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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language secessionism | 4/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_secessionism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:22:09.851113+00:00 | kb-cron |
Portugal, a former southern county split from the Kingdom of Galicia and fief of the Kingdom of León, was created by Afonso I of Portugal in 1126 and expanded towards the Islamic south, like its neighbouring kingdoms. That part of Galicia, named Portugal, became independent while the northern part of the country remained under the Kingdom of León during the 12th century and early 13th century. Northern Galicia would later be ruled by the Kingdom of Castile, which would become the core and ethnic base for the future Spain; but the culture was the same on both sides of the political border. Galician-Portuguese culture attained great prestige during the Low Middle Ages. In the late 15th century, Castilian domination became more severe, banishing their language in all official uses, including the church. Galician-Portuguese survived diglossically for the following centuries among the peasant population, but it experienced a strong Spanish influence and had a different evolution. Meanwhile, the same language (by the reintegrationist view) remained fully official in Portugal and was carried across the world by Portuguese explorers, soldiers and colonists. During the 19th century a revival movement arose. This movement defended the Galician language, and created a provisional norm, with a Castilian orthography and many loanwords. When autonomy was granted, a norm and orthography (based in rexurdimento writers) (Galician literature) for a Galician language was created. This norm is taught and used in schools and universities of Galicia. But most writers (Castelao, Risco, Otero Pedrayo) did not support the traditional Galician forms; some of them based on Spanish orthography even if they recognized the essential linguistic unity, saying that the priority was achieving political autonomy and being read by the population. Other writers wrote with a Portuguese-like orthography (e.g. Guerra da Cal and Carvalho Calero). Reintegrationists claim that the official norm (released in 1982) was imposed by the Spanish government, with the covert intent of severing Galician from Portuguese. But this idea is rejected by the Real Academia Galega, which supports the official norm. Reintegrationist and Lusist groups are protesting against this so-called language secessionism, which they call Castrapism (from castrapo, something like "patois") or Isolationism. Unlike in the case of Valencian Blaverism, isolationism has no impact in the scientific community of linguists, and it is supported by a small number of them but still has clear political support. Galician-Portuguese linguistic unity until the 16th century seems to be consensus, as does both Galician and European Portuguese being closer to each other, and also closer in the 19th century than in the 20th century and now. In this period, while Galician for the most part lost vowel reduction, velarization of /l/ and nasal vowels, and some speech registers of it adhered to yeísmo, all making it phonologically closer to Spanish. For example, European Portuguese had splits that created two new vowel phonemes, one of them usually an allophone only in the case of vowel reduction and the other phonetically absent in any other variant. Some dialects had a merger of three of its oral diphthongs and another three of its nasal vowels, and together with Brazilian Portuguese absorbed more than 5000 loanwords from French as well as 1500 from English. It seems that the debate for a greater integration among Portuguese-speaking countries had the result of a single writing standard (1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement), often shunned by some segments of Portuguese media and population but long waited and cheered by Brazilians despite occasional criticism to some aspects and that changed the spelling of between 0.5% and 1% of the words in both former varieties, with minor respect to major dialect phonological differences. The other debate, whether Galician should use the same standard of Portuguese (Lusism), a standard with minor differences (Reintegrationism), a re-approximation of both through another Lusophone spelling agreement that would give particular regional differences such as that of Galician as well as major diverging dialects of Portuguese (especially in South America) more room (Reintegrationism), or the present standard based on the Spanish orthography, still did not cast official attention of government authorities in any of the involved countries, even if Lusophone support is expected to be strong in any of the first three cases. A point often held by minorities among both Reintegrationists/Lusists and Lusophonists is that Portuguese should have a more conservative and uniform international speech standard that at the same time respects minor phonological differences between its variants (such as a free choice between the various allophones of the rhotic consonant /ʁ/, [a ~ ɐ ~ ɜ ~ ə] for /a ~ ɐ/ or [s ~ s̻ʲ ~ ʃ ~ ɕ] for the voiceless allophone of /S/) that would further strengthen Lusophone integration, but this is not especially welcomed by any party in Europe.