Language issues

As an American living in Europe you realize that your perspective on languages is all wrong. After all, we're from a country with 300 million people who speak the exact same language, not to mention Canada. Our regional variations don't even really rise to the level of dialects (though of course that's not a very exact term).

In many European countries, on the other hand, regional variations in language are dramatic. The languages we know as French or Italian are literary standards based on one important dialect and then generalized to the rest of the country (what we call French comes from Northern France, the langes d'oil, standardized on the dialect of the Île de France, I think; the Italian language is based on the language of Florence) . Italy of course has only been a state since the 1860s. France has a longer history of being a nation-state, and also has a very long history of intense and unempathetic centralization, under the Bourbons, the revolutionaries, etc. Even so, most people living in the State "France" didn't speak "French" for a long time, through the 19th century, even into the 20th century. There's an interesting book by Eugen Weber called "Peasants into Frenchmen" that's about the process of official cultural/linguistic/administrative unification (or internal imperialism, if you want to look at it that way), and he argues that the people of the country "France" didn't really become "French" as we understand it today until the period between 1870 and 1930, which is really very late.

Your daily history lesson

So where does Spain fit into this rat's nest of history and regional peculiarity (kidding, love ya Europe)? Well, Spain is funny. In the year 711, the Moors invaded Spain and quickly took over most of the peninsula. But when the Moors got way up to the north coast of Spain, they looked at the mountains and thought to themselves, "Wow, rugged mountains filled with all the crazy hold-outs and desperadoes left over from our brilliant conquest. Should we even bother?... nah..." and they didn't really take control of the region. The Christians also triumphed in a battle at Covadonga, which, depending who you ask, might just be famous for its symbolic value (i.e. it was the first Christian victory after 711). The result of all this is... chan chan-chan... the núcleos de resistencia, or "nuclei of resistance," to awkwardly translate the habitual Spanish term. So you can image that there are various little Christian kingdoms up in the northern mountains, kind of isolated. During the next 800 years or so, these "nuclei" turn into the various kingdoms of Spain (like Castile, Leon, Asturias, Galicia) and expand towards the south at the expense of the Muslim states there. So they are shaped kind of like stripes from North to South. And given the fact that all these kingdoms originate in isolated little "nuclei," they all have a different way of talking, or their own language. So the stripe along the Atlantic coast speaks Galician-Portuguese. The stripe along the Mediterranean coast speaks Catalan, which is a language closely related to the languages of Southern France. And in the middle of the country you have the Asturian-Leonese stripe and the Castilian stripe and the Aragonese stripe and so on. (Let's take a moment to remember the Basques who live in the corner of Spain and France and have an ancient language that has no known linguistic relatives.*) Then you have to take into account the effects of history. The kingdom of Castile becomes increasingly important and powerful, and begins to be politically linked up with the other kingdoms of Iberia, forming a shape that is more or less like what we think of as "Spain" today. Because of this, the Castilian language becomes more important, becomes official, and crowds out other languages. Castilian is what we customarily refer to as "Spanish." And for my purposes I should also point out that Galician-Portuguese splits into two languages, Galician and Portuguese.

So a lot of the non-official languages of Spain get relegated to 2nd-rung status. Sure, if you go to the countryside, you can find people who speak them, but they're not used in government or in church administration or literature, etc.

They have their advocates, though, and sometimes go through periods of revitalization. People write literature in Galician and Catalan, work out official spelling standards, and so on.

Now let's jump to the 20th century:

Franco's régime pursues a harsh Castilian-only policy and represses Catalan, Basque, Galician, etc. Historically, I think this is a kind of funny choice. I say this because the more traditional pattern of the Spanish state is to be regionalistic and not centralistic. Centralization and uniformity are more modern ideals and often associated with liberal/Enlightenment régimes. Anyway, after the fall of the Franco régime, Spain's new constitution enshrines a devolved and heavily regionalistic system of government and also supports the regional languages.

Today

So Spain today has four official languages. One is Castilian which is official the whole country over. Then there's Catalan, which is official in Catalonia, the Valencian community, and the Balearic islands (in Valencia they call it Valenciano and in the islands they call it Mallorquín, but it's all the same language really). The language of Galicia is Galician. And the language of the Basques is of course Basque. It works out pretty well, though you might wonder why the Asturians and Leonese don't have official status for their language. Well, good question. Once you start this kind of particularism, you kind of wonder where to stop. That's the inherent problem.

Galician

I live in Galicia, one of the regions with its own language. Before I left, I was a bit preoccupied by the language issues and worried they would present a major inconvenience. It hasn't really been that way. For one thing, I live in Vigo, the biggest city in Galicia. Along with another big city in the north, Corunna,** it is predominantly Castilian-speaking. So "at home," I rarely have to deal with Galician. I think if I worked in Vigo I would pretty much never run across it. Some people in Vigo are positively dismissive of the language. One lady, when I mentioned I worked with Galician speakers, joked, "¡Qué horror!"

I work in a plurilingual school out in a town. At school, the teachers are all Galician-speakers. And a large portion of classes are given in Galician too. Of course the teachers speak Castilian too, they're perfectly bilingual, but Galician is more natural to them. This is especially true of a few. Minus the gym teacher, she's from Zamora province (Castile & Leon) and doesn't really speak Galician. Whenever they talk with me they speak Castilian so it's no problem, but it does mean I hear a lot of Galician, in the staff room and in class.

I'm more undecided when it comes to the kids. I hear them speaking lots of Castilian. Sometimes the teacher will be speaking to them in Galician and they'll be responding in Castilian. Basically they're bilingual.

I can catch quite a lot of it; as you might guess, it's not wildly different from Spanish.

I hope you enjoyed this overlong explanation of Galician language issues, congratulations if you made it all the way to the bottom. And since throughout I've been dodging the Castilian/Galician issue by relying on English-language terms, here's a little chart of proper names.

English	Castilian	Galician
Galicia	Galicia	Galicia / Galiza
Galician	Gallego	Galego
Castilian / Spanish	Castellano	Castelán

*Pretty much every crackpot linguist makes it his pet project to prove the link between Basque and Ancient Egyptian or Finnish or Japanese or the languages of the Caucasus or whatever.

**It's called La Coruña in Castilian or A Coruña in Galician, so I've avoided either by using the old-fashioned Engish exonym Corunna; I just like exonyms anyway.