Galicia, where certain linguistic solutions of Spanish came into contact with. Galician ... yond the confines of the medieval kingdom of Galicia (López Carreira.
Sociolinguistics of Spanish in Galicia* FERNANDO RAMALLO
Abstract The aim of this article is to present the major characteristics of Spanish in Galicia, where certain linguistic solutions of Spanish came into contact with Galician, the vernacular language following the fragmentation of Latin into the peninsular Romance languages. This study should be supplemented by others primarily concerned with the study of Spanish of Galicia.
1. Introduction The sociolinguistic situation of Galicia1 and, more specifically, the social stratification of Spanish in this territory, have been little studied outside of Spain. Consequently, the volume of work in circulation — in Spanish as well as in other widely-spoken languages — is even scarcer. This is due to several factors, among them the fact that Spanish publications have only recently become available in translation (cf. Monteagudo and Santamarina 1993). This has, to a large extent, conditioned the presentations that we find in the international bibliography, which, in some of the more wellknown cases, are either extremely brief (cf. Mar-Molinero 2000 or Hualde et al. 2001), or lack the thoroughness required of this type of publication.
2. Configuration of bilingual areas Since its beginnings as an independent Romance language in the early Middle Ages, Galician gradually became consolidated as an everyday language in the more informal registers and in the early literature. It is found especially in lyric poetry, where it became a koine`, appearing beyond the confines of the medieval kingdom of Galicia (Lo´pez Carreira 2005). Its popularity, however, particularly in the more formal registers, 0165–2516/07/0184–00021 6 Walter de Gruyter
Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 184 (2007), pp. 21–36 DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2007.012
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declined notably due to the gradual pressure brought to bear by Castilian political, economic, and religious interests, eventually causing the dominant classes to abandon the Galician language, in a gradual process of linguistic assimilation (from the top down). This process accelerated, from the sixteenth century onwards, for this language that shared a common origin with Portuguese due to the particular development of neo-Latin languages in the western part of the Iberian Peninsula. In spite of its gradual decadence, Galician continued to be almost exclusively the oral language of the majority of the population until the early twentieth century. It is common practice to pinpoint the origin of the current language contact situation found in Galicia in the thirteenth century. Since that time, with the ascent to the throne of Fernando II in 1230, by then King of Castile since 1217, the medieval kingdom of Galicia was to become yet another of the territories ruled by the Castilian crown. It would also undergo the sociolinguistic consequences that arise from such a political change. The implantation of Castilian was not a rapid process, but rather a gradual one that lasted until the final consolidation of the language many centuries later. In fact, the joining of the two crowns did not entail an immediate decline in the cultural and political peculiarities of each individual fraction of the kingdom, among other reasons because Castile’s political leadership in the rest of the peninsula, with the exception of Portugal, was not to occur until the fifteenth century. Very slowly, certain varieties of Castilian began to appear among the inhabitants of Galicia, initially as received speech, and only much later as spoken language. In other words, contact had no immediate consequences in Galicia’s linguistic adaptation. In fact, we should remember that the most splendid period for Galician-Portuguese Romance literature runs from the thirteenth century to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Several factors explain the substantial decline of the Galician language beginning in the sixteenth century. Certainly, the most notorious factor is the linguistic assimilation mentioned earlier, to which the languages bordering on the Kingdom of Castile were subject due to the pressure from Castilian. In fact, the sixteenth century marks the first stage of a language shift process that was to last for several hundred years and, in Galicia, is generally known as the ‘‘Dark Ages.’’ In the sixteenth century, Castilian became the o‰cial language of the kingdom and, consequently, it is at this point that it began to be notably consolidated outside of Castile. Nevertheless, to accurately understand the Galician case, it is necessary to hark back to the mid-fourteenth century and the coming into power of the Trasta´mara dynasty. The presence of this Castilian nobility, accompanied by a host of servants, scribes, and clergy, all speaking the language of Castile, led to the extension of a new sociopolitical and
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cultural model. From this time on, Galicia’s sociolinguistic fate was sealed: in an attempt to recover their lost social prestige, the Galician nobles gradually substituted their language for that of the Castilian nobles, and Galician as a written language vanished once and for all from the o‰cial documents after the first third of the sixteenth century, shattering the consolidation of Galician as a literary language (Monteagudo 1999).
3. Historical presence of Spanish in these territories At the end of the medieval period, Galicia had no ruling classes of its own to foster the consolidation of its language’s social prestige. For this reason, Castilian slowly gained ground, increasing in prestige and extending its presence to the formal domains of the new foreign ecclesiastical hierarchy and throughout the echelons of civil and military administration. The result was that the written and institutional use of Galician fell into decay and it was not until the close of the eighteenth century that signs of renewal were to arise. Galician, however, continued to be the everyday language of the common classes. Over time, as Galicia began to recover economically, Spanish would become the reference language of commerce and the still-developing urban centers. Meanwhile, Galician was gradually taking refuge in rural areas, where the centralist government took relatively little interest and, above all, where it had a more relative capacity to exert its influence. In general, this geolinguistic stratification — the urban as opposed to the rural — has remained in place until the present day. In the centralist environment that characterized the eighteenth century with the arrival of the Bourbon dynasty and its drive towards constructing the national Spanish state, the need for linguistic uniformity appears as a primordial element for the cohesion of the new political structure. At this time, encoding began to take place in the Spanish language — a phenomenon which was to enormously facilitate its spread among the population (Moreno-Ferna´ndez 2005), and was achieved primarily by means of an educational system that tended towards uniformity, and which would soon comprise a vital part of political centralization. As far as Galician was concerned, its exclusive oral use contributed to its notable fragmentation and dialectalization, making it very di‰cult to create a cultivated variety until well into the twentieth century. Despite the fact that at the close of the eighteenth century there were highly commendable attempts to bring back Galician as the language of culture, it was not to be until the second half of the nineteenth century that the non-institutional recovery of the cultural uses of the Galician language was to occur. This was also when the first Galician grammars and
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dictionaries, essential for encoding a standard, were published. All of this overlaps with the period when the Spanish national state was finally established and, with it, the o‰cial status of the Spanish language. The first third of the twentieth century was a promising time for the Galician language. This point in history witnessed its renewal as a literary, cultural, and historical language, while the prevailing political climate seemed to foster its o‰cial recognition. Nevertheless, the Civil War and, later, the Franco dictatorship, destroyed all attempts to recover Galician. During the Franco regime (1939–1975), Galician was rendered invisible. There was no o‰cial or explicit prohibition on the use of the language, but by using a linguistic praxis that favored Spanish and a centralist sociopolitical ideology over any political identitary cultural manifestation, Franco’s regime established, de facto, a unique acknowledgement of Spanish and put into practice a surreptitious persecution of the peripheral languages, hindering cultural production in the Galician language. The language shift sped up during this period. Spanish finally anchored into urban centers among the more learned population and among the younger generation. Such stratification parameters are what, broadly speaking, still exist today. To a large extent, intergenerational transmission of the Galician language took a marked downturn due to the economic consequences arising from the late urbanization process occurring in Galicia. Many rural families, needless to say, speakers of traditional Galician, came into contact with urban culture and, eager to integrate as quickly as possible, they adapted to the reference system particular to urban areas where the Spanish language was yet another ingredient of the ‘‘modernity’’ to which they had committed themselves. In this manner, they added Spanish to their repertoire, not only in the more formal registers, but also, and more importantly, in the informal, including the transmission from one generation to another (Ramallo 2000). The most immediate consequence of this phenomenon was the gradual increase of bilingualism, especially in the generation of those aged 30 to 40 in the urban environment (Seminario de Sociolingu¨´ıstica 1995). The repercussions that the political change of 1978 brought about in the social distribution of the languages spoken in Galician are dealt with in the final part of this article.
4.
Linguistic characterization of Spanish in the bilingual areas: consequences of linguistic contacts
The phenomena arising from the linguistic contact between Spanish and Galician are too complex to be covered in any detail in this brief
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presentation. Despite the extensive bibliography on the situation of Galicia written over the last few years, almost all of these works have focused on characterizing the interferences of Spanish in Galician, while only a few focus on the linguistic characterization of the varieties of Spanish ´ lvarez Ca´ccamo 1983; Garcı´a and used in Galicia (see, among others, A Blanco 1998; Mas 1999; Porto Dapena 2001; Castro 2003; Rojo 2004; Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes 2005). This section describes some of the features of the linguistic varieties of Spanish spoken by the population that normally uses this language and for whom it has been their first language. Rather than it being a matter of Galician interferences in Spanish, we are dealing with a case of historical integration of elements particular to Galician that are also a part of the process of acquiring Spanish as a mother tongue (Mackey 1970). For this reason, we do not include any reference here to phenomena such as ‘‘gheada’’ or ‘‘seseo,’’ very frequent in the normal speakers of Galician when using Spanish, but far less common in native speakers of the varieties of Spanish in Galicia (Rojo 2004). There is a commonly held opinion that the phonic level is the most outstanding feature of the Spanish used in Galician; the pitch accent is the suprasegmental attribute that immediately sets a Spanish speaker in Galicia apart. Castro (2003) has shown that in the final position of each phonic group, or the prototypical melodic unit of Spanish, high pitch is perceived as being linked with Galician, ‘‘through instances of open and closed mid vowels in those positions’’ (Castro 2003: 46). Apart from the particular melody, the varieties of Spanish of Galicia use a vowel system that is very similar to that used in Galician, a language that distinguishes between seven vowels with four degrees of opening: /i e E a O o u/. In the Spanish used in Galicia, the di¤erences between the medium degree vowels are not distinctive (or are not always distinctive, cf. Garcı´a and Blanco 1988; Porto Dapena 2001) but they certainly are present in the sharper way of speaking in Galician Spanish than in peninsular Spanish (Rojo 2004). The tonic [e] and [o] of peninsular Spanish are usually pronounced open [E] [O], whereas the atones of the same series in the initial or pretonic position are usually closed. Another of the phonic features found in the Spanish used in Galicia is a reduction of the first consonant of the cultured word groups: estrutura [estructura], acio´n [accio´n], manı´fico [magnı´fico], diretor [director], etc. In terms of the grammatical level, various aspects should be highlighted. The frequent use of the diminutive particular to Galician -in˜o/-in˜a [-ito/-ita], the presence of demonstrative first and second forms such as estes and eses, instead of the standard estos and esos, the use of
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the locution de aquella with the meaning of so, the neuter pronominal form lo que with the value of the standard que or the incursion of this neuter pronoun into expressions such as the following, are very common: (1)
A.: B:
¿Do´nde esta´ Juan? [¿Do´nde esta´ Juan?] ‘Where is John?’ Ahı´ lo viene. [Ahı´ viene] ‘Here he comes.’
In the verbal system, we find one of the most outstanding characteristics of the Spanish used in Galicia. Traditionally, it was very strange to hear a speaker of these varieties using compound tenses. Nevertheless, for some years now these forms are being increasingly used (Dubert 2002), not always coinciding with the rules of standard Spanish (hypercorrections, anomalous uses, etc.). Even when bearing this statement in mind, certainly the opposition between escribı´ un libro ‘I wrote a book’ and he escrito un libro ‘I have written a book’ is almost non-existent in Galicia. This phenomenon is undoubtedly explained by the solutions reached by Galician in its verbal paradigm. In Galician, there are no compound tenses, meaning that a fair part of the value entailed by such tenses is conveyed by a complex system of verbal periphrases. In fact, there is a degree ´ lvarez Ca´ccamo of periphrastic transfer from one language to the other (A 1983). For instance, the Spanish speakers in Galicia can be heard to use the periphrasis darþpast participle [giveþpast participle], a construction that does not exist in standard Spanish: (2)
no doy hecho todo el trabajo
equivalent to no soy capaz de hacer el trabajo ‘I can’t complete the work’; the frequency of periphrasis, as in tenerþpast participle [haveþpast participle], llevarþpast participle [have spent], or venir deþpast participle [have justþpast participle] is also very high. Another notorious aspect is the use of forms of the imperfect subjunctive with the meaning of pluperfect indicative, as in the following example: (3)
e´l estuviera destinado anteriormente en San Sebastia´n
meaning: e´l habı´a estado destinado anteriormente en San Sebastia´n ‘he had previously been sent to San Sebastian’ alternating in some contexts with e´l estuvo destinado anteriormente en San Sebastia´n ‘he was previously sent to San Sebastian’ (Polla´n 2001). Another morphological feature characteristic of the Spanish used in Galicia is found in the use of the present subjunctive of the verbs dar ‘give’ and estar ‘be’. As opposed to the canonical forms in standard Spanish yo de´ ‘I give’, tu des ‘you give’, el de´ ‘he give’ . . . yo este´ ‘I am’,
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tu´ este´s ‘you are’ . . . , in Galicia it is common to hear yo dea, tu´ deas . . . , yo estea or tu´ esteas, etc., especially in speech (Garcı´a and Blanco 1998). As is well known, although in standard Spanish the choice between the copulative forms ser ‘to be’ and estar ‘to be’ show semantic and pragmatic restrictions, the form estar has extended its presence to contexts traditionally restricted to the use of ser. This change of status of estar in Spanish, especially in contexts of [copula þ adjective] has been widely documented (Ferna´ndez Leborans 1999). In the case of the Spanish used in Galicia, Geeslin and Guijarro (2005) have noted some di¤erences in terms of what occurs in other syntopic varieties. The comparison between three groups of speakers, one bilingual Galician/Spanish, another monolingual in Spanish used in Galicia and the last, monolingual in the Spanish used outside Galicia, leads these authors to conclude that ‘‘the process of copula selection in Galicia [ . . . ] di¤ers from monolingual regions of Spain in the frequency with which each copula is selected’’ (Geeslin and Guijarro 2005: 15). Certainly, the di¤erences are noted only in the higher frequency usage of estar in general, by the group that speaks the Spanish used in Galicia, without detecting a di¤erent dependence on linguistic and social variables among the di¤erent groups. Other features include the frequent use of an ethical dative, as in: (4)
te es un individuo a tener en cuenta
meaning es un individuo a tener en cuenta ‘you are a person to bear in mind, you’, or in the expression ¿y luego? to express surprise. This expression is di‰cult to translate both into peninsular Spanish and into English. A rough approximation would be: ¿y eso? ‘and . . . ?’. It is also easy to document pronominal expressions with no reflexive, as for example (5)
voy descansar
instead of me voy a descansar ‘I’m going to have a rest’. Lexis presents distinguishing peculiarities. As anywhere, there are hundreds of words, set expressions and other lexical constructions, which, in the Spanish used in Galicia take on meanings di¤erent from the ones they may have in standard Spanish. By way of an example, the crossover noted in the Spanish used in Galicia between the verbs sacar ‘withdraw’ and quitar ‘take out’ is well known. Quitar usually appears in place of sacar and vice versa (Mas 1999): (6)
Quito´ a su hijo del colegio. [Saco´ a su hijo del colegio] ‘He took his son out of the school.’
(7)
Como me porte´ mal, me saco´ la paga. [Como me porte mal me quito´ la paga] ‘Since I was bad he withdrew/stopped my pocket money.’
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5.
Use of Spanish by domains
The social stratification of languages in Galicia is a consequence of historical vicissitudes and of the di¤erent linguistic policies, which, either explicitly or implicitly, have been applied in Galicia. From a historical viewpoint, a clearly defined dichotomy is noted between the two competing languages. Spanish was an urban language, used by the dominant classes, but also the language of prestige, with a frequent use in formal registers by the popular classes. Galician was mainly heard in rural, more economically depressed areas, with largely illiterate populations. Schooling was entirely in Spanish, this being the language used by the media, the administration, the church, and the business world. Although this dichotomy has been present for centuries, it was during Franco’s regime (1939– 1975) when it became more evident. Over the past few decades, the situation described above has begun to change. Alongside traditional Galician, which continues to be in use mainly in the rural areas, a cultured variety has appeared and spread among the urban middle classes, in the media, and in the educational system. Curiously enough, for some authors, it is a variety which, particularly in its phonetic component, scarcely di¤ers from the cultured variety of the Spanish used in Galicia (Vidal 1997; Regueira 1999).2 The most immediate consequence of this new situation is, in part, contradictory: Galician has infiltrated domains that were exclusive to Spanish, at the same time that Spanish has broadened its presence throughout the Galician population due to the waning social prestige of Galician that has caused a de-Galicianization process in the heart of Galician speaking families. This may be explained by a change in the use of the language. Galician has been ritualized, giving way in the instrumental uses and expanding in the symbolic. Spanish has not only not stopped losing presence, but rather, during the twentieth century, its advance has been spectacular (Seminario de Sociolingu¨´ıstica 1995). Research carried out over the last fifteen years underscores some interesting facts that bear comment.3 We will start with a description of the individual uses, moving on to describe the uses of the language in domains such as the following: the family, the church, and the media. The domain of education will be dealt with in Section 8. Practically the entire Galician population has mastery of both languages, at least at the level of oral competence. In fact, as far as individual uses are concerned, for some years now, the majority of the population declares itself to be bilingual, although an analysis over time reveals a return to monolingual practices, both in Spanish and in Galician (Table 1). In more informal interactions, for example at an administrative
Spanish in Galicia Table 1.
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Individual linguistic choice. Evolution over time
Frequent language Language with the doctor Language with the administration
1992 2003 1992 2003 1992 2003
Spanish
Galician
Bilingual
10.6 18.5 38 33 24.5 27.3
38.7 44.4 40 39.5 53.5 43.3
50.7 37.2 21.5 27.5 21.9 29.3
level, and particularly with the doctor, the use of Spanish has increased its presence considerably in comparison with the frequent language. Monolinguism in Spanish increased almost twofold between 1992 and 2003 in the generic variable (frequent language), which we take as a reference for our considerations on individual linguistic uses. Since these data are relevant for an initial approximation of the private linguistic usage by the Galician population, we should not overlook the fact that there are certain variables that allow for a more clearly defined stratification of the languages, for example, age and habitat. Where there is a younger population, the use of Spanish increases considerably in all of the interactions studied in recent years. In this regard, the data for 2003 are striking: only one in ten people aged over 65 is monolingual in Spanish, whereas among those under sixteen years of age, this proportion rises to one in three. In terms of residency habitat, towns versus cities, the use of Spanish is notably higher than the use of Galician, especially among younger generations. In this sector of the population (
