Galician language

Galician ( , ), also known as Galego (), is a Western Ibero-Romance language. Around 2.4 million people have at least some degree of competence in the language, mainly in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it has official status along with Spanish. The language is also spoken in some border zones of the neighbouring Spanish regions of Asturias and Castile and León, as well as by Galician migrant communities in the rest of Spain; in Latin America, including Argentina and Uruguay; and in Puerto Rico, the United States, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.

Modern Galician is classified as part of the West Iberian language group, a family of Romance languages. Galician evolved locally from Vulgar Latin and developed from what modern scholars have called Galician-Portuguese. The earliest document written integrally in the local Galician variety dates back to 1230, although the subjacent Romance permeates most written Latin local charters after the High Middle Ages, being especially noteworthy in personal and place names recorded in those documents, as well as in terms originated in languages other than Latin. The earliest reference to Galician-Portuguese as an international language of culture dates to 1290, in the ''Regles de Trobar'' by Catalan author Jofre de Foixà, where it is simply called Galician (''gallego'').

Dialectal divergences are observable between the northern and southern forms of Galician-Portuguese in 13th-century texts, but the two dialects were similar enough to maintain a high level of cultural unity until the middle of the 14th century, producing the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric. The divergence has continued to this day, most frequently due to innovations in Portuguese, producing the modern languages of Galician and Portuguese.
The lexicon of Galician is predominantly of Latin extraction, although it also contains a moderate number of words of Germanic and Celtic origin, among other substrates and adstrates, having also received, mainly via Spanish, a number of nouns from Andalusian Arabic.

The language is officially regulated in Galicia by the Royal Galician Academy. Other organizations, without institutional support, such as the Galician Association of Language, consider Galician and Portuguese two forms of the Galician-Portuguese language, and other minoritary organizations such as the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language believe that Galician should be considered part of the Portuguese language for a wider international usage and level of "normalization".

Classification and relation with Portuguese

Modern Galician and Portuguese originated from a common medieval ancestor designated variously by modern linguists as Galician-Portuguese (or as Medieval Galician, Medieval Portuguese, Old Galician or Old Portuguese). This common ancestral stage developed from Vulgar Latin in the territories of the old Kingdom of Galicia, Galicia and Northern Portugal, as a Western Romance language. In the century it became a written and cultivated language with two main varieties, but during the century the standards of these varieties, Galician and Portuguese, began to diverge, as Portuguese became the official language of the independent Kingdom of Portugal and its chancellery, while Galician was the language of the scriptoria of the lawyers, noblemen and churchmen of the Kingdom of Galicia, then integrated in the crown of Castile and open to influence from Spanish language, culture, and politics. During the 16th century the Galician language stopped being used in legal documentation, becoming de facto an oral language spoken by the vast majority of the Galicians, but having only minor written use in lyric, theatre, and private letters.

It was not until the century that linguists elaborated the first Galician dictionaries, and the language did not recover a proper literature until the century; only since the last quarter of the century has it been taught in schools and used in lawmaking. The first complete translation of the Bible from the original languages dates from 1989. Currently, at the level of rural dialects, Galician forms a dialect continuum with Portuguese in the south, and with Astur-Leonese in the east. Mutual intelligibility (estimated at 85% by Robert A. Hall Jr., 1989) is very high between Galicians and northern Portuguese.

The current linguistic status of Galician with regard to Portuguese is controversial in Galicia, and the issue sometimes carries political overtones. There are linguists who regard Galician and Portuguese as two standard varieties of the same language. Some authors, such as Lindley Cintra, consider that they are still co-dialects of a common language in spite of differences in phonology and vocabulary, while others argue that they have become separate languages due to differences in phonetics and vocabulary usage, and, to a lesser extent, morphology and syntax. Fernández Rei in 1990 stated that the Galician language is, with respect to Portuguese, an ''ausbau'' language, a language through elaboration, and not an ''abstand'' language, a language through detachment.

With regard to the external and internal perception of this relation, for instance in past editions of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', Galician was defined as a " Portuguese dialect" spoken in northwestern Spain. On the other hand, the director of the Instituto Camões declared in 2019 that Galician and Portuguese were close kin but different languages. According to the Galician government, universities and main cultural institutions, such as the Galician Language Institute or the Royal Galician Academy, Galician and Portuguese are independent languages that stemmed from medieval Galician-Portuguese, and modern Galician must be considered an independent Romance language belonging to the group of Ibero-Romance languages having strong ties with Portuguese and its northern dialects. The standard orthography has its roots in the writing of relatively modern Rexurdimento authors, who largely adapted Spanish orthography to the then mostly unwritten language. Most Galician speakers regard Galician as a separate language, which evolved without interruption and in situ from Latin, with Galician and Portuguese maintaining separate literary traditions since the 14th century.

Portuguese Early Modern Era grammars and scholars, at least since Duarte Nunes de Leão in 1606, considered Portuguese and Galician two different languages derived from Old Galician, understood as the language spoken in the Northwest before the establishment of the Kingdom of Portugal in the 12th century. The surge of the two languages would be a result of both the elaboration of Portuguese, through the royal court, its internationalization and its study and culture; and of the stagnation of Galician.
The earliest internal attestation of the expression ''Galician language'' ("lingoajen galego") dates from the 14th century. In Spanish "lenguaje gallego" is already documented in this same century, ''circa'' 1330; in Occitan ''circa'' 1290, in the ''Regles de Trobar'' by Catalan author Jofre de Foixà: "''si tu vols far un cantar en frances, no·s tayn que·y mescles proençal ne cicilia ne ''gallego'' ne altre lengatge que sia strayn a aquell''" 'If you want to compose a song in French, you should not admix Provençal nor Sicilian nor Galician nor other language which is different from it''

Reintegrationism and political implications

Private cultural associations, not endorsed by Galician or Portuguese governments, such as the Galician Language Association (''Associaçom Galega da Língua'') and Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language (''Academia Galega da Língua Portuguesa''), advocates of the minority Reintegrationist movement, support the idea that differences between Galician and Portuguese speech are not enough to justify regarding them as separate languages: Galician would be simply one variety of Galician-Portuguese, along with European Portuguese; Brazilian Portuguese; African Portuguese; the Fala language spoken in the northwestern corner of Extremadura (Spain); and other dialects. They have adopted slightly modified or actual Portuguese orthography, which has its roots in medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry as later adapted by the Portuguese Chancellery.

According to Reintegrationists, treating Galician as an independent language reduces contact with Portuguese culture, leaving Galician as a minor language with less capacity to counterbalance the influence of Spanish, the only official language between the 18th century and 1975. On the other hand, viewing Galician as a part of the Lusosphere, while not denying its own characteristics (cf. Swiss German), shifts cultural influence from the Spanish domain to the Portuguese. Some scholars have described the situation as properly a continuum, from the Galician variants of Portuguese in one extreme to the Spanish language in the other (which would represent the complete linguistic shift from Galician to Spanish); reintegrationist points of view are closer to the Portuguese extreme, and so-called isolationist ones would be closer to the Spanish one; however, the major Galician nationalist parties, Anova–Nationalist Brotherhood and Galician Nationalist Bloc, do not use reintegrationist orthographical conventions.

Official relations between Galicia and the Lusophony

In 2014, the parliament of Galicia unanimously approved Law 1/2014 regarding the promotion of the Portuguese language and links with the Lusophony. Similarly, on 20 October 2016, the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, approved by unanimity a proposal to become an observer member of the Union of Portuguese-Speaking Capitals ( UCCLA). Also, on 1 November 2016, the Council of Galician Culture (''Consello da Cultura Galega'', an official institution of defence and promotion of the Galician culture and language), was admitted as a consultative observer of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP).

A "friendship and cooperation" protocol was signed between the Royal Galician Academy (RAG) and the Brazilian Academy of Letters on 10 January 2019. Víctor F. Freixanes, president of the RAG, stated during the ceremony that "there is a conscience that the Galician language is part of a family which includes our brothers from Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique... a territory full of possibilities also for Galician. We always said that Galician is not a regional language, but is in fact part of that international project".

Geographic distribution and legal status

Galician is spoken by some three million people, including most of the population of Galicia and the numerous Galician communities established elsewhere, in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Biscay), in other European cities (Andorra la Vella, Geneva, London, Paris), and in the Americas (New York, New Jersey, Buenos Aires, Córdoba/Argentina, Montevideo, Mexico City, Havana

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