Galician is anIndo-European language of the Western Ibero-Romancebranch. It is spoken by some 2.4 million people, mainly inGalicia, 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 neighbouring Spanish regions of Asturias and Castile and León, as well as by Galician migrant communities in the rest of Spain, inLatin America, the United States, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.
Modern Galician is part of the West Iberian languagesgroup, a family of Romance languages that includes thePortuguese language, which developed locally from Vulgar Latin and evolved into what modern scholars have called Medieval Galician or 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 andadstrates, 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.
Galician-Portuguese lost its unity when the County of Portugal obtained its independence from the Kingdom of Leon, a transition initiated in 1139 and completed in 1179, establishing the Kingdom of Portugal. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Galicia was united with the Kingdom of León, and later with the Kingdom of Castile, under kings of the House of Burgundy. The Galician and Portuguese standards of the language diverged over time, following independent evolutionary paths. Portuguese was the official language of the Portuguese chancellery, while Galician was the usual language not only of troubadours and peasants, but also of local noblemen and clergy, and of their officials, so forging and maintaining two slightly different standards.
Cantigas de Santa Maria, 13th century
During the reign of Alfonso X, Castilian Spanish became the official language of the chancellery of the Kingdom of Castile. However, in Galicia and neighboring regions of Asturias and León in 1200–1500, the local languages remained the usual written languages in any type of document, either legal or narrative, public or private. Castilian was progressively introduced through Royal decrees and the edicts of foreign churchmen and officials. This led, from the late 1400s on, to the end of legal documents in Galician; the last ones were issued around 1530. Also, from 1480 on, notaries of the Crown of Castile were required to obtain their licenses in Toledo, where they had to prove their mastery of Spanish.
In spite of Galician being the most spoken language, during the 17th century the elites of the Kingdom began speaking Castilian, most notably in towns and cities. The linguistic situation in Galicia became one ofdiglossia, with Galician as the low variety and Spanish as the high one. In reaction to the relegation of the autochthonous language, a series of literary and historical works (always written in Spanish) appeared in the 1600s through 1800s, meant to vindicate the history, language, people, and culture of Galicia. The period from the 1500s to early 1800s, when Galician had little literary—and no legal—use, is considered the dark age of Galician language. The Galician spoken and written then is usually referred to as Middle Galician.
