Galician

Galician began in Rome's northwestern province of Gallaecia. Soldiers, settlers, and administrators brought Latin to a country already shaped by Celtic languages and by the Suebi, who founded a kingdom there in 411. Spoken Latin changed in the wet valleys north of the Douro until it was no longer the language of Rome. By the ninth century, the speech of Galicia and northern Portugal had become a recognisable Romance language.

That language first belonged to both sides of the modern border. Medieval Galician-Portuguese became the chosen language of lyric poetry across Christian Iberia. Alfonso X of Castile wrote his Cantigas de Santa Maria in it during the thirteenth century. Political separation then pulled the shared language in two: Portuguese gained a royal court and moved south with an independent kingdom, while Galician remained under a Castilian crown.

From the late Middle Ages, Castilian displaced Galician from government, church records, and most printed literature. Galician did not vanish; it remained the language of farms, fisheries, markets, songs, and households. Writers of the nineteenth-century Rexurdimento brought it back into public literature. Rosalía de Castro's Cantares gallegos appeared in 1863, a date now commemorated each year by the Día das Letras Galegas.

Galician became co-official with Spanish in Galicia after the 1978 Constitution and the 1981 Statute of Autonomy. It is taught in schools and used by public institutions, publishers, broadcasters, and musicians. Yet legal status has not secured transmission at home. The 2023 survey by Galicia's statistics institute found that only 7.0% of children aged five to fourteen always spoke Galician, compared with 40.3% of people aged sixty-five and older. Galician is not absent, and it is not a relic. Its danger lies in that widening distance between knowing the language and choosing it for ordinary life.