For a long time, and in the absence of a language policy defined in the Principality, the toponymic posters that we find ourselves on the road usually present corrections, additions that do not come from the press or factory, but from a paint can and a later brush. Numerous have already been the demands for the local toponymy to be labeled in Asturian, but from the administration. In the absence of this public initiative, quite common today in other autonomous communities, in Asturias the names are changed in secret, with erasures and graffiti.
Despite this secrecy, linguistic sensitivity of the average Spaniard, at least as regards the name of his town or the places he knows, he tends to lean towards the Asturian language.
In the council of Sariego we can approach this reality of nominating in Asturian. The informative posters distributed throughout the municipality clarify the meaning and history of the different localities of Saragossa. Is about the Route of Toponymy, which in the end is a cultural and healthy exercise, because we rarely have the chance to have someone explain to us where certain proper names come from.
The person in charge of elaborating the texts was the local historian Florencio Friera, that has compiled in recent years the linguistic map of the entire council. Of about 1,800 living place names that he found in «Sarigu», the route offers a brief explanation about twenty-eight referred names, to inhabited places, including all the districts of the council:
Canal, for example, its Latin origin -CANALS- alludes to the location of this village, located next to one of the streams of the La Llomba mountain range, at a height of four hundred meters. Among the legends originated in Canal it is necessary to mention the one that says that a neighbor of this place was married, some years ago, with one of the xanes that lived in a cave of La Llomba. They had a child. When he was interested in his mother's past, the xana disappeared forever.
Text: © Ramón Molleda for asturias.com
