Draft law passes Galician parliament calling for stronger Portuguese-language ties

From here in Portuguese:

The Galician parliament unanimously approved the consideration of a draft law of a popular initiative calling for greater weight of the Portuguese language in the Spanish autonomous region. 

More than 17,000 Galicians signed a petition for more "access to the wealth of the Portuguese language". The initiative now passed puts into consideration the teaching of Portuguese in Galician schools, better use of the language in Galician public institutions, transmission of TDT (Televisao Digital Terrestre) television channels from Portugal, and access to national radio frequencies from the other side of the border. 

There is still no timetable for the proposal, which advocates the introduction of the Portuguese language at all levels of education, to become law, but Xosé Carlos Morell (the proponent of the initiative, known as Iniciative Paz Andrade) believes that a four-year period would be reasonable for the implementation of Portuguese in Galician schools.

Looks like the Facebook page for the initiative is here.

Read more...

Unemployed Galicians study Portuguese to facilitate emigration

From here in Portuguese with audio:

There are more and more unemployed Galicians studying Portuguese, a way to be prepared to emigrate to Portuguese-speaking countries.

Two days before regional elections in Galicia, unemployment and emigration are two strong themes in the election campaign. A Antena1 visited the headquarters of the Instituto Camões in Vigo, encountering various unemployed Galicians attempting to open a new door to the future.

The audio for the article has some quick interviews with students and the teacher at the Instituto Camões there, and what's interesting is that they also mention Portugal as a possible place to work along with Brazil and Angola, the two countries usually mentioned. Galicia has around a 20% unemployment rate, and since even Portugal's dismal unemployment numbers are better than those in Spain it makes sense.

That brings up a question: don't Galicians already kind of know Portuguese anyway thanks to Galician? Kind of:

Nowadays, Galician is resurgent, though in the cities it remains a "second language" for most. According to a 2001 census, 99.16 percent of the populace of Galicia understand the language, 91.04 percent speak it, 68.65 percent read it and 57.64 percent write it. The first two numbers (understanding and speaking) remain roughly the same as a decade earlier; the latter two (reading and writing) both show enormous gains: a decade earlier, only 49.3 percent of the population could read Galician, and only 34.85 percent could write it. This fact can be easily explained because of the impossibility of teaching Galician during the Francisco Franco era, so older people speak the language but have no written competence. Galician is the highest-percentage spoken language in its region among the regional languages of Spain.

In addition to that Portuguese is often seen as a more cultured version of Galician in the region. Add those two together and your average Galician probably understands just about anything said in Portuguese, but may be averse to sending an email to a company or going for an interview out of fear of coming across as uneducated or uncultured. I would expect that these courses at the Instituto Camões would have a large emphasis on orthography, punctuation etc. and paying attention to which Galician words don't have a Portuguese equivalent in order to avoid getting a blank stare in an interview and realizing for the first time that the word you always assumed was also Portuguese is actually not.

Read more...

How Galicians view Portuguese

An article here (automatically translated here) in Spanish about the way Galician speakers view Portuguese is quite interesting. The article is too long and the automatic translation is good enough such that there is probably no need to translate any of it here, but be careful when you see the word cult: the phrase "El portugués es como un gallego más culto" means "Portuguese is like a more cultured/educated version of Galician", not "The Galician Portuguese is more like a cult" as Google would have you read it.

The basic gist of the article is that Galicians see learning and maintaining Galician as a more or less direct gateway to the Lusophone world. Few actually end up learning Portuguese for its own sake (2,000 students last year according to the article) but since most view it as the same language with a different accent, some different words and a different orthography the number of those that learn Portuguese is not really relevant.

Read more...

Catalan, Basque and Galician can now be used in the European Court of Justice

There are quite a few articles on this in Spanish that pretty much say the same thing, so let's go with...this one.

Catalan, Basque and Galician can be used starting tomorrow (=27 April) in the European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg...then it goes on about an administrative agreement that has made the usage of recognized regional languages in this way possible, and that Spain is the first country to utilize this. With this citizens can send correspondences to the court in any of Spain's official languages and receive a reply in the same language.

Catalan and Galician are both Romance languages so receiving and sending letters in those two should be a pretty easy matter (there was even a common Galician-Portuguese language in the Middle Ages), but Basque is completely different and would require relying entirely on Basque native speakers, since no one else would be able to manage the documents, and I imagine this would place a bit more burden on those handling the correspondences to be accurate. I would imagine for example that any correspondences coming in in Galician or Catalan could easily be looked over by someone that doesn't necessarily know the language as a mother tongue to get an idea what the subject is after which it would get forwarded to the person in charge, but Basque doesn't look like other European languages so letters in Basque would just go straight to the native speaker in charge. At least, that's the way I imagine it would work.

Read more...