Galician

Overview
Galician is an Indo-European language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch. It is spoken by some 2.4 million people, mainly in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is official along with Spanish. The language is also spoken in some border zones of the neighboring Spanish regions of Asturias and Castile and León, as well as by Galician migrant communities in the rest of Spain, in Latin America, the United States, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.

Modern Galician is part of the West Iberian languages group, a family of Romance languages that includes the Portuguese language, which developed locally from Vulgar Latin and evolved into what modern scholars have called Galician-Portuguese. 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, 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 the Arabic of Al Andalus.

The language is officially regulated in Galicia by the Royal Galician Academy. However, independent organisations, such as the Galician Association of Language and the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language, include Galician as part of the Portuguese language, as the Galician-Portuguese variant.

Relation with Portuguese
Modern Galician and its sibling, Portuguese, originated from a common medieval ancestor designated variously by modern linguists as Galician-Portuguese (Mediaeval Galician, Medieval Portuguese, Old Galician or Old Portuguese). This common ancestral stage developed in the territories of the old Kingdom of Galicia, which covered the territories of modern-day Galicia and northern Portugal. In the 13th century it became a written and cultivated language. In the past Galician and Portuguese formed a dialect continuum, which many scholars contend still exists today at the level of rural dialects. Others point out that modern Galician and Portuguese have diverged to such an extent during the past seven centuries that they now constitute two closely related but separate languages.

Historically, the Galician-Portuguese language originated from Vulgar Latin as a Western Romance language in the lands now in Galicia, Asturias and northern half of Portugal, which belonged to the mediaeval Kingdom of Galicia, itself comprising approximately the former Roman territory of Gallaecia as modified during the two centuries of the Suevic Kingdom of Galicia. The standards of the language began to diverge in the 14th century, 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 Castilian language, culture, and politics. During the 16th century the Galician language stopped being used in legal documentation, becoming de facto an oral language, with just some use in lyric, theatre and private letters.

The linguistic status of Galician with respect to Portuguese is controversial, and the issue sometimes carries political overtones. There are linguists who deal with modern Galician and modern Portuguese as norms or 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 superficial differences in phonology and vocabulary, while others, such as Pilar Vázquez Cuesta, argue that they have become separate languages due to major 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 respect 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. However, most Galician speakers do not regard Galician as a variety of Portuguese, but as a different language, as modern Galician evolved without interruption and in situ from Latin, and Portuguese and Galician have had separate literary traditions since the 14th century.

Galician excerpt from Wikipedia article "Lingua galega"
A situación sociolingüística en Galicia está marcada pola diglosia resultante dun proceso histórico de substitución do galego polo castelán. Aínda que as posturas oficiais dos responsables da política lingüística en Galicia (case sempre vinculados orgánica ou ideoloxicamente ao Partido Popular) insistiron desde os anos oitenta na tese do chamado bilingüísmo harmónico, concepto inexistente nas ciencias que estudan a relación entre lingua(s) e sociedade, o caso galego responde ás características dun cadro de linguas en contacto entre as que se dan relacións conflitivas. A fase actual, aparentemente bilingüe, constituiría un fotograma fixo do tempo que media entre o monolingüismo social na lingua propia do territorio (así define o galego o Estatuto de autonomía) e o desprazamento definitivo desta por parte do idioma imposto. Este último (o que as teses sobre diglosia denominan Lingua A) acumularía sobre si a maior parte das funcións do poder político e económico, e polo tanto o prestixio social, mentres que a lingua propia do territorio ou Lingua B quedaría reservada aos usos menos relevantes. Daquela, salvando casos puntuais, o bilingüísmo en Galicia é unha ficción de raíz ideolóxica en canto que só adoitan ser bilingües as persoas falantes de galego (non teñen outra opción: a Constitución española de 1978 consagra o deber de coñecer a lingua española), mentres que as castelanfalantes, cuxo número non deixou de medrar —especialmente nos últimos cen anos—, rara vez se ven presionadas para usaren o idioma propio do país. A partir do novo contexto de relación xurdido da oficialidade das dúas linguas (1981) existen algunhas áreas nas que o galego recuperou a posición de normalidade (institucións locais, administración autonómica, Parlamento galego, determinados ámbitos literarios e artísticos...) e por iso se caracteriza como diglosia imperfecta o momento actual.