Basic Data on Galician Language

Galician is a Romance language, related to other languages, like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Italian, Romanian or Sardinian, that originated in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula over 2000 years ago. Galician is still the language of most of the population in Galicia.

It is spoken by some 2.2 million people of the total 2.8 million people registered in the Galician census. There is a homogeneous geographic distribution in the use of the language. It is not recorded any territorial area where Galician is not spoken.

This high level of speakers puts Galician in an exceptional situation in comparison with other minority languages, and shows its validity in all kinds of communicative situations in modern life.