Author note: This article was written as an assessed essay for a Galician module. It takes the place of this week’s Language of the Week, which will be back on the 17th November. Thanks!

Galician and Welsh share mirror histories. Each teeters on the edge of a historical global superpower, attempting to assert its cultural identity in the face of hundreds of millions of native speakers of the dominant language. The contrasts and similarities between how the languages have survived, revived, and developed themselves reveal a narrow but viable path for other minority languages to follow. This essay explores the contemporary sociolinguistic contexts of Galician and Welsh: the periods of flourishing, decline, and the communities fighting to secure their future.

To start, it is worth examining the periods in which these languages have flourished. O’Rourke (2010) notes that the modern Galician nationalist movement can trace its origins back to the 1840s, bringing with it an emphasis on the language in intellectual spaces. However, these ideals remained on the fringes of society until the Rexurdimento at the turn of the century, pushing the idea of a Galician culture and identity into the popular culture. By 1936, the language was even on the verge of becoming an official language of Galicia, before the onset of the Spanish Civil War abruptly halted this process (O’Rourke, 2010).

Unlike in Galicia, Welsh did not experience a concentrated period of cultural “flourishing” before its decline. It was, instead, simply the predominant language of daily life. Wales lacked a university until Aberystwyth opened in 1872, with Welsh only entering formal study at the end of that decade (Aberystwyth University, 2025). There was simply not an organised intellectual sphere capable of producing a linguistic movement like that of Galicia’s.

Returning to Galicia in the 1930s, the Francoist regime adopted a radically different policy on minority languages from that of the previous government: they were to be eradicated. Books in these languages were burnt in the streets, and the non-Castilian Ibero-Romance varieties – Galician, Catalan, Valencian, and Mallorcan – were relegated to the status of “dialects” (Claesson, 2022). This linguistic and social repression robbed minority languages of public prestige, confining their usage to the home, where individuals had to fight to maintain intergenerational transmission. O’Rourke (2010) speaks of the “restigmatisation of Galician”, noting its “rejection and ridicule […] by the Franco regime,” as state propaganda throughout the region disparaged the language as “barbaric”.

The decline of Welsh follows a different story, but a similar trajectory. Social pressures from the country’s rapid industrialisation throughout the nineteenth century strongly encouraged the adoption of English, which had previously only been spoken in isolated pockets of the country – Montgomeryshire, the Borders, and Pembrokeshire. It became common policy in many schools, particularly in South Wales, to ban the use of Welsh to promote English. This policy of ‘English at school’ led to the commonplace introduction of the Welsh Not, a wooden placard placed around the neck of a child caught speaking Welsh. The token would be transferred to the next ‘offender’, and at the end of the day, the child wearing it would be caned, a combined public shaming/punishment. A sort of ‘diglossic order’ was imposed, where Welsh became the language of the church and Sunday schools, and English the language of education and academia (Johnes, 2024, pp. 1-38).

Despite their unique paths to decline, both Galician and Welsh saw a remarkable revival starting in the latter half of the twentieth century. After the death of Franco in 1975 and the transition to democracy, momentum began to build again towards legal status for the language. In the 1980s, Galician-medium education expanded beyond only teaching the language itself to other subjects, and minimum requirements for the language in education have been raised repeatedly since then (O’Rourke, 2010).

In Wales, the linguistic revival was not driven by political change, but instead by grassroots campaigns. Starting in the 1940s, when Welsh was allowed into court testimony for the first time, incremental legal changes have improved the status of the language, culminating in the Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and 1993 granting Welsh equal status to English throughout the country (Open University, n.d.) and the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure of 2011 finally granting the language official status in Wales (The National Assembly for Wales, 2011, s. 1).

Despite legal recognition, both languages continue to face prejudice and negative stereotyping. In Galicia, use of the language is now often associated with Galician nationalism, “making use of the language in certain contexts marked [or] out of place” (Souza and González Seoane, 2025, p. 268). The historical diglossia, with Galician being relegated to informal contexts, has led to an issue – quite often, the commonly used term for a concept in Galician is the “vulgarism” in Castilian (p. 254).

Galician speakers are also disproportionately poor and rural. In a 1993 sociolinguistic survey (Monteagudo and Santamarina, 1993, p. 132), 97% of participants of a “very low” income were native Galician speakers, as opposed to just 20% of “very high” income earners. Similarly, just 22% of professionals reported speaking Galician as their native language. This lack of education among most Galician speakers contributes to the stereotype of Galician as a “farmer’s language”, reinforced by 93% of farmers in Galicia speaking Galician L1.

Ultimately, both Galician and Welsh have survived due to a mix of local conviction and legal recognition. Education policy and local autonomy have both restored a degree of prestige to both languages, but neither would be alive today were it not for local activism and the cultural resilience of both peoples. Their continued coexistence with globally dominant languages shows us that the path forward does not rely solely on the eradication of prejudice, but on the simple decision to speak, teach, and live through the medium of what others have called “lesser”.

Bibliography

Aberystwyth University (2025) History of the University. Available at: https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/about-us/history/history/

Claesson, C. (2022) ‘Vernacular resistance: Catalan, Basque, and Galician opposition to Francoist monolingualism’, in C. Kullberg and D. Watson (eds) Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 51–80. doi: 10.5040/9781501374081.ch-002

Johnes, M. (2024) Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Nineteenth-Century Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Monteagudo, H. and Santamarina, A. (1993) ‘Galician and Castilian in contact: historical, social and linguistic aspects’, in R. Posner & J. N. Green (eds), Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology, Vol. 5: Bilingualism and Linguistic Conflict in Romance. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 117–173. doi: 10.1515/9783110848649.117.

The National Assembly for Wales (2011) Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, nawm 1, 9 February. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/mwa/2011/1/section/1

Open University (n.d.) Contemporary Wales: Welsh language activism. Available at: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/sociology/contemporary-wales/content-section-6.2.1/

O’Rourke, B. (2010) Galician and Irish in the European Context: Attitudes Towards Weak and Strong Minority Languages, Palgrave Macmillan UK, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [10 November 2025].

Sousa, X. and González Seoane, E. (2025) Manual of Galician Linguistics. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi-org.bangor.idm.oclc.org/10.1515/9783110417449