‘How to Kill a Language: Planning, Diglossia, Bi-normativism, the Internet and Galician.’

Galician, one of Spain’s minority languages has existed for as long as Spanish, at least. Galician-Portuguese was a completely formed language with broadly homogenous written and spoken norms until two slightly different branches gradually emerged: Galician and Portuguese, starting in the thirteenth century. While Portuguese evolved and became one of today’s languages spoken across the world, Galician was confined and relegated to a regional vernacular, spoken in the province of Galicia and fringes of Asturias, in the Northwesternmost corner of Spain, bordering with Portugal. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Galician ceased to exist in the written form and when it reappeared, it had adopted the Spanish norms. It was only in the 1980’s modern Spain and its accession to the EEC (now EU), that Galician finally (re)gained the status of official minority language in coexistence with the national language, Spanish or Castilian. Yet, whilst enjoying the official status protection from the Spanish State and fostered by the Council of Europe in terms of corpus and policy planning, education, usage in the press, media all aimed at revitalisation, Galician has not only been losing status and being eroded in an ever shifting diglossial relationship with Spanish, but also lost L1 speakers in the past forty years, and younger generations are more and more likely to either speak Galician as L2 or worse, chose not to speak it at all. This situation presents a contradiction and is the cause of conflict between different factions of Galician speakers, the Galegofalantes. Why and how can it be that a language which was repressed for over four hundred years, starts declining precisely after it was given official support? What factors played or are still at play in the steady decline and erosion of Galician? A study into historical, social, economic, cultural, regional, and international factors, events and particularly politically motivated Language Planning Policies can partly explain the precariousness of the Galician language. The last forty years and particularly the new Millenium and the Internet, brought in fast-paced global changes with significant technological advances often requiring adaptation, and sometimes disintegration of traditional socio-cultural communities. The timing was unfavourable towards Galician, aided by consistent nationalist glottopolitics, the planned syntactic corpus fostered by the successive regional governments and most local authorities, led to further deterioration and stagnation of Galician whilst galvanising further lexical and semantic influx of Spanish into the Galician language. Access to education, libraries, study materials, publications, research tools on the Internet is often available in Spanish only. Higher education and academia is dominated by Spanish, as are public services, institutions, the judicial system, mass-media and communication at all levels in everyday life. Some Galicians are happy with the pro-Spanish language norm also known as Isolationism, seemingly oblivious of the language-shift and replacement even in remote, rural societies. Others demand a Galician spelling much closer to Portuguese, her natural sibling and see the official re-unification, or Reintegrationism, with the Lusophone world as the only way to save Galician from an impending death. With deep-rooted divisions and conflicts, a compromise between Isolationists and Reintegrationists seems unlikely, except if there is markedly political change and with that a reversed language shift will take place. Essay on Language, Identity and Policy – Applied Linguistics and TESOL MA By Alex De Lusignan Fan Moniz Under supervision of: Dr Anne Ife, Associate Lecturer School of Humanities and Social Sciences ARU (Anglia Ruskin University) Cambridge


Introduction
The recognition of the Galician language (Galego) as official regional language, together with Spanish in the Autonomous Community of Galicia (Spanish Constitution, 1981), and further ratification by Spain of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2001 (Council of Europe, ECRML, 2019, p.30), gave legal protection and enabled promotion of the use of Galician at all levels of education, in the media and public services. The number of Galician speakers, however, has been declining for the past forty years (Instituto Galego de Estatística, IGE 2014) with no indication for a change of course.

Purpose
The study focuses and aims at explaining the dichotomy between officialisation and accelerated decline of the Galician language since the post-Franco era (Skobel, 2010, p.21) and 2021, by analysing contributing factors such as historical, political, sociolinguistic, historiographic, educational policies, internal tensions, and fast socio-economic and technological changes.

Historical timeline
The territory in which the Galician-Portuguese Romance variant was formed, corresponds to the Roman province of Gallaecia, consisting of former Roman 'conventus' areas in the third century AD, such as conventus Bracarensis, Cluniensis, Lucensis, Asturicensis, created to administer an indigenous ethnic base that already had a relative cultural unity (Baldinger 1963).
Its peripheral situation, at the most western end of the known world, at Finis-Terrae (the end of the Earth), allowed it to remain linguistically distant from the innovations that emanated from Rome (Teysser 1989, Monteagudo 1999, Condé 2005. This new language is believed to have formed between the 7 th and 9 th centuries mainly from a Vulgar Latin variant spoken in the then Suebian Kingdom of Gallaecia (with Bracara as capital), later taken over by the Visigoths, comprising present-day's northern half of Portugal, Galicia, and western parts of Asturias and Leon (López Quiroga, 2018).  Banza & Gonçalves, 2018) This neo-Latin regional language kept an older autochthonous Celtic substratum (Martins Esteves, 1997) from Gallaecian-Lusitanian and some Germanic lexicon added subsequently. The first records are written in cursive Gothic, a mixture of Latin and early Galician-Portuguese dating to 882 AD. (Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, 1867-1873).
The oldest Galician-Portuguese document, although undated, is placed ca. 1173 AD (Souto, 2003, Pp. 25-27) believed to have been written by a scribe identified in documents dated April 1175 AD.
The Kingdom of Leon and the newly formed County of Portvgaliae (both part of ancient Gallaecia-Lusitania) started diverging politically in 868 AD and culminated in 1143 with a Papal decree declaring Portugal a sovereign Nation.
By 1249, the Portuguese borders to the south were established and remained almost unchanged ever since. The political separation between Galicia and Portugal in the early Middle-Ages did not alter the continuum evolution of the language, and in fact Galician-Portuguese became associated with the troubadours in the different courts of Iberia.
Contemporary to the French-Provençal, Galician troubadours like Martim Codax (Littera-FCSH, Medieval Galician-Portuguese songs, Martim Codax) composed circa 1230 AD songs such as 'Ondas do Mar de Vigo', that still generate linguistic interest and interpretative debate among scholars today (Ferreira, 2018):  Cunha, 1956) Writings from different troubadours in that formative period, denote the absence of a totally uniform spelling system which also led to different interpretations of their works in time, as in the excerpt by Paay Gomez Charinho (below), where on the one hand there is autonomous syllable usage of the adverb 'u' (lat. ŭnde= 'where') and on the other, the process of syllable loss/agglutination in Galician-Portuguese (Gal-Por)  ** The palatalised consonant sounds /λ/ and /ɲ/, written with the digraphs lh and nh, (Bagno, 2007) are believed to have been introduced in Galician-Portuguese at the same time as the Troubador lyricism, influenced by the Provençal spelling (Lapa, 1929).
As the Kingdom of Leon merged with the Kingdom of Castile, the sphere of influence shifted southeast, away from Galicia between the 13 th and 15 th centuries. The language of the Castilians, spread from Toledo as the Christian Kingdoms pushed south and southeast against the Moors. The elevation of Castilian into 'Spanish' (Del Valle, 2013) in the thirteenth century as the language of Hispania, consolidated bilingualism and diglossia between Spanish and regional vernacular languages and dialects in Spain (Ferguson, 1959).
Spain itself, would only become a united nation in 1491, when the 'Catholic Monarchs' Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand I of Aragon (Aram, 2006) finally conquered the Emirate of Granada from the Muslims (Peinado, 2011).
It was also from the 13 th century onwards that Galician-Portuguese started separating -Galician entered an exodiglossic relationship with Castilian (Monteagudo and Lagares, 2017), gradually lost phonetic nasalised vowels as shown on the table below, absorbed Spanish consonant features such as the /θ/ phoneme known as 'seseo' by which process the previously different sounds corresponding to the old Gothic double 's' spelled ç, c, z or s, in some cases like patronymic surname endings, all became one phoneme 'th' spelled 'z' or 'c' (when placed between two vowels), and an increased number of Spanish lexicon (Alonso, 1951):  This period marked the separation of Galician-Portuguese (Banza and Gonçalves, 2018) and the cessation of Galician in the written form between the 15 th and 19 th centuries.  This separation process is exacerbated by a simultaneous language-conflict in Galicia caused by the imposition of Castilian, the State's official language which eventually becomes 'Spanish'. (Mariño 1998/ Monteagudo 1999.

Rexurdimento
Following the end of the Napoleonic conflicts in 1810, a period of relative freedom and progress paved the way to a literary revival movement of the Galician language, culture, history known as Rexurdimento Similarly, to other Western European nations, the prevailing ideology and language planning in Spain, became focused on monolingualism. Under the hegemony of one stronger language, Castilian in this case; smaller sociodialectal variants were not part of the national discourse (Blackledge, 2007).
There was no corpus planning for Galician at the time when the Resurgence occurred, no literacy instruction (Liddicoat, 2007)  Galician became synonymous with rural, uneducated, and lower social classes who spoke a regional dialect; frowned upon in urban centres and higher or better-off social strata.
It is therefore not surprising that when the Rexurdimento occurred, writers no longer used a spelling different to Spanish as Galician over the centuries was only transmitted as a spoken vernacular, fragmented in dialectal variants across the regions of the old geographical Kingdom of Leon.
The geography over the centuries, also contributed toward the peripheral status of Galicia and the Galicians within Spain: a mountainous, cold, isolated, small, mostly agricultural and fishing region, poor in natural resources. Galicia became a land of emigrants. In the late 19 th century, substantial numbers of Galicians emigrated to the Americas via Portugal (Rodrigues, 2012), many illiterate or semi-illiterate in the search for better economic conditions.

Glottopolitics, Nationalism, Language Policy Planning (LPP)
Historically in the case of Spain, the concept of nation has encompassed centralised administrative, cultural, religious, military, political and ideological exercise from Madrid with her language as the only conveyer code to the Hispanic world. Castilian became the language of Spain, anchored in all regions and her colonial empire, as described by Blommaert and Heller (2010) 'in the monoglossic nationalism of the nation-state alongside those emo-linguistic ideologies' (Morgenthaler García and Amorós-Negre, 2019).
The prevailing Spanish discourse (as in numerous other countries in the Western world) was one where any divergence from the 'traditional' concept of one nation(-state), one language, one people, be those ideological or linguistic, were perceived as potential threat to the homogeneity of society as a unit (Hobsbawm,1998 Republic, 1994), to defend the integrity and purity of the French language.
This concern continues even during the COVID-19 pandemic. New Anglicisms such as 'cluster, coping, tracking' are generating controversy and debate in the French society (Ministère de la Culture, 2020).
Galician and other minority languages in Spain (Basque, Catalan, Asturian), although at different points in history, suffered a similar fate to minority languages in France.
As embodiment of a different language, identity and culture in a Spanish region, Galician was consigned to an unofficial status, with ever reduced influence or power, lack of standardisation or renewal, corpus planning or transmission, only being used as family or local vernacular, orally transferred from generation to generation in Galicia.
It is safe to say that since the 15th century and at least until 1981, Galician was actively planned to confer absolute dominance of Spanish (Wardhaugh and Fuller, 2014).
Conversely in the US for instance with regards to Spanish speakers, particularly since the 1980's there have been attempts to implement 'English Only' spoken in the workplace, although there isn't a law stipulating that English is the (only) official language in America.

Diglossia, sociolinguistic apartheid, and self-hate syndrome
After the Rexurdimento period and during the 1930's Second Republic in Spain, where Galician was briefly allowed to co-exist with Spanish, Galicia was engulfed by "a strongly centralist   (Cooper, 1989) The Spanish state enforced a different language upon the speakers of Galician by creating a situation of diglossia where the local language was subjugated and ceased to exist in the written form, some of its phonetics, lexicon, syntax, and semantics were altered and replaced, stopped being taught to young This language policy bears asymmetric parallels with the South African Apartheid system in the linguistic and socio-educational and cultural senses. Afrikaans was widely referred to as 'Kombhuis Nederlands' (Kitchen Dutch), a language and culture frowned upon by the Anglophone settlers who migrated to South Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Two languages and cultures living side by side in precarious coexistence known as 'language struggle', in constant tension, sometimes conflict and mutual prejudice; English the language of the conquerors, Afrikaans the language of the conquered (Reagan, 1988). As the Afrikaner nationalist movement grew stronger and the National Party regime took the power in 1948, the dynamics between the two languages and factions of society was reversed. Afrikaans was the dominant White language and the educational programmes favoured Afrikaans over English schooling (Reagan, 1988).
Black populations were encouraged to access schooling in their respective native languages, with the Bantu Education Act of 1953, intended to 'divide and conquer' as means to perpetuating the ethnolinguistic division in South Africa (Reagan, 1988). When in 1974 Afrikaans became compulsory alongside English as medium of instruction in South African schools, black students began mobilising against learning and speaking the 'Apartheid language', culminating with the June 16th Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 (SAHO, 2013).
Both the Afrikaans and Spanish nationalistic language policies placed one language above another (others), both were designed to enable the supremacy of one language and ideology over another (others), both imposed social, economic segregation, and both fuelled discrimination of one sociolinguistic group on another (others) as exposed by Del Valle (2000) on Galician and the Galicians " (both) associated with ignorance, illiteracy and underdevelopment, a stigmatisation which prevails in the present" (Nandi, 2017).
In 1978 the Spanish constitution recognised regional minorities in a state of 17 autonomous regions, Castilian continued as the official language of state whereby all Spaniards have the duty to know it and right to use it, and minority language-speakers, in Autonomous Communities, including Galicians have the right to know and use their regional language (BOE: Spanish Constitution, 1987).
Beyond dispute however, Spanish continued to be the only official language of the state. For instance, Galician politicians are free to use Galician in their regional Parliament but not in the Cortes Generales, the national assembly where only Spanish is allowed (Spanish Constitution). Once users of a particular language accept this ideology and inherent prejudices which discriminate between inferior or superior languages, a mechanism of discrimination against the perceived 'inferior' language will ensue and may lead speakers of the lower language to abandon it in favour of the privileged one.
Having been treated as speakers of a minority language in their own land for over five centuries, users of Galician particularly some diatopic varieties, are still victims of the prejudices and stereotypes accumulated over that long period of diglossia (Freixeiro Mato, 2016).

Educational system and multilingualism
Within 20  From inception however, the successive local governments failed to follow through with the adequate LNL implementation (Monteagudo (2012b, p. 26). An intermittent 'laissez-faire' attitude coupled with lowintensity language policy model focusing almost exclusively on the educational domain, has left Galician with reduced scope for revitalisation in other spheres of society and led to an endemic sociolinguistic crisis since 2009 (Nandi, 2017) to this day.
Equal practical implementation of Galician and Spanish, including in educational institutions; is laborious because there are no unified language contexts in Galicia where the two languages are equally distributed (Monteagudo, 2003).
Based on the number of speakers' ratio, one of the two voices has been chosen over the other. In urban centres, most children are educated and raised in Spanish, whereas in rural and smaller populations Galician is dominant. Thus, the status-quo perpetuates the Spanish dominance because conurbations, more affluent, and more educated segments of a population under 3 million (Eurostat, 2020), do not use Galician as first language.
Another aspect to emphasise is the sociolinguistic discourse among young people in Galicia, whereby language and identity or ethnolinguistic awareness, are not generally perceived as correlated (RAG, 2003).
Yet in the same study by the Royal Academy of Galicia (RAG), upon further interviewing young participants respectively from rural areas and urban areas to describe 'Galicians', the sociolinguistic ambivalence is revealing:  /publicacions.academia.gal/index.php/rag/catalog/view/169/170/576-1,   Ambiguous: can be interpreted as intentionally deceiving and cunning.
Indecisive: unwilling to make decisions.
Self-complacent: prone to self-pity and victimisation.
Mellow: associated with longing, melancholy, not affectionate. Word that the Portuguese and Germans respectively define by 'Saudade' and 'Sehnsucht'.
Mysterious: a feature based on Galician folklore: legends… non applied on everyday interactions.
This policy came as part of an EU-wide epistemological view and related policies towards achieving joint knowledge dissemination and cohesive instruments of communication inter member states (COE 2009, Kaplan 2008.
Under the 2010 decree, the Government implemented a Plurilingual language policy model in certain schools where 33% of teaching is conducted in Galician, 33% in Spanish and the remainder 33% in English.
Each (state) school's managing board can decide and apply for the Plurilingual model in their institution.
Private schools are allowed to choose their preferred language of instruction but must still offer Galician and Castilian as subjects in their curricula (Nandi, 2017).

Isolationism, Reintegrationism and the Future
In 1970 the Real Academia Galega (RAG), the authority tasked with the standardisation of written Galician, issued the first official norms. The LNL (1983) is considered by some as the stepping-stone for the revival and reinstatement of Galego in all sectors of Galician society with appropriate corpus, status, prestige and language acquisition planning (Monteagudo, 2012a), being able to finally "raise its former status from a low prestige language and end the discrimination towards its speakers, developed as a consequence of such status" (Loureiro- Rodríguez, 2008, p. 67, on Nandi, 2017. The process of attempted standardisation of a self-identified Galician published in 1982, 'Bases prá Unificación das Normas Lingüísticas' (Basis for the Unification of the Norms) was problematic from inception (Weinstein, 1980) because in trying to free from the influence of Castilian and Portuguese languages with long-established historical connections to Galician, the normative ideologies and opinions were conflictive even as RAG and ILG (Instituto da Lingua Galega / Institute of Galician Language, henceforth ILG) were formed.
One of the most influential modern Galician linguists and thinkers, also a founding member of RAG, was Ricardo Carvalho Calero (Rodríguez, 2000). Carvalho Calero totally opposed what he and many other scholars, intellectuals, education professionals and everyday Galicians, considered the pro-centralised, and pro-Hispanised language-prescription of Galician imposed by the ruling political elites and decision-makers.

2011).
Carvalho Calero's was fundamentally a counter-power (language) planification, understanding this as the alternative against (that) whose immediate aim is the progressive democratisation of the hegemonic (pro-Castilian) or official LPP, because a Linguistic Planning made by and for Galicians has not been achieved.
Thus, two disagreeing main ideologies and written norms for Galician have been part of the Galician discourse since the late 1970's and 80's: Isolationism and Reintegrationism (Carballo Calero, 1979).
The so-called 'Isolationism' is the policy supporting the current written form of Galician, fostered by the local Xunta de Galicia government, defended by RAG, promoted by ILG and coincidentally Spanish nationalist politicians and people, whose political orientation and ideologies tend to be loyal to the Spanish state and the concept of a unified Nation.
From a linguistic and sociocultural perspective, Galician is a language, or for some a dialect, heavily influenced by Spanish over the past five centuries, and could not and cannot therefore, be revived on a purely historical, medieval tradition which became redundant, and thus, unfit for contemporary applicability.
The so-called 'Coordinationist-Reintegrationism' appears the most conducive as it refutes the concept of Galician as a dialect (of Spanish) but a regional variant of Galician-Portuguese.
Their proposed corpus is essentially Portuguese with distinct Galician prosody, orthography, morphosyntax and lexical differences (Garrido, 2020). It is uncertain whether RAG and AGAL will reach any viable compromise concerning Galician's future developments.
Galicia has been an 'observer' of the CPLP Lusophone group of countries and applied for formal membership but in 2020, the Spanish state came up with a counteroffer (González Velasco, El Trapézio, 2020) where Spain (united) wishes to become an observing associated partner at the CPLP Lusophone world.
The Spanish State's approach to language continues to be one intrinsically linked to political agendas: language matters are political matters where the dominance of Castilian over regional languages continues to be implicitly 'sine qua non causation'.
Since the accession of Spain and Portugal in the 1980's however, there have been numerous initiatives and EU-funded programmes of cooperation and regional development between Galicia and Northern Portugal apart from a renewal of shared close linguistic, ethno-cultural ties (Sampedro, 2012).
The 'Eixo-Atlântico' project officially launched in 1992, (Méndez, 2007) Atlantico, 2021). Several high-speed train projects are being implemented to connect major cities in this region, with airports and maritime ports also being expanded: The current linguistic conflict in Galicia (Bobillo García et Al., 98), according to some quarters has an added modern problem-regular speakers and younger generations are using code-switching and diglossia more, contributing to an overall stagnation, erosion, usurpation, and semantic replacement of Galician by Spanish

Urban society, the Internet and Globalisation
Urban Galician society and younger generations, tend to associate Galician with the past, a language they recall from their grandparents but which their daily life and the wider Spanish reality, do not relate to (CL AGAL, 2009). Even for children who start their early education mainly in Galician, the likelihood that they end up with their higher education in Spanish is almost certain (Iglesias, 2020):  Young Galicians growing up with the Internet and a global world with languages like Spanish, English and other major languages being all-pervasive for virtual communication, digital media, social networks, audiovisual didactic materials (from pre-school to higher education) effortlessly available over and above those in minority languages such as Galician. Consequently, the Internet and Globalisation are playing a part in the weakening of Galician because the fast paced-changes, movement of people and information flows are not accompanied by language adaptability nor the mediums or practical tools to process them.
In a report commissioned by the British Council (2013), the top 10 world languages (excluding English) and their Internet use (including English), produced the results below: https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/languages-for-the-future-report.pdf Observing all indications, facts and literary data presented on the study, and because it is inevitable that a significant number of languages are likely to be no longer spoken within the next century (Nettle & Romaine, 2000) the prognosis of Galician is crepuscular. For future generations of 'Galegofalantes' (Galician speakers) the situation looks even more precarious: 'Após décadas a ouvir a música celestial do bilinguismo harmónico, nas regions mais povoadas da Galiza falar normalmente em galego é quase impossível para um meninho ou umha meninha, e para uma pessoa adolescente pode ser um exercício de risco. Mui provavelmente, será convertido em alvo de microagressons, às vezes disfarçado de piada.' (Rodríguez Carnota, 2018).
'After decades of listening to the heavenly music of harmonious bilingualism, in the most populated regions of Galicia speaking normally in Galician is almost impossible for a little boy or girl, and for a teenager it can be a risky exercise.
Most likely, it will be turned into a target of microaggressions, sometimes disguised as a joke.' If not reversed, what Skutnabb-Kangas (2000: 314) describes as: one of the many strategies of 'invisibilising' linguistic genocide where it is mainly researchers who are the culprits, when results of linguistic genocide (not only those resulting from education, but in general) start showing and languages 'disappear', this can be made to seem 'natural', or 'voluntary shift', or 'inevitable' -therefore, agentless.
(…'The small dialects must be lost… they must give way before the stronger and more developed… The language of Ambon is disappearing at an increasing rate… It is sensible not to oppose such a gradual, natural process' […]), (Skutnabb-Kangas).
There is nobody to blame, except the people who left their language. Calling linguistic genocide 'language death' is one way of making the genocide invisible, (Moreira, 2011), and Galician may reach that stage within less than a century.