Abstract

In Spain, in addition to Spanish, three other languages are officially recognized in the areas where they developed, referred to in the Spanish Constitution as “historic nationalities”. Two of those languages – Catalan and Galician – belong to the same language group as Spanish. They are Romance languages that evolved from Latin. The other official language is Basque, a pre-Indo-European language whose origins remain controversial. Two other Romance languages – Asturian and Aragonese – are also spoken in parts of Spain, but do not have official status. The linguistic affiliation of Galician is the subject of a tug of war between the ‘isolationist’ regulations put forward by the Royal Galician Academy, which considers Galician to be an independent language, and the ‘reintegrationist’ regulations, which treat Galician as a variety of Galician-Portuguese. Galician is spoken by around three million speakers. On the other hand, the Catalan language is spoken by some eleven million people, including regions beyond the boundaries of modern-day Catalonia: in Spain, in addition to Catalonia, it is official in the autonomous regions of Valencia and the Balearic Islands and is also spoken in parts of Aragon; in France, it is spoken in the historical country of Roussillon, roughly identical to the present-day Pyrénées-Orientales département; in Italy, it is spoken in the Sardinian town of Alghero, and it is the official language of Andorra. The Basque language, which was standardized in 1968, also stretches across the French-Spanish border and is estimated to be spoken by fewer than one million people.