The Moorish language

In the beginning, the Iberian languages were all pretty close together. They probably had distinct dialectal names for each other, but it wasn't that hard for any one person to write anyone else (assuming they could write in the vernacular at all, that is, although interestingly Rodrigo Diaz was literate in Latin.)

But the world doesn't stay at the beginning forever, and as time progresses and things evolve (for instance, Aragon becoming much more important much earlier), those languages start to speciate and distinguish themselves fairly quickly - especially between the dialects spoken in al-Andalus and ash-Shamal.

Now that it's been dead 700 years IRL, we call the southern dialect continuum Mozarabic. This is a nice, distinctive term to describe what wasn't a terribly distinct dialect family at the time - but it has one problem: "Mozarabic" identifies itself not as "Mozarabic" but latino/us, vernacular Latin. (For that matter, most Romance languages of the period did that as well.)

And because Mozarabic survives past the Middle Ages, it continues to evolve, becoming one of the two dominant Ibero-Romance languages of Andalusada - known as "Moorish." Unless it's "Sevillan."

Nomenclature: Moorish or Sevillan?

For most of history, the Romance language spoken in al-Andalus had no official name. Once it established a written standard, it was usually identified as Ixbili/sevillano "Sevillan" to distinguish it from, say, Aragonese or Catalan. It was also identified as moro "Moorish," but never consistently ("Moorish" was also used to describe Arabic generally.)

What it's called today is determined mostly by politics:

• Sevillan is generally used in the G.P. of Mexico and the Crown of All Spains. The former has defined itself as being aggressively non-Moorish, and usually identifies what they speak as "the Spanish of Seville," asserting its connections with continental Christendom. The Spanish Crown can't possibly be assertively non-Moorish, but they call it "Sevillan" in an effort to associate it as part of a united Spain in a vain effort to keep Mahdism in check.
• "Sevillan" is also used to describe the Moorish register spoken by the Andalusian khassa. It's rather formal, less because that's how the khassa historically spoke it themselves (they're overwhelmingly Muslim, and Arabic was the language of court and culture) than because that's how it was spoken to them by the servants.
• Moorish, by contrast, is the favored term in the UCNA and Gran Peru. In both cases, it's because it's the language associated with what the New World social hierarchies identified as "Moors," although it's a bit more complicated than that.
• Even though the grammar and orthography follows the standards set by Mexico, Axamalla calls it "Moorish" too, mostly to stand apart from their southern neighbors more.
• Because there is a pronounced dialect spectrum across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Crown of All Spains usually calls African dialects "Moorish," to distinguish them from the (less Arabized, usually much more intelligible) "Sevillan" on the mainland.

Varieties of the Moorish language

Historically, the Sevillan language wasn't terribly standardized: while it was the language of the market and low culture, the language of high culture was Arabic instead. As a result, modern Moorish is pluricentric, recognizing three very distinct standard forms.

The first of these forms is Literary Sevillan, based on the written language of Seville. This is the official register of Moorish in Spain.

• Oddly, it's also the standard for both written and spoken Moorish in Gran Peru, where most of the historic Moorish population was illiterate anyways. (Peruvian Moorish is, in turn, the written standard for Moorish dialects used in the southern Andes and the CRC.)

Mexican Sevillan, based on the dialect of Medina Mexico. This is the official language of Mexico (and, by extension, Axamalla), and is widely spoken in the southern UCNA too. More than any other standard, Mexican Sevillan is shaped by political policy:

• "Patrician" vocabulary has been replaced with more European equivalents. Most of Mexican Sevillan's administrative vocabulary is neologistic; there are no alcaldes in Mexico, for instance.
• "Plebeian" vocabulary, meanwhile, draws more extensively from the aboriginal languages of precolonial Mexico.

Andalusian Moorish, the most radically distinct. Andalusian Moorish is actually a koiné that evolved between several distinct regional dialects of New World Moorish, and was formally standardized; the koiné has continued to evolve independently, despite the language academy's continued efforts to conform it to Literary Sevillan.

• Of the three linguistic standards, Andalusian Moorish is the one most reflective of the colonial vernacular. It's more Mexican than Mexican itself, and even the G.P. acknowledges that.

Historically, Moorish was written in both Arabic and Latin scripts. As of 1930, use of the Arabic script has been thoroughly abandoned.