I just received these comments from a Galician speaker who lives in the Galician region of Spain. The comments refer to this article here. Galician is a language related to Portuguese that is spoken in the far northwest of Spain.
Interesante conversación. Qué pena que no la haya visto en su día.
Vivo en Galicia, pero nací en Madrid y hablo Castellano y también Gallego.
En galicia la gente de la calle lo que habla es castrapo. Una jerga con estructura sintáctica del gallego, usando palabras castellanas y con entonación gallega. Por eso, dice el artículista, la gente castellana entiende al de la televisión pero no entiende a la gente de la calle.
Cualquier gallego entiende el portugués escrito, pero la fonética del Portugués se aparta mucho del gallego y del castellano y lo que entiende por escrito no lo entiende si lo oye.
El gallego es un idioma practicamente muerto, porque con la televisión gallega lo que han conseguido es hacer un gallego con una estructura castellana usando ciertas palabras gallegas y con entonación castellana.
Los jovenes no quieren hablar gallego, solo lo habán los que van poco a la escuela, abandonan el sistema educativo, que curiosamente es donde se enseña. Entre marineros, labradores y gente de oficios bajos es donde se habla más el castrapo, porque el gallego de le TV tampoco lo habla nadie. Y cuando la gente que suele hablar castrapo habla castellano es penoso oirles.
Incluso los que hablan bien castellano cometen un sin fin de faltas tanto de pronunciación como de sintaxis y de léxico. Los gallegos son lo que hasta ahora hablan peor el castellano en España. En poco tiempo supongo que les superarán los catalanes que hablarán castellano como lo puede hacer un japonés medio.Lo malo es que unos cuantos iluminados utilicen la lengua como arma política, y pretendan, como en Cataluña, erradicar el castellano en aras de conseguir un país que nunca existió. Mira el ejemplo tonto de los integracionistas gallegos, quiren pasar de tener una lengua reconocida en España a tener un dialecto del portugués, no reconocido ni por los portugueses.
Es sencillamenente, lo que solemos decir: joder por joder.
Podría escribirlo en inglés pero me es más facil hacerlo en Español.
Saludos a todos.
My translation:
Interesting conversation. Too bad I didn’t see it until now.
I live in Galicia, but I was born in Madrid and speak Castilian and Galician.
In Galicia the street people speak something called Castrapo. This is a language with Galician syntactic structure and intonation but using Spanish words. The author of this piece is correct that Castilian speakers people understand the “TV Galician” but they don’t understand Castrapo.
Any Galician can understand written Portuguese, but Portuguese phonetics deviates so much from Galician and Castilian both that it is hard for a Galician speaker to understand. When you see it written, you can now understand the words you could not understand when it was spoken.
The sad truth is that Galician is a language that is almost dead due to what Galician television has done by creating a fake Galician language using a mix of Spanish and Galician words with Spanish intonation.
Young people do not want to speak Galician anymore. They only know whatever Galician they were taught in school (Galician is now taught in the schools of the region) and after school they are not exposed to it much anymore. Castrapo is spoken by working class people – sailors, farmers. These same folks refuse to use TV Galician.
Unfortunately, most Castrapo speakers do not speak Spanish very well. Listening to them speak Castillian is painful.
Even those who speak well Castilian commit endless errors of pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary (This implies that Castrapo does use some Galician vocabulary). The Galicians speak some of the worst Castilian in Spain.
The trouble is that a few intellectuals use Galician as a political weapon, and intend, as in Catalonia, to eradicate Castilian in order to achieve a country that never existed. Look at the example of the silly Galician integrationist grouping that want to go from having a language recognized by Spain and turn it into a dialect of Portuguese which at any rate is not even recognized by the Portuguese themselves.
I could write this in English, but it is easier in Spanish.
This is what I have heard about the situation in Galicia. However, what I heard is that the situation of the Galician language is not nearly so dire as portrayed by the author. TV Galician is indeed a fake language invented for TV, so like Spanish that it is intelligible to most Spanish speakers.
I have also heard that Galician is not completely intelligible with Portuguese, not even way down on the southeast border of Galician where it is said to be intelligible with the Tras Os Montes dialect of Portuguese. Galician speakers in this border area say the two languages are indeed close there, but they use Castillian to communicate with Portuguese speakers from across the border because Galician-Portuguese communication is too fraught with errors of understanding.
Galician is indeed in bad shape in the cities, but it is doing well in the countryside. There is indeed a movement for Galician independence that is led by intellectuals, but it does not seem to have much support among the population. The Galician government complains of lack of funding for Galician education and TV. All in all, I would say that Galician is doing pretty well for a non-state language, and I suspect that it will still be vigorous in 60 years or so.
