Galician Language

Galician Language

Galician /ɡəˈlɪʃən/ or /ɡəˈlɪsi.ən/ (galego ) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch. It is spoken by some 3 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 neighbouring 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, and elsewhere in Europe.

Galician is part of the same family of languages as the Portuguese language, and both share the common origins. Galician-Portuguese lyric (13th-14th centuries) was among the most remarkable universal literature produced in the Middle Ages. Galician language was the first Iberian tongue to be consolidated from Latin in the Medieval Ages in Galicia. The language spread southwards with the conquests of the Galician warlords since the 8th century, who became counts and later kings of Portugal. The standards of Portuguese and Galician dialects started to slowly slip away since the independence of Portugal in the 12th century. The lexicon of the language is predominantly of Latin extraction, although it also contains an important number of words of Germanic and Celtic origin, among other substrates and adstrates, having also received, mainly through Spanish and Portuguese, a sizeable number of nouns from the Arabs who in the Middle Ages governed southern Iberia.

It is unofficially regulated in Galicia by the Royal Galician Academy, yet independent organisations such as the Galician Association of Language and the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language include Galician as part of the Galician-Portuguese language.