Language and identity in Galicia : the current orthographic debate

Abstract

Galicia is one of the seventeen Autonomous Communities which constitute the Spanish state. It consists of four provinces, Pontevedra, Corunna, Lugo and Orense, and is situated on the north-west of Spain. Two languages are recognised as co-official within Galicia: Galician and Castilian. The Real Academia Galega and the Instituto da Lingua Galega agreed an orthographic and morphological norma (standard) for Galician in July 1982, which was approved by the Xunta, the Galician local government. In spite of this, there are groups who contend that Galician should be written to a greater or lesser extent like Portuguese, rather than like these normas. This orthographic debate, between the tendencies known as Reintegracionista and Independentista, is the focus of this thesis, not in terms of which orthography may technically be the more appropriate way to write Galician, but in terms of what issues lie behind the debate.

Given that speech developed long before writing, that individuals learn to speak before they learn to write and that writing is absent from some societies, some commentators would argue that spoken language is much more important than written language. In the case of Galician, however, more than a decade after the normas were approved by the Xunta, there is still debate about how the language should be written. If spoken language is more important than written language, why do these different positions exist?

The process of prescribing normas is part of language corpus planning. Language planning is generally not carried out solely to improve communication, but rather in order to achieve non-linguistic ends, such as national integration, political control, economic development, and so no. The Reintegracionista-Independentista debate is ostensibly a debate about Galician orthography, that is, a debate rooted in the corpus of the language, but in reality it is a debate about non-linguistic issues.

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