Galician Language
Galician is an Iberian Romance language belonging to the Western Ibero-Romance branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community with the constitutional status of an "historic nationality" in northwestern Spain. Galician is also spoken in the neighboring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castile and León, near its border with Galicia, and in Portugal.
Medieval or Old Galician, more usually known today by linguists as Galician-Portuguese, was the language spoken in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia. Old Galician diverged into the two modern languages of Galician and Portuguese when the County of Portugal became the independent Kingdom of Portugal. The two modern languages still share much that is mutually intelligible, particularly in northern Portugal where they are joined by a dialect continuum.
Despite the positive effects of official recognition of the Galician language, Galicia's socio-linguistic development has experienced the growing influence of Spanish, a major world language. The drift toward Spanish is ascribed to the growth of urban centers, the emergence of a Galician middle class, and the worldly influences of education and the media.
Galicia also boasts a rich oral tradition, in the form of songs, tales, and sayings, which has made a vital contribution to the spread and development of the Galician language. Still flourishing today, this tradition constitutes a priceless cultural heritage, much of which is shared with Portugal.
Read more about this topic: Galician People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)