Galician is no longer the most spoken language in Galicia. This is what the Royal Galician Academy (RAG) considers in the analysis of the data from the latest survey by the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE) on knowledge and use of the Galician language, published last October and which revealed the great decline in the same among the younger population. The Academy certifies that, for the first time since records exist, Galician has lost its majority status and is “dangerously close to the threshold of collapse.” He does not hesitate to identify those responsible for the situation: the Xunta de Galicia. “The responsibility belongs to the entire Galician society, but very fundamentally to whoever has the government and thus has the mechanisms for action and planning,” he points out, “the first responsibility is, therefore, to the Galician Government.”
The 75-page report that details the figures of the IGE – an organization that depends on the Xunta itself – is signed by the academic Henrique Monteagudo and the members of the Sociolinguistics Seminar of the entity Xaquín Loredo and Gabriel S. Vázquez-Grandío. His conclusions are devastating. “For the first time, Galician loses its status as the habitual language of the majority of the population,” he says. In two decades, the number of Galician speakers decreased by 400,000 people. The number of Spanish speakers increased by 380,000. Among young people, the trend is even more adverse. The response of “always speaks in Galician” or “more in Galician than in Spanish” accounts for 16% among the population aged 5 to 14, around 34,000 people. In Spanish there are 180,000. “The drop in the two decades from 2003 to 2023 is enormous,” he points out.
Almost none of the IGE meters show positive dynamics for the Galician. The initial language of 34% of the current population – 2,699,424 inhabitants, according to the INE – is Galician, 33% is Spanish and 29% are both languages. But initial monolingualism in Spanish is the majority option in those under 50 years of age, “it acquires overwhelming proportions in those under 30” and, alarmingly, in those between 5 and 14 years old. In this last fraction, it was reduced from the 70,000 detected in 2003 to the 23,000 counted 20 years later.
These numbers on the initial language are just the tip of the iceberg. This is how the Academy report understands it when it points out the different development of the initial speakers in Spanish and Galician. “The majority of individuals who learn to speak Spanish maintain their language and tend toward monolingual practices,” he says, “while those who learned to speak Galician maintain their language less and tend more toward bilingual practices.” Not only that, those who declare having learned to speak Galician and Spanish “end up prioritizing Spanish.” An educational legislation – approved alone by Feijóo’s PP against the educational community, parties and unions – that has limited the presence of its own language, the brutal cut of budget items destined for linguistic normalization by the Xunta de Galicia or The enormous environmental pressure of Spanish are some of the explanations used by specialists in the matter.
The Royal Academy also dismantles one of the arguments with which the Galician Government and the party that supports it, the PP, have defended themselves against criticism over the data from the Galician Institute of Statistics, which blames immigration for the growth of Spanish. . “The increase in the number of Spanish speakers is fueled, to a certain extent, by an increase in immigration,” he indicates, “however, this in no way explains the decline in the number of Galician speakers, in a figure greater than 50,000 individuals.” And he adds that “it is even worth asking” why the educational system does not guarantee the competence in Galician of migrant youth. But this lack of competence in the community’s own language affects the entire school-age population.
The means and the ends
“The current educational model is not fulfilling the mandate of the Linguistic Normalization Law,” he states. The norm states in its article 14.3 that the educational authorities of the community “will guarantee that at the end of the cycles in which the teaching of Galician is mandatory, the students know it, at its oral and written levels, on an equal basis with Spanish.” It is not happening, as the Academy itself has already demonstrated on other occasions. It does not even comply with the principles of the so-called Multilingualism Decree, which in article 4 says that the first objective is the “guarantee of the acquisition of equal competence in the two official languages in Galicia.”
The Academy has already demanded the repeal of the aforementioned decree, which Feijóo imposed in 2010 as a result of his unilateral break with the political consensus on Galician that had operated since the time of Fraga Iribarne in the Xunta de Galicia. The opposition to the PP also demands it. In recent weeks, and within the conversations that the Minister of Culture, José López Campos, has started with BNG and the Socialist Party in order to reach a “Pact for Lingua”, they have insisted on it. But the Popular Party, while claiming to seek an agreement, refuses to withdraw a rule that, for the first time since the fall of the dictatorship, reduced the presence of Galician in school and prohibited it from teaching scientific subjects. In a recent interview in ABCLópez Campos confirmed that “the basis of the decree will not be touched in any way,” and he understood by basis “freedom and linguistic balance.” Judging by the analysis of the Academy and the IGE data, neither of the two things exists, always to the detriment of the Galician.
“What there is is a dissonance between the objectives of the law and the formulas applied to achieve them,” considers the institution chaired by the professor and writer Víctor Freixanes, “the change in the educational model is essential to achieve them, but it is not sufficient to reverse the situation, but must be accompanied by a broader set of measures, not only in the field of formal education.”
The current geography of the language
The RAG report also draws a sort of current geography of Galician in Galicia. “The sociological profile of Galician speakers is that of an increasingly aging group, made up largely of people with basic education and who live in peripheral regions, with lower income than the average and increasingly depopulated,” he explains, supported by the “social variables” of the available studies. As examples, they mention A Costa Morte, the interior of the province of A Coruña, the east of Lugo and the border areas of Ourense with Portugal. “Except for progressive aging, this portrait has not changed in its fundamental lines in the last fifty years, although a minority profile of more urban Galician speakers has emerged, with secondary and higher education, and young or adult,” he points out.
The distribution of Galician speakers abounds, “tends to be territorialized to discontinuous areas among themselves.” He assures that its presence in the two main cities, Vigo and A Coruña, is “marginal”, just like in Pontevedra or Ferrol. Only in Lugo and Santiago de Compostela, among urban areas, the language situation is “quite solid.” What also happens in some large towns such as Ordes and Carballo (A Coruña) or in densely populated regions, O Barbanza (A Coruña) or A Mariña (Lugo).
“The increasingly pronounced decline of Galician is getting dangerously close to the threshold of collapse,” the Royal Galician Academy finally concludes, “despite everything, taking into account the notable vitality of the language and the solid commitment of significant sectors of citizens Galician, this trend is reversible.” To do this, he calls for agreements far from partisan conveniences that lead “urgently” to effective policies, “with the essential push of the institutions and with the support of the majority of society.”
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