the largest Afro-Argentine population but hamlets of mostly black people can be found inland in the north and west.

The last waves of immigrants to come during the 20th Century besides Italians and Germans have mostly been Castilians who fled their civil war (1935-1939) and the creation of the Estado Castellano, a fascist republic that only fell in 1967. Another wave of Russians and other ethnic groups from the former Russian Empire likewise fled fascism in their own homelands and after the fall of SNORism in 1991, immigration exploded. The Orthodox Church in Riu de la Argent worked with the state to help integrate these newcomers and see to it that rhey found jobs and had adequate access to translators and immigration lawyers. The state stopped helping the Orthodox Church take care of immigrants after the 2003 junta by Esperanza Rios. Nowadays, after the winding down of Eastern European immigration, Chinese and Coreans are the two biggest immigrant groups with the larest increases by percentage entering into the country and they tend to find jobs as small business owners and managers for Chinese & Japanese companies. The two groups with slightly bigger numbers and consistent immigration rates are still people from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, including its possession of Cartago. Both Sicilians and Carthaginians/Tunisians have free entry and residence into the country through their membership in the Aragonese League with RdlA, and many take advantage of this as Buen Ayre has a higher standard of living than rural Sicily and Naples and all of Carthage. Maghrebi Arabs might overtake Levantines as the biggest Arab group in the country in the upcoming years: some government officials estimate this could happen as early as 2023. These Arabs are also much more likely to retain their religion and indeed the House of Saud financed a mega-mosque for them in the Palermo neighborhood (the largest in South America), but the spirit of the Reconquista is alive and well in Riu de L'Argent and Islam and Muslims are distrusted by society as a whole. Tunisians who marry locals almost always end up converting to Catholicism: indeed, under the militantly rightwing junta's laws on civil marriage, this is still required. Modern Sicilian and Neapolitan immigrants report zero problems as immigrants.

Hey mate, sorry for taking a bit of time with my response. Long story short I ended up having some train station snafus and ended up having to postpone my response like a day. But I’m finally in a TGV en route to Marseille, and it’s provided me with ample time to think and type.

• About mixed Aragonese/Catalan—I’m a little confused as to what you mean by this? Do you mean like a mixed Aragonese-Catalan dialect à la Portunhol, a heavily Aragonese-influenced Catalan, or a heavily influenced Aragonese? But regardless, here’s some of my thoughts on what language could end up being beought to and becoming dominant in Riu:
• I’m not sure how far south exactly the Catalan language would extend in Aragon, but I have it tentatively set up as extending all the way south to *at least* coastal Murcia province (and *possibly* inland Murcia as well.), which *seems* to have been the extent of the Catalan language circa the 15th-17th centuries before Castilianisation. I’ll probably run this by JSTOR once McGill gives me an account, though that seems to be taking a hot minute right now. Almería is a blank for me, but depending on how the demographics of Murcia end up being set up, it may or may not end up being Catalan-speaking. (IIRC like ~50% of the settlers post-Reconquista and Moor expulsion were from Murcia.) You may be asking what relevance this has to Riu de l’Argent, and the answer is pretty simple: the ports. Long story short, if Catalan extends all the way south to Almería, then pretty much every port from which settlers could depart to the New World would be Catalan-speaking. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean Catalan would end up being the de facto majority language of RdlA; more important than the ports would be to look at where Spanish settlers *here* to Argentina actually ‘came from. Again, I’ll probably have to resort to good ol’ JSTOR to get *that* little bit sorted out. (Here’s hoping my uni comes through...)
• As for (Northern) Italians being the main migratory group to RdlA—it wasn’t something I would have expected, but I’m definitely into it. JW—do you imagine the Sicilians would have gone elsewhere than RdlA? And if so, then where would you plunk them down?
• About the French—don’t forget the Basques. Lots and lots of Basques in Argentina IRL, and I’m not really sure that would be different *there*. *Here* I should note that the vast majority of French immigrants to Latin America were from Gascony—make of that information what you will. Definitely I think that any factoring in of the Basques will give the Gaullians an advantage over the Francians in immigration numbers, though. Gaullians would probably assimilate very easily and probably not leave much of a *linguistic* heritage because of the general Catalan/Occitan/Aragonese similarities (possibly even more so *there* since Christophe appears to have taken a fair amount of Narbonosc vocabulary from Spanish-Portuguese), but I should note that there’s a town in I believe Buenos Aires province where the entire population has maintained the Languedocien dialect of their forebears. Might be cool to include that.
• Scandinavian Argentines—I should note that a lot Scando-Argentines actually settled in Misiones Province, which *there* would be part of Paraguai. Anywhoooooo, there was actually a pretty large Swedish contingent in those parts of Argentina, and conversely there doesn’t seem to have been much of a Norwegian presence in the country—most Norwegians seem to have preferred Brazil. W/r/t Danish Argentines, there’s definitely a presence in Tres Arroyos though (quick note about Tres Arroyos—the Catalan word for “arroyo”/“creek” isn’t actually rambla, but instead “rierol”; IDK the Aragonese word though.) as well as in other parts of (I think) Buenos Aires Province.
• About the Castilians—*here* Spaniards were actually one of the largest contingencies of immigrants to Argentina in the 19th-early 20th centuries. Of course, I’m guessing you de-emphasised them because of the obvious difference in colonisers, and I’m inclined to partially agree with you on that; however, I should note that about 70% of the Spaniards who headed to Argentina post-independence were actually Galicians, to the point where Argentines don’t tell Spanish jokes but Galician jokes instead. IDK if that changes the calculus of includig them in Argentina or not.
• A quick note about Kemr New—best of what I can tell, the wiki page for the New Cambrian dialect seems to suggest it’s doing alright, so I wouldn’t be so sure about the Brithenig language being in trouble in Riu.
• Finally, a note about Aragonese orthography—the one I’ve been headcanoning isn’t the Ortografia de Uesca or the compromise one conceived recently in 2011, but instead the one conceived by the Sociedad de la Lingüistica Aragonesa in 2004, mainly because it draws on orthographical conventions typical of medieval Aragonese instead of phonetic or semi-Hispanicised ones as do the other two orthographies.

All in all, this is looking pretty good. Hope to see your response soon!

P.S. As for your wondering why Paraguay *there* seems to have Misiones and that one other province in IRL northern Argentina, my best guess would be that it has to do with a different outcome to the Chaco War (that is, assuming it happened, which is a real possibility.

Alright, that’s all for now. Thanks for the post! Juanmartinvelezlinares 08:26, 26 July 2018 (PDT)

Hey man, I feel that. I got stranded for a night in Toronto after my flight. I was not pleased. Yeah that’s a tough one. Linguistics is not my expertise. I should just come clean and admit that I have always, always been fascinated with Aragon, since the day I went to Kastro Hlemoutsi (Clairmont) in the Ileia region where I didn’t care about the Crusaders but I was fascinated by the so-called ‘Catalan Company’ of mercenaries who came from the Crown of Aragon. I actually don’t like that the language got shafted in real life, and I don’t want the same thing happen to IB just with Catalan instead of Castellano. I have two reasons to justify a kind of pushback from the Aragonese to best the Catalans. One, they have the backing of the state. When Aragon moves into Murcia, all the dialects of the local Mozarab Christians, Muslims, and Jews all probably going to be pretty linguistically-similar. If the state says “you speak Aragonese,” then officially on the books, they’ll speak Aragonese. It’ll probably help if they bring spare farmers and shepherds from the north down south to replenish ghost towns left behind by the fleeing Muslims and Jews. Using the example of the Belgian Congo, I really think that Aragonese can crush Catalan. Now, the people of the country speaking like a kind of Portunhol would be fascinating, but I was just thinking just a Catalan-influenced Aragonese. Anyway yeah, in the Belgian Congo, the majority of the Europeans were Flemish. They wanted to make it a second administrative language, but the government shot it down. In fact, the Congo’s few educated Africans fought they idea as well. I remember reading one of Belgian Congo’s most famous intellectuals said that he would never stand for a racist language, the language of apartheid, to compete with French, the language of the educated elite around the world. The two tongues are already so similar, I genuinely don’t think it’ll be hard for Aragonese to absorb Catalan whether it be in inland Murcia (or hey even coastal Murcia) or the New World colonies. I think, as states are inherently repressive, that the state is going to demand that people conform to the official language and culture. There’s also precedent for it in IB; when the capital got moved to Barcelona, Aragonese muscled in on Catalan and the city has a degree of diglossia.

Oh ha, ready to laugh? I vaguely recall you saying you wanted northern Italians to be the dominant first waves in RdlA, Paraguai, and Uruguai. I’m pro-southern till I die since I’m Greek, so I’m more than happy to change it. I’ll change that in a heartbeat, hell yeah. Now, do you still have that writeup you made when I asked if you draft a way to get towns of Aragonese-speakers in the Two-Sicilies. Maybe it’ll be a cycle of Aragonese pushing out southern Italians and then those southern Italians displaced move to the New World.

As for Basques and Swedes, I had no idea they were there. I can make explicit references to the lion’s share of the French being actually Basques. They have a wine-region, too, this is a quick fix. Now, I just threw in references to Scandies because everyone in Buenos Aires is white as fuck. I’m talkin’ freckles, blonde hair, green eyes, fuckin’ Northface jackets. I was shocked. Nothing in my books could prepare me for how Aryan these guys are. Plus I read about Alejandro Christophersen on Wikipedia and the idea struck me. I’ll include a reference to Languedoc, Hell, let’s say multiple pockets; one near the city, one up north in wine country. I just kind of arbitrarily chose those two. I can either remove the reference to Norwegians and write in Swedes, or we can have all three. The country has plenty of space and it has a population of like 43 million in an even smaller country (although the more populous core is still there. Taking off Patagonia only removes like 2 million people and removing the Paraguayan-border removes probably no more than a million-and-a-half). I’d prefer to have all three now that you mention it. “Rambla” is also the Aragonese word for “Arroyo.” Any placename I’ve come up with for RdlA and Paraguai have so far used Aragonese, never Catalan. Yeah you guessed it right. I figured because it was an Aragonese colony and is still an Aragonese dominion, it didn’t pull people from Portugal or Castile as much. Now, that being said, in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Castilians moved to Brazil, so that isn’t necessarily a given. It’s a successful place. It’s a rich land with many natural resources, a breadbasket of the continent, and until 2003, it took care of its own. I’d be totally fine having a constant stream of Castilians since the 19th Century, with refugees coming by the boatload from Galicia after 1937. I can make the next draft be more specific, or if you want to write it in, that’s fine too. Ah jeez, duly noted. I don’t agree with it because I feel like it’s super easy to get caught up and join the next language over in your linguistic-family, but I’m also a diehard fan of linguistic diversity so I’m happy all the same, even though Latin America is damn good at assimilating minorities. I agree with your idea for orthography. Can you put that on our wiki page? Does it still use a lot of CH’s because Juan is Chuan for example in the system I’ve been using. I still follow the “Chunta Aragonesista” on facebook, ha. I have an even bigger write up for immigration to Paraguai, but it’s not done. Do you want to see it so far? I haven’t even touched Uruguai yet, do you want to take them over? Misterxeight 18:33, 26 July 2018 (PDT)

Honestly I'm just as weirded out by mega-Paraguay as you are because its borders in IB don't really match its pre-1860's borders. I'm just gonna roll with it. South America's page mentioned it's a kingdom and has 24 million people. Everyone accepted it was republic so we're fine there and I scaled the population back to double its real life population, so 13,450,616. I wanted to see a Paraguai develop without the specter of war, so the reasoning I came up with on why it owns the important area of Misiones is just that the Aragonese were too afraid of making B.A. (not BsAs) vulnerable and exposed to Inca or rogue native attacks, so they contract out their Guarani allies to control the whole north of their colony as a useful buffer, Misiones included. So I figured out kind of that Paraguay has Corumbá, half of Mato Grosso do Sul, & all of the Pantanal region, but it's missing even the center of the western part of its Chaco. Granted that's not useful land at all, but it's still weird that it got so much northern and eastern territory and still lost some out west. I also can't figure out if its Brazilian territories are worth anything or of its hundreds or even thousands of kilometers of absolutely useless swamp. Can you figure that out? I'm at a loss. Misterxeight 19:04, 26 July 2018 (PDT)

Hey mate, no worries, I'm only just gonna be going into college. I'm no expert with linguistics either, at least not yet. (It all depends on my eventual major though...)

Hmmm. My intention with Aragonese vs. Catalan wasn't really that either language would get short-staffed by the other, but rather a sort of equality between the two, with Catalonia and High Aragon being the primary domains of their respective languages, with Valencia and Murcia speaking different proportions of each. (And the Balears... I guess being monolingually Catalan.) However, I as of yet haven't managed to nail down the exact borders of the two languages beyond "Aragonese extends south to *at least* the real-life S, and Catalan likely extends down to the Murcian coast". I actually added in the thing about Aragonese being spoken in Barcelona because I felt bad not giving it more territory, especially since I had largely sketched out the range of Catalan as being more or less being the same as real life--which included the Franja region in High Aragon. I'll admit I'm not quite so sure about that decision nowadays, but for now I'm sticking with it until I can get some pro opinions on it. For what it's worth, the Muslims clung pretty damn steadfastly to Andalusi Arabic, and Mozarabic was dead by the 13th century, though granted that's also around the same time Aragon and Castile moved into Murcia. So I'd be tempted to default to whatever the native language of the Christian settlers would have been. Going off any potential substrates in Murcian Spanish unfortunately doesn't help since Aragonese and Catalan share several similarities that mean they could both account for traits in the aforementioned Murcian dialect. Right now, my best shot is to turn to historiographers, and it'll take a bit of JSTOR mining to get clarity on that front. Not to mention the "fun part"--subsequently figuring out which regions of the Crown of Aragon, if any, provided the largest amount of settlers to IRL Argentina. (I may quite possibly end up being the first college student to willingly put myself through JSTOR hell.) However, I do have an idea for how to get Aragonese in regardless of whichever ends up being the principal language. Essentially, have the upper and more urbane classes speak Aragonese, while Catalan is more the language of the common citizen, somewhat similar to what used to be (and to some extent still is) the situation between English and French in *here*'s Québec.

Lol, what I had in mind with the Italian/Sicilian community in RdlA was essentially more or less the IRL situation, where the divide is roughly half-Northern/half-Southern (*there* would be half-Italian/half-Sicilian). Essentially, both communities are super prominent and give the Bons Aires/Buen Ayre region yummy food like pizzas, milanesas, and at least twelve different kinds of gelato. In Uruguai, I'd imagine things would be a *bit* more (though not hugely) skewed towards the (Northern) Italians. I think that's a pretty good middle ground, what about you?

Yeah, I say go for it with the Basques! Glad you agree on that. Ditto with the Galicians (though I do think we need to make sure we are Very Specific about them being Galicians, not Castilians. Otherwise it might come off a little assimilation-y).

As for the Scandinavians... Holy crap, is BA *really* that white? I always thought that was an exaggeration. I had no idea it was actually true. But anyway. Yeah, I don't have any problem with all three groups being in the country. I would like Swedes to be more dominant than the other groups though.

Lol, about Brithenig not dying out... ...In all fairness, it's not super close to Aragonese or Catalan, so I suppose it has a fair chance at life. For what it's worth, the dialect mentioned on the Kemr New page has apparently undergone quite a bit of Aragonese/Catalan influence.

Yeah, sure, I'll put it up on the page. The orthography by the SLA doesn't actually use as many "CH" digraphs, since it's an etymological orthography, so in a lot of cases the [tʃ] phoneme is written as "j" or "g". The main reasons I picked it were a.) it's based on historical High Aragonese orthographic trends and b.) IB tends rather... archaic in language matters, as I'm sure you know by now from the Potato Shakesperean that seems to be IB English, so it fit right in. But yeah. Basically "Chuan" would be spelled as "Juan", and "Chunta Aragonesista" would be "Junta Aragonesista", while still retaining the voiceless affricate pronunciation. (Gotta love etymological orthography.) Plus several words with etymological cedilla.

Lol, mega-Paraguay isn't *super* weird to me, since again on closer inspection most of the regions included have been claimed by *here*'s Paraguay at some point or another. I should note that, best of what I can tell, *there*'s Paraguai does in fact include the Chaco, and also actually doesn't seem to include that much of Mato Grosso do Sul. According to this map of the LUA overlaid with the IRL Brazilian states, only like two little prongs of southern Mato Grosso Do Sul actually belong to Paraguai. If anything, they actually seem to have more of (I think)Rio Grande do Sul than they do IRL Mato Grosso. But I could be wrong. I think the territory in RG do Sul that it got is pretty decent farmland, whereas the Chaco is... well, the Chaco, and they gain some extra swampland from Brazil but not massive amounts. Juanmartinvelezlinares 13:46, 30 July 2018 (PDT)

Hey, congratulations, man. I know the entire world is asking you “oh you must be excited,” and it might not seem like it, but it is. Best of luck this coming school year. McGill was my own first choice, but my parents couldn’t bear to have me away in a different country, so I went to D.C. and hated every minute of it. I hope you have a great time outside of school exploring Montreal. I hope the apartment hunting is going well! Well that’s good news. All I ask for is that it’s a vibrant and healthy language in IB, which it already is. So let’s figure if Aragon proper has 15-30 million people (about 15 in real life just going off of a quick, cursory glance of the 4 autonomous regions’ Wikipedia pages) and mostly everyone is bilingual or monolingual in it, ditto for Riu which has 43 million, a couple million L2 speakers in Paraguay out of the 13 million, same for Two Sicilies (it has to be the main second language taught in school) out of their 31 or so million (and another 8-9 million in Carthage), a couple low thousand speakers each in Greece and Turkey, and then Uruguai and people who learn it in Patagonia after Mapuche and French, that brings us maybe close to Italian’s real life 90 million speakers. That’s definitely a success to me. I had no idea that you added that, that’s hilarious. I’m a fan regardless, as I am of the idea that Aragonese takes away speakers from the elite class and the intelligentsia. I bet Catalan nationalists will play that up in their linguistic and cultural renaissance, whenever that may be. Yeah, I’m fine with that as well. I was kind of hinting at it in the writeup (whose second draft’ll be coming soon. As I sit here and write to you know, I’m expecting a call from a friend and my sunglasses just got run over on the road because I put them on the hood of a car and they went flying off onto some train tracks) but I might need to tweak it to be more specific. The way I see it, because the Two Sicilies has been tied to Aragon for awhile and we’re explicitly making it known that Aragon did not play by real life Castile’s rules for who could and could not immigrate to the New World, that Due-Sicilians would be the base of all Italians in the colony and there since its foundation. That would be a steady trickle for the first two centuries. It’s only when the economic possibilities of the colony become apparent and autonomy gives the place an appeal to outsiders that northern Italians flock there in the millions, absolutely dwarfing the long-assimilated southern Italians. Perhaps, towards the end of the 1800’s, the southerners fight back, and until the ‘20’s, both groups are neck and neck. Just before GWII, southerners outpace northerners which is the pattern to this very day. Simply put, layered Italo-Aragonese culture is what I’m proposing here, with southerners, northerners, southerners, northerners, and finally southerners from past to present. Then, in the 2000’s and 2010’s, the final wave of “Sicilians” are actually Tunisian Arabs from if not Carthage then Sicily-proper, who the long Argentinized Levantines distrust for being the wrong kind of Arab and Sunni.

Maybe, as a foil, we keep Uruguai more homogenous; just natives, just Aragonese, just Africans, and just northern Italians. They might just be Italo-Aragonese-mestizo and mulatto (I use this in the non-offensive, Spanish meaning, and emphatically not in the offensive, English meaning) cattlemen until the 1920’s when they get weirdos like the Doukhoubors or Ashkenazi Jews move in. Comparing the hyper-diverse, heterogenous Riu de L’Argent to the more homogenous and cohesive Uruguai could be a fun exercise. Galicia as a page has like no information on it. Do you have anything in your headcanon that you’d like me to weave in to the plight of the Galicians and how they make Buen Ayre and all of Riu home? What about that more Celtic-y Romance dialect you had an idea of? We also know that they’re more leftists, so they might get to work with the Irish and northern Italians to join socialist groups in the city. Galego words should probably get into cocoliche, which uh speaking of, do you have a name for? It is indeed. I myself was shocked. I have a friend who went there last winter and he was a tad offended by its extreme whiteness because his wife is half-English and half-Nigerian. I blended in and speak Spanish so I had zero problems, but he said they got stares and everyone assumed they were Brazilian because he’s big and blonde and she’s black. There were some black people, but everyone I saw was mixed. Some native peoples; I saw a few older women in like full, traditional Bolivian garb. I’ve only ever seen the red sweaters and bowler hats like that in movies and on TV, that was fun for me. My true hobby beyond all this is film photography, but in new countries like this I don’t take pictures of people on the street. I never know how passersby are going to react. Well hey, that’s good. There are two places I’m convinced are the best at assimilating immigrants and minorities: that’s China and it’s Latin America. I did some reading while I was there on the Welsh in Patagonia (Fascismbook suggested this article while I was there: https://adventure.com/welsh-patagonia-argentina/), and it seems like it’s dying out there. I guess the Aragonosphere is not as good as the real life Castellanosphere as getting new groups to cough up their languages. I’ve been using the cedilla for words in Aragonese (like I changed Mendoza to Mendoça) so I’m glad that’s sticking around. Yeah, Paraguai is my new headache. There might be a contradiction between the map you linked, and the one of South America proper. I used this map (https://www.deviantart.com/upvoteanthology/art/Ill-Bethisad-552857836), to plot the country’s borders over a real-life world map. Here are the results (http://ib.frath.net/w/File:Where%27sParaguay.png). A lot more Mato Grosso and M.G. do Sul. Also, more worryingly enough, Argentina lost half its wine country if not more to the Incas. I thought that it still went as far south as Jujuy because the borders look the same, but clearly it’s not. Is that set-in stone forever? Can we get Riu Dee some land back? Regarding P-guay, I did some digging and because it controls a lot of Bolivia, it’s close to owning all the natural gas of Bolivia, but it’s off. I think what it owns there is humid cattle-land, which while not bringing in the gas money, is not so bad. Maybe that’s where I can tack the Irish Quakers and Mennonites; they don’t need to be the ones to make the Chaco bloom. I do wonder if there’s a way to bring all the excess water and wetness from its eastern border to its western. Could they engineer some Gaddafi-level pipeline that drains the swamps on the Parana-border to the Chaco? Is that possible? Science was never my strong suit.

Immigrant Draft Zone

Afro-Argentines

Around 11.82% of the population have at least 1 African ancestor.

Luso-Argentines

Riu de L'Argent has both communities from Portugal-proper who never lived in the colony of Brazil or any of its four successor states as well as people hailing from said successor states, although the latter group mostly comes from neighboring Parana.

Roma: The Exiles

The Roma have a very bittersweet history in the Iberian peninsula. The came by foot from Gaulhe in the 1400's and were originally celebrated by the locals since the day they crossed the Pyrenees as they came bearing goods for sale from all across Europe, even from as far east as Constantinople. Although they amassed in Castile's Andalucia, many did reside within Valencia and Murcia, much to the relief of the locals there as they helped secure the last Muslim holdouts on behalf of the crown and replace the exiled Muslims and Jews who left behind entire towns empty and sectors of the economy greatly diminished (although Murcia had already been conquered by Aragon then, there were still lawless hamlets in the mountains that did not recognize the authority of the Christian newcomers). However, things began to change in the 1700's when the Roma lost access to their trading networks and the specter of Islam was not but a scant memory in the Aragonese mindset. Whereas the Castilians tended to block their "gitanos" from leaving for the New World, the Portuguese and the Aragonese both agreed that they could prove useful, and what better place where they could prove their worth than inland Brazil for the former or the windswept Pampas for the latter. Seeing as the Greek experiment was a success, in 1749 as many of the Roma of Murcia, Valencia, Zaragoza, Barcelona, & the Andorran-border as the state could nab were rounded up, thrown into carts, and placed on boats for the sole Aragonese colony in the New World. They were put to work building up the city of Buen Ayre. While they weren't convicts, they were monitored strictly and held to much the same rules. Their mixed language, Caló, laid the foundations for the slang dialect of Buen Ayre, a rich mixed language several centuries in the making and the way that the destitute and desperate could truly express themselves. The exile of the Roma had the opposite effect on the colonials; initially, instead of being assimilated into Aragonese society in the new world, they absorbed male convicts by inducting them into their tribes on the marriage of their women (for the first few decades, only male convicts were sent). When female convicts and eventually non-convict settlers were brought in, intermarriage between urban poor and the Roma stopped and an internal policy of strict endogamy began with one notable exception—the gauchos.

The Roma have laid the foundations for the gaucho people of the Pampas. These nomadic cattlemen on horseback formed their own culture and societies on the lonely pampas once the crown began to let Europeans leave the vicinity of Buen Ayre and the economic potential for cattle rearing to the west of the Greek colony was realized. The Greeks never became nomadic cowherds for reasons unknown (perhaps because they had no tradition of it back in Anatolia, Thrace, or southern Italy). They tended to rear just pigs, chickens, goats, and sheep as they did back home, although they added horse, donkeys, & mules to the mix (the Anatolians missed their camels deeply). The Greeks were allies to these new class of people, and engaged in mutually beneficial economic relations with them, but they never joined them. The Gauchos have four components: the Aragonese, the natives, freed or escaped African slaves coming from northeast of the Pampas, and the Roma. The Roma were nomads through and through since they left India in an unknown century. The gauchos speak a form of Aragonese that's been reclassified as its own language. It is too mixed with Portuguese and peppered with words of African origin, but most of all, it evolved from a mixed Roma-Aragonese (known as Caló) with Arabic, and not from "pure Aragonese" (if such a thing ever existed). The nomadic movement of cows was where the Roma really utilized their skillset. While many stayed behind in Buen Ayre, the majority moved south to the pampas, intermingling with the Aragonese and natives and accepting crypto-Arabs, Africans, & Portuguese into their ranks. The last wave of purely Aragonese Roma only ends the year the Napoleonic Wars started and Aragon sided with France and was too busy to exile its unwanted to the New World. During the late 1800's and early 1900's, Roma from Eastern Europe (Veneda, Ukraine, Russia, & Crimea) would move to Argentina along with their neighbors from these lands. They were shocked to find people still speaking their language in the dark streets and back-alleys of Buen Ayre, but they sure were glad. The newcomers intermingled with the Aragonified old-timers, adding words of other Romance and Slavic origin to their secret language. These Gitanos stayed purely in the city and did not join the Gauchos in the Pampas; by then, the latter most likely had forgotten all about their Roma origins. The pairing of these two Roma groups were most likely the first mixed Orthodox-Catholic marriages in Riu de L'Argent that didn't end with one spouse converting to the other's religion. Not including the Gauchos, officially 320,000 people claim Roma ancestry in Riu de L'Argent, but anthropologists estimate that if people with at least one Roma ancestry are counted going back to 1749, that number could be as high as 3,500,000-5,000,000.

Scandinavians

Around 350,000 Argentines claim descent from ancestors hailing from the Scandinavian Realm. By far, the lion's share hail from Sweden, the largest constituent in the federation. Around 250,000 people are of Swedish ancestry, almost entirely in the Corrientes province and the autonomous city of Buen Ayre. Around 82,500 people claim Danish descent, 14,500 claim Norwegian, and 1,500 people are of Finnish descent. The first record of Swedes in the country dates from 1763, where they were registered as new converts to Catholicism (most likely forced) in the region of Murcia by the Jesuit paranational force operating within the colony. Carolus Linnaeus most likely sent them as botanists and zoologists to gather the unique specimens of the southern cone. From then on, a small trickle of individuals came as mariners and either stayed or had children with local women and then left (the exact same story as with the country's first Norwegian transients). The next wave came in the mid-19th Century, when Swedes came to help build the country's burgeoning railroad system. The government in Buen Ayre of this era took modernization very seriously and made a conceited effort to reform the country's colonial way of life and its stagnant economy. To this end, the railroad was the greatest way to do it in the minds of the politicians. Although the engineers and overseers almost entirely came from the Federated Kingdoms (England and Kemr) and the labor was either local or Genoese, Swedes came to fill roles in all the ranks, from the most innovative engineers to the humblest, most hardworking of laborers. They brought some women in the following years, but most married locals, Italians, or Britons. It was not until the dawning of the 20th Century that Swedes came as non-urban settlers who founded their own settlements. In 1890, two thousand Swedes left Stockholm and Sundsvall to set up a colony in Paraná where they could get away from the poverty and pollution of the southern Swedish cities and start a new life. Life was tough, and it was difficult to tame the jungle and start a new settlement from scratch. In 1909, 1910, and 1911, new waves of Swedes came to replenish the three villages, numbering 1,400, 700, and 2,300 respectively. The first Swedes did receive help from the government of Paraná, but it was paltry compared to the help of fellow colonists from nearby German settlements (fellow Lutherans) and the native Guarani and Brazilians. The first Swedes' children even intermarried with all three groups, but mostly the German Lutherans. In 1914, the Swedes repaid the help they received from the locals and the Germans by clearing the brush and the jungle to create a primitive network of roads to connect all colonies to Curityba, the regional capital. Once again, they received help in this monumental endeavor from everyone nearby, including the government who paid low wages for the effort. By 1923, however, the community felt undervalued by the government, so half the Swedes decided to move across the border into Riu de L'Argent, which was generously offering more government help and more free land. This tore the Swedish community in two, but the benefits the Argentines were offering to settle in nearby Corrientes province were too much to pass up. They crossed the border and declared their intent to settle in the country to the provincial governor. In Paraná, the Swedes worked on yerba mate plantations, but Corrientes was not within the range of the crop, so they switched not to the cash crops of the province, like tobacco or cotton, but to lumber. The work was grueling, and those newcomers quickly switched out to farming less backbreaking work like citrus harvesting or sustenance farming when they could, but many of the northerners who came in 1909-1911 were miners, hunters, and lumberjacks, so they knew the work well. The pines of Corrientes vaguely reminded them of the pines of their homeland, and the eucalyptus trees were fragrant and fetched a high price for its use in making paper. The sport of tapir hunting learned from the Guarani in Paraná replaced the moose hunts of their homeland. To this day, only 1,500 people live there, with many of the town's best and brightest moving to Buen Ayre, or even to the larger Swedish settlements nearby. What is remarkable about the Corrientes Swedes is that they were so successful, people claiming descent from Swedish railroad workers and even most of the surviving people born in Sweden who worked on the railroads moved to the province to join their kin. This boost of more nativized citizens helped their colonies thrive even more than they already were. The people were surprised in 1924 to find the town of Colônia Finlandesa, a small town made up of intellectuals turned farmers, surviving against all odds. They zealously guard the Finnish language, although the villagers speak their own, unique dialect peppered with words from Guarani, Aragonese, and Portuguese. Their Lutheran church in town severed ties with all Lutherans in the region after the Holy Roman Episcopal Lutheran Ordinariate of Uniates picked up steam in the region with the help of the Holy See and the Argentine and Paranese governments in the 1940's and 1950's. Only recently has it started accepting aid from the Church of Finland and the newest pastor studied at the Lutheran seminary in São Paulo when his predecessors were all self-taught within the settlement. Argentines describe Colônia Finlandesa as a "utopia gone sour." The Danes came mostly as mariners like the Swedes, although they formed a cohesive unit and called for their families relatively early on. They sought out a quieter place where they could recreate the Denmark that they left behind. A river town known as Tres Ramblas was selected. The former sailors became fishermen and plied the waters of the Salado, on the border with the Greeks known as Costanicos. The Norwegians, the second smallest Scandinavian group after the Finns, did not form a cohesive unit in the new country and only exist as Aragonified surnames. There is a neighborhood in Buen Ayre founded by Norwegians, but the language has died out and upwardly mobile residents scattered as soon as they could afford to move out to more affluent neighborhoods and many did not bother to preserve the culture. Even the small kirk constructed by the first denizens of Vico [Barrio] Noruega is now a Catholic church, having been bought by the archdiocese in 2004 after it had only been preserved by the old women of the neighborhood for the past 30 years when Norway stopped paying for a missionary priest to celebrate services there. The archdiocese promised to keep the rustic, Nordic character of the exterior and interior and invited the locals to attend liturgy there. The HREL-schism that rocked all Scandinavian communities has roughly divided all groups. Colônia Finlandesa and Tres Ramblas stayed firm to Lutheranism, most of Buen Ayre switched over to Catholicism, the Swedes in the rest of the country had assimilated into regular Latin Rite Catholicism of the Isidorian variety, and the Swedes of Corrientes were cut in twain 45%-55% HREL to Lutheran. Esperanza Rios' many charitable organizations have put a great deal of money into supporting the HREL in Riu de L'Argent since 2003, funding youth groups, refurbishing churches, translating the liturgy and other services of the Ordinariate into Aragonese, and doling out food and clothing to poor Scandinavians in need. While conversions have amped up in the past years, most conversions are probably more out of the fear (the stick) than these charitable services (the carrot). It is hard for sociologists to say nowadays what motivates contemporary Scando-Argentines' conversions. Either way, it has had little to no effect on their assimilation, as by the 21st Century many are bilingual in Aragonese and their mother tongue and a decent amount of the newest generations are Aragonese-monolinguals. The dialects of Swedish, Danish, and Finnish all diverged from the speakers back home, retaining perhaps 19th Century grammar, but adopting a great deal of new words for new, 21st Century concepts wholesale from Aragonese. Many farming and nature terms come from Guarani. A few words for all of them come from Portuguese, a testament to the communities' start in nearby Paraná.

Enter the Galegos

There are 768,000 people in Riu de L'Argent who claim some kind of Galician ancestry, of which 471,000 can demonstrate some knowledge of the language (albeit highly influenced by Aragonese), a little over 1% of the population out of about 1,711,000 people in total who claim ancestry from any part of Castile or Leon. Castilians, although busy with colonizing the entirety of the Americas from the northern coast of Montrei to the island of Chiloe in what is now southern Chile, Riu de L'Argent was an attractive place to move because it was so safe and far removed from the sectarian wars of Europe and the native insurrections of Tawantinsuyu or Mejico. Although officially they were disbarred from moving to lands owned by the Crown of Aragon, the colonial authorities readily accepted Castilians and they even outpaced Portuguese until about 1711 as the next biggest group to move to the colony. Initially, they came from all parts, although usually they hailed from the southern region of Andalucia. It is possible that some of those people were of converted-Muslim stock, known as the "Cristianos Nuebos" in Aragonese and the "Cristianos Nôvos" in Castilian. By leaving Castile, they could conceal their past and not be prejudiced against. The English's port of Gibraltar was the point of embarkation for these Andalucians, whereas the Galicians tended to leave directly from Galicia from ports like A Coruña. After the Napoleonic Wars, Castilian immigration tapered off until the mid to late 19th Century when it started up again. In the 1600's and 1700's, immigration from Castile might have been 60% Andalusian, 20% Galician, and 20% mixed, now the ratios had reversed, with the second wave being 60% Galician and 40% assorted. These laborers came to work along the railroads primarily, so they settled either in tenement settlements along the Patagonian border, or joined the nomadic Gauchos and became cattlemen, supplying prime beef to Buen Ayre's and Montevideo's slaughterhouses and docks for export. Some Castilians joined the Portuguese laborers harvesting tobacco in Corrientes, but not enough to leave a mark. They usually ended up assimilating to the greater Aragonese culture. It was the third wave, the wave of the second quarter of the 20th Century, that left the longest lasting Castilian (Galician) vestiges in the country. Around 213,000 people fled the Castilian Civil War for Riu de L'Argent, with many more fleeing to France and lesser numbers going to Chile, Portugal, Cuba, Porto Rico, Araucania and Patagonia, and Mejico. Almost all refugees from the civil war were Galicians, certainly the ones in Riu de L'Argent were, so much so that Argentines now refer to all Castilian immigrants as "Galegos" and use "Galician" & "Castilian" interchangeably, even when speaking about the contemporary people of the Kingdom of Leon and Castile. It was simply easiest for the Castilian-Leonese on the western seacoast near Portugal to get out when the fascist forces pushed into the Republic from the south by way of North Africa. Argentina was already formulating its socialist history, which made it a bit of a black sheep on the continent, and this is precisely what attracted the fleeing peoples of Castile to Buen Ayre when the Republic of Castile seemed lost and the fascists were set to topple the government and take over, which they did in 1939 once the Castilian State was declared by infamous dictator Roberto Tascon. The Aragonese and Castilians did not get along well with each traditionally in their old homelands, but now, in the 20th Century and thousands of kilometers from home, past rivalries and ethnic differences did not mean much. The Galicians eventually became associated with socialism by the locals, just as the Irish did. The Galicians also felt kinship toward the more assimilated Irish as fellow leftists, and the Galicians joined the civic organizations set up by the Irish (with plenty of Italian, German, and Aragonese help) to advance the cause of socialism in the country. In time, the Galicians (and there were other refugees from other parts of Castile, this wave just happened to be 80%-90% Galician) melded into the greater Argentine society. Melding or not, the language is kept alive by civic clubs set up in the 1940's and 1950's. Now, to speak Galician is an act of defiance against the rightist government of Esperanza Rios.

Dominion vs Autonomous

the 2 dates are not mutually exclusive and simply represent different stage of political evolution. To give a comparison *here*, new south wales and the others australian settlement began as simple colonies ruled by an apointed governor. In time, they were given a certain level of autonomy as provinces by being granted elected parliament who could legislate on a number of matters but still had to obey the UK on everything else. Finally, when federation occurred, the former provinces, as a whole, achieved the status of Dominion with ever more autonomy until in 1931 the dominions were finally considered to be sovereign countries. The fact that "Dominion" *here* was only used for the last stage doesn't mean it is not an adequate translation of the aragonese term used for the lands autonomous from aragon proper but united by a shared monarch. It was even the same term used to designate New England at a time where it had nowhere the level of sovereignty enjoyed by modern dominions before 1931.

The date of 1876 on this page is also mentioned on the page of Aragon as being when *full* autonomy was granted so that the earlier date represents rather when, as mentioned in the history section, some sort of elected local government was set up with what I assumed to be power over internal affairs. Perhaps if you think the wording is misleading, we could change it to something like "Dominionhood: 1823 (limited autonomy), 1876 (full autonomy granted)"