Galician seen as second-class: roots of diglossia

Why Galician is perceived as second-class in its own land

Galician has never had so many loudspeakers. It is a subject in school, it has public television, a university, and an administration that in theory uses it daily. And yet, many people still switch languages when they pick up the phone, enter a doctor's office, or see a camera in front of them. Castilian appears when one needs to seem serious. That reflex—what's ours is for home, what's foreign is what counts—is the paradox that fuels the question of why the self-perception of Galician is more pessimistic than that of Catalan or Basque. The key is not in the character of a people, but in who spoke what.

Castilian was the language of money and the cacique

The most widespread argument points to a social fact before a linguistic one. In Galicia, Castilian was for centuries the language of the well-to-do in cities: the meager bourgeoisie, the minor nobility, small merchants, civil servants, and political bosses. Education, administration, television, and the world of success spoke Castilian; Galician remained where the countryside remained, increasingly impoverished and without industry. The difference with Catalonia and the Basque Country is not one of degree, but of structure: there, a bourgeoisie made its language a banner of class and business; here, the Castilianization of the elites was so complete that those elites ended up acting as a belt of the central power.

The shame that doesn't show up in statistics

The most cited symptom is the nervous laugh. In a training center in A Coruña, a student from a village who addresses a teacher from outside in Castilian receives sarcasm from his classmates for speaking posh in the wrong place. The anecdote sums up an inverted hierarchy: in other communities, switching to Castilian can be read as betrayal; in Galicia, switching to Galician can be read as lack of worldliness. There is even the joke that Galician is badly spoken Spanish, or Spanish is posh Galician, depending on how you look at it. On the other side, the reply is blunt: those who have lived there maintain that they never met a Galician ashamed of the Galician language, and that today Galician is heard among office colleagues in Madrid without anyone turning around.

Does speaking Galician open the Lusophone world?

There is a promise that divides waters: learning Galician would be the gateway to the entire Portuguese sphere, from Brazil to Mozambique. A traveler recounts that he traveled the northern peninsula by bus and that communication with a Brazilian friend was fluent at ninety percent, to the point of discussing politics without a translator. The counterargument is more stubborn: Galician shares sounds with Spanish, and whoever understands Portuguese understands it for other reasons. Intelligibility, they say, is not symmetrical, and to the Portuguese themselves Galician is largely indifferent. A nice promise, but only half true.

From the Celtic special little one to the Irmandiña revolts

Faced with the complex, another current vindicates the long history. Galicia had its own kingdom, rose against the King of Castile in the Irmandiña revolts, and stood up to the Vikings. María Pita and her defense of A Coruña are brandished as proof that it is not a docile people: not seeking a fight is confused with allowing oneself to be overwhelmed, and it's not the same. In the War of Independence, British commanders praised the tenacity of Galician militias, and Galicia was the first Spanish territory to expel the French, as early as 1809. The ironic nuance is added by those who recall that half of Europe was Celtic: as for exclusivity, little.

Workplace burden or heritage?

The final stretch is that of the classroom. Some maintain that studying in Galician condemns kids to the local, that with the world's second most spoken language in play, time is wasted on micro-languages, and that without Castilian or English, careers narrow. The reply comes in two ways: first, that there is no data linking bilingualism to worse results; second, more fundamentally, that associating language and national identity is a recent invention, that for centuries the language was just a tool and people learned the one that served them to advance without drama. As peine to Latin in the end, they conclude.

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With school in favor and prestige against, Galician fights a battle that is not decided in classrooms, but in the head of whoever hesitates before opening their mouth. Does it stop being a small language the day it stops sounding like a village?