Galician is a Romance language that grew out of "Vulgar Latin". It initially developed in the late first millennium amongst the Romanised Celts in modern-day Galicia (Spain) and northern Portugal. Galician and Portuguese are considered to have been a single language (Galician-Portuguese) until the middle ages but diverged somewhat over the subsequent centuries largely as a result of the political separation.
Following the separation, Galician lost much of its literary and academic allure and was somewhat marginalized. Indeed, as with many other minority languages in Spain, it was also heavily repressed and was excluded not only from official use but specifically from the field of education. Although it experienced a renaissance in the 19th century it was only with the coming of democracy after Franco's death in 1975 that the language once again flourished, aided somewhat by active promotion by the local regional government and the Real Academia Galega (Official Galician Language Institute).
Related languages Galician is most closely related to the other variants of Galician-Portuguese, namely Portuguese, spoken by around 220 million people worldwide, and Fala, which is spoken by around 10,000 people in pockets of Extremadura (Spain) near the Portuguese border. In terms of vocabulary and grammar, Galician and Portuguese are still much closer than Spanish with mutual intelligibility very high. Indeed, such are the similarities, that not everybody agrees that Galician should be classed as a separate language and there is a minority movement in Galicia, known as Reintegracionismo, that is looking to have Galician recognised as a variant of Portuguese.
The argument is that differences between Galician and Portuguese are no more marked than those between other recognised variants of Portuguese (such as Brazilian Portuguese or African Portuguese). The closeness is demonstrated by the fact that the European Parliament accepts Galician as Portuguese for interpretation purposes. Furthermore, there is little doubt that a person from Northern Portugal would find it easier to understand a Galician speaker than they would some of the Portuguese dialects spoken around the world.
Galician is also close to other Iberian languages, and lexical similarity between it and Spanish is extremely high. Outside the Iberian peninsula, Galician also has significant lexical similarities with Italian, French and Romanian.
Current status Galicia is recognised as one of the four official languages in Spain with joint official status in Galicia where it is widely used in political and cultural life. Galician is taught in schools and is spoken by over 2.5 million people in Galicia, with a further half a million strong immigrant community spread across South America and Europe. The publicly funded Galician-speaking television station, TVG, has also given impetus to the language.
As Catalan political and military power increased during the "reconquest" of Spain from the Arab inhabitants, the language was pushed south through Catalonia and into Valencia and across the seas to the Balearic Islands.
When Catalan political and military power subsequently ebbed, however, the language suffered. In 1700, following the Treaty of the Pyrenees, Louis XIV of France banned Catalan from being used in official documents in what Catalans call "Northern Catalonia" (corresponding approximately to the current French department of Pyrenees-Orientales).
At around the same time, the kingdom of Spain prohibited the use of Catalan for official purposes including in education. It was not until the cultural revival in the late 19th century that the language began to recover, only to be battered once again by the Spanish Civil War. Franco's linguistic policy of Castilian first (known as Spanish outside Spain) meant that there was little place for Catalan, which was widely repressed. After Franco's death in 1975 and the coming of democracy the language once again flourished, aided somewhat by active promotion by the local Catalan Regional government (Generalitat).
Related languages Catalan is very closely related to its linguistic neighbours (Occitan, Castilian, Aragonese, French). Of these Occitan and Catalan are probably the most mutually intelligible although many Castilian speakers have little difficulty understanding Catalan with the reverse almost invariably true. As with most romance languages there is a fair degree of mutual intelligibility with Italian, French and Portuguese but as accents and pronunciation vary dramatically from the Balearic islands to Andorra there is no hard and fast rule.
Status today Catalan is an official language of Andorra and has joint official status in Catalonia where it is widely used in political and cultural life. It is also spoken in parts of south-eastern France, Aragon, Murcia and in the city of L'Alguer in Sardinia. Valencian, which is spoken in Valencia, and the various linguistic variants spoken on the Balearic Islands are, to all intents and purposes, the same language with accent and pronunciation being the most notable divergences. A rough equivalence would be the differences between US and British English. For local political reasons, however, there is strong resistance to being classed under the Catalan banner and indeed during the ratification process for the 2004 EU constitution, the Spanish government supplied separate Catalan, Balearic and Valencian translations even though they were actually identical.
Accurate estimates of the number of true native speakers are difficult to come by but official sources claim close to 10 million people are able to speak the various variants. This breaks down into 6 million in Catalonia, 2.5 million in Valencia and 0.75 million on the Balearic Islands. An additional 2 million people claim to be able to understand it. The position of Catalan has been strengthened in recent decades by the popularity of local Catalan-speaking television stations and by the fact that it is compulsory in schools across Catalonia and Valencia.
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