The Galician Language

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For us, Galician people, as for every other country in the world, language is the way in which we interpret and express our reality and culture. Language is the basis for our experiences, customs, celebrations, art, music... as one of our best thinkers said: "a language is more than a work of art, it is an unending source of works of art".

Galician and Portuguese are in the theory the very same language, but they are in practice a bit different. Centuries of mutual isolament and artificial differences have been caused by the Spanish frontier, creating two different cultures: more Latin the Portuguese, more Atlantic the Galician.

Galician is Galicia's own language thanks to a people who have managed to maintain our language over the centuries as a sign of collective identity, in spite of the political obstacles placed by Spain.

Nowadays Galician is spoken by more than 3 million people, both in Galicia and its borderings (occident of Asturias, León and Zamora) and in several countries where Galician people emigrated.

• History of the Galician language
• The Galician today
• The Galician in the world
• Another rather interesting point of view about Galician
• Our sister language, the Portuguese

If you want, you can go to the Galician today section and find out about the levels of usage for Galician, the attitudes of the Galician-speakers towards their language and the extent to which it has become normalized, starting off with a general level and going on to deal with the spread of Galician throughout the world.