Galician

   

Galician (Galego) is a language variety of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia (in the Galician language, Galicia or Galiza), an autonomous community in northwestern Spain.

General Info

Galician is spoken by more than 3 million people: it is spoken by most of the people in Galicia as well as among the many Galician immigrants in the rest of Spain (Madrid, Biscay), Iberoamerica (Buenos Aires, Managua, Montevideo, San Jose, Costa Rica) and Europe.

Due to its historical situation as a non-official language, for some authors the situation of language domination in Galicia could be called "diglossia", with Galician in the lower part of the continuum and Spanish language at the top, while for others the conditions for diglossia established by Ferguson are not met.

Commonality with Portuguese

Historically, the Portuguese language originated in Galicia (the Roman Gallaecia) and branched out in the 14th century after the Reconquista brought it southwards. Modern Galician is seen by some linguists as a dialect of Portuguese. The Encyclopædia Britannica pronounces it a Portuguese dialect spoken in northwestern Spain, one often incorrectly considered a dialect of Spanish.

The Instituto da Lingua Galega claims that Galego is an independent Romance language that belongs to the group of Ibero-Romantic Languages. According to the Associaçom Galega da Língua, it has never ceased to be a part of the Portuguese language, just like the Brazilian version, the African varieties, and other dialects. However, in some aspects the Portuguese dialects are more conservative than the Galician ones, which for the most part lost the voiced fricatives /z/, /v/, etc.

History

From the ninth century, the language spoken in the NW of the Iberian Peninsula was so different from Latin that Latin and Galician could be already considered two separate languages. Nevertheless, written texts in Galician have only been found dating from the end of the XII century, because Latin continued to be the cultured language not only in Gallaecia but throughout medieval Europe.

The oldest known document is the poem Ora faz ost'o Senhor de Navarra by Joam Soares de Paiva, written around 1200. The first non-literary documents in Galician date from the early thirteenth century, the Noticia de Torto (1211) and the Testamento of Afonso II of Portugal (1214), both samples of medieval notarial prose.

From the eighth century Galicia was a political unit with the kingdoms of Asturias and Leon, but was able to reach a degree of autonomy becoming an independent kingdom at certain times in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. Galician was the only language in oral use and Latin was used to a decreasing degree in written language. This oral monolingualism was able to exert such pressure in the thirteenth century that it led to a situation of dual official status for Galician and Latin in notarial documents, edicts, lawsuits, etc; Latin, however, continued to be the universal vehicle for culture.

In the Middle Ages, Galaico-português (or Portuguese-Galician) was a language of culture, poetry and religion throughout not only Galicia and Portugal but also Castile (where Castilian was used mainly for prose).

After the separation of Portuguese and Galician, Galician was considered provincial and was not widely used for literary or academic purposes until the mid 1800s, and during the Franco regime in Spain its formal or written use was officially repressed (although it continued to be widely spoken in rural areas).

With the advent of democracy, Galician has been brought into the institutions, and it is now co-official with Spanish. A heavily Castilianized version of Galician is taught in schools and there is a public Galician-language television. However, for the most part there has been no serious attempt on the part of the Spanish and Galician institutions to reverse language assimilation and loss.

Its orthography, introduced in 1982 (and made law in 1983) by the Real Academia Galega (based on a report by the "Instituto da Lingua Galega") is strongly based on Castilian. It remains a source of contention, however, as many citizens would rather have the institutions recognize Galician as a Portuguese variety and therefore opt for the use of the Portuguese writing system, perhaps with some adaptations.

The Spanish state recognized Galician as one of Spain's four "official languages" (lenguas españolas), the others being Castilian (also called Spanish), Catalan, and Basque. Though this is viewed by most as a positive step toward language maintenance, officialness does not guarantee language transmission among the youngest generations.

Galician-language literature

Main article: Galician literature

See also

Fala dos arxinas, a jargon of Galician masons.

External links


ast:Gallegu de:Galicische Sprache es:Idioma gallego eo:Galega lingvo fr:Galicien gl:Galego ia:Galego nl:Galicisch ja:ガリシア語 pl:Język galisyjski pt:Galego sv:Galiciska


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