[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Galaico

It depends on what a meta-ethnicity means to you.

So far nothing. I have no feeling of meta-ethnicity, so I am enquiring about other people's opinions, as to how they define or feel their meta-ethnic belonging.

Originally Posted by Galaico

If it’s just about languages, we could perfectly take away the word “ethnicity” from meta-ethnicity and leave as meta-linguistic group.

That's entirely correct.

Originally Posted by Galaico

For example, I am a Romance speaker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I feel any kind of ethnic closeness to any other Romance speaker, let’s say a Romanian. On the other hand, I can perfectly feel an ethnic closeness with a Basque, who’s not a Romance speaker (not even Indo-European speaker), but it is beyond doubt our ethnic kinship.

When I think of meta-ethnicity I think about the European peoples in general, whom all have a clear genetic and historical relation with each other. When I specifically think about my ethnicity, I think about a group of hunters and gatherers who crossed the Pyrenees and settled in Iberia in Upper Paleolithic times, exterminating the last Neanderthals, and painting the caves of Altamira. I can think about a small group of Neolithic farmers teaching their knowledge to those hunters and getting assimilated into the greater Iberian ethnicity. Many more things come to my mind, war against Rome, Latin assimilation, Germanic invasions, Reconquista, etc.

Does this mean that your meta-ethnicity is simply European? Or Iberian/Hispanic? In the former case you would feel a meta-ethnic kinship with a Romanian, not because he is a Romance-speaker like you, but because he is of European extraction as well.

Originally Posted by Galaico

However, a linguistic group isn’t going to determine my ethnic feeling or awareness. That I speak a Romance language is just an “accident” in the ethnic evolution of part of my people.

However, there must have been a pretty large group of colons from Italy, thanks to whom the whole Iberia (with the exception of the Vascongadas and one part of Navarre) today speaks Romance idioms. They must have contributed to the Iberian ethnogenesis.

Or, maybe, the Latin language prevailed in the end, not because of the large number of Italic colons, but simply because it was a lingua franca, in which most of the local ethnicities could communicate with each other, on condition that the pre-Roman Iberia was very linguistically diversified, with many mutually incomprehensible idioms (but we cannot be sure about that because little is known about those languages).

I am speaking here not only about Hispania, but about the possible patterns of the spread of the Latin language everywhere, where it took firm roots.