Galego | English

Non fiction

LINGUA, NACIÓN E IDENTIDADE

By XOSÉ RAMÓN FREIXEIRO MATO

About this book

The relationships among Galician and Portuguese, Spanish and minority languages in Spain and Europe are the object of reflection and analysis of this work, which also pays attention to the issue of standard Galician in determining the degree of contact with close languages.

In its struggle to become the national language of Galicia, Galician was also the object of much vindication, defence and care by our writers, some of whom are presented here as part of this (re)construction process of a Galician national identity, with our language as its most remarkable symbol.

Book fragment

However important standardisation of the language is, the normalisation of its use is always more important. The process of normalisation of the Galician language is not going smoothly. We do not need far too many arguments, as reality speaks for itself. We can, however, refer to three events that happened in recent years. One of them is tragic: a person who is about to undergo surgery has to endanger her health in order to exercise her language rights, as the public hospital in Santiago de Compostela where she is going to be operated on, does not have forms in Galician to sign and the complaint would obviously delay the operation. Another one is dramatic: a lawyer submits a document in Galicia to the court in Muros and the judge requests her to immediately “correct her mistake”. And the third one is a tragicomedy: a couple wants to get a civil marriage in Galician in Santiago de Compostela, and they have to hire an interpreter, as the judge apparently does not understand Galician and this takes them months. Let us highlight that these events took place in 2003 in Santiago and Muros, not in Madrid, nor in the year 1974, when we were under a dictatorship and there was no Constitution, no self-government Statute nor a Language Normalisation Act.